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.
I shall not die. Although this body, when the spirit tires Of its cramped residence, shall feed the fires, My house consumes, not I.
Leaving that case I find out ample and ethereal room. My spirit shall avoid the hungry tomb, Deceiving death's embrace.
Night shall contain The sun in its cold depths; Time too must cease; The stars that labour shall have their release. I cease not, I remain.
Ere the first seeds Were sown on earth, I was already old, And when now unborn planets shall grow cold My history proceeds.
I am the light In stars, the strength of lions and the joy Of mornings; I am man and maid and boy, Protean, infinite.
I am a tree That stands out singly from the infinite blue; I am the quiet falling of the dew And am the unmeasured sea.
I hold the sky Together and upbear the teeming earth. I was the eternal thinker at my birth And shall be, though I die.
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