I do not attach much importance to the publication or non publication of my poetry and never have done. Most of it (the published part) appeared five, ten, fifteen or even thirty or more years after they were written. The few recently published in magazines (not all of them new, e.g. the sonnets) owed their fate to Nolini's eagerness and not to my initiative. But the vast bulk of what I have written (long poems mostly) lies on shelf and in drawer, most of it for more than a decade, awaiting either dissolution or an interminable revision or total recasting which at the present rate may well retain them there a decade or two more. But that is my own idiosyncrasy—it cannot be a rule or example for others.
A far sail on the unchangeable monotone of a slow slumbering sea, A world of power hushed into symbols of hue, silent unendingly; Over its head like a gold ball the sun tossed by the gods in their play Follows its curve,—a blazing eye of Time watching the motionless day.
Here or otherwhere,—poised on the unreachable abrupt, snow-solitary ascent Earth aspiring lifts to the illimitable Light, then ceases broken and spent, Or on the glowing expanse, arid, fiery and austere, of the desert's hungry soul,— A breath, a cry, a glimmer from Eternity's face, in a fragment the mystic Whole.
Moment-mere, yet with all Eternity packed, lone, fixed, intense, Out of the ring of these hours that dance and die caught by the spirit in sense, In the greatness of a man, in music's outspread wings, in a touch, in a smile, in a sound, Something that waits, something that wanders and settles not, a Nothing that was all and is found.
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