It must create its colors out of itself.

XLVIII

Music is not yet written but is to be.

The preparation is long and of long intent

For the time when sound shall be subtler than we ourselves.

XLIX

It needed the heavy nights of drenching weather

To make him return to people, to find among them

Whatever it was that he found in their absence,

A pleasure, an indulgence, an infatuation.

L

Union of the weakest develops strength

Not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge

One of the leaves that have fallen in autumn?

But the wise man avenges by building his city in snow.

Re-statement of Romance

The night knows nothing of the chants of night.

It is what it is as I am what I am:

And in perceiving this I best perceive myself

And you. Only we two may interchange

Each in the other what each has to give.

Only we two are one, not you and night,

Nor night and I, but you and I, alone,

So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,

So far beyond the casual solitudes,

That night is only the background of our selves,

Supremely true each to its separate self,

In the pale light that each upon the other throws.

Lytton Strachey, Also, Enters into Heaven

I care for neither fugues nor feathers.

What interests me most is the people

Who have always interested me most,

To see them without their passions

And to understand them.

Perhaps, without their passions, they will be

Men of memories explaining what they meant.

One man opposing a society’

If properly misunderstood becomes a myth.

I fear the understanding.

Death ought to spare their passions.

Memory without passion would be better lost.

But memory and passion, and with these

The understanding of heaven, would be bliss,

If anything would be bliss.

How strange a thing it was to understand

And how strange it ought to be again, this time

Without the distortions of the theatre,

Without the revolutions’ ruin,

In the presence of the barefoot ghosts!

Perception as an act of intelligence

And perception as an act of grace

Are two quite different things, in particular

When applied to the mythical.

As for myself, I feel a doubt:

I am uncertain whether the perception

Applied on earth to those that were myths

In every various sense, ought not to be preferred

To an untried perception applied

In heaven. But I have no choice.

In this apologetic air, one well

Might muff the mighty spirit of Lenin.

That sort of thing was always rather stiff.

Let’s hope for Mademoiselle de Lespinasse,

Instead, or Horace Walpole or Mrs. Thrale.

He is nothing, I know, to me nor I to him.

I had looked forward to understanding. Yet

An understanding may be troublesome.

I’d rather not. No doubt there’s a quarter here,

Dixhuitième and Georgian and serene.

Sailing after Lunch

It is the word pejorative that hurts.

My old boat goes round on a crutch

And doesn’t get under way.