By the seventeenth century the Japanese had brought this “wordless” poetry to perfection in the haiku, the poem of just seventeen syllables which drops the subject almost as it takes it up. To non-Japanese people haiku are apt to seem no more than beginnings or even titles for poems, and in translation it is impossible to convey the effect of their

I was all at once very tired. I looked out into the narrow street, this strange, crooked corner where we sat, which was brazen now with the sunlight and heavy with people—people I would never understand. I ached abruptly, intolerably, with a longing to go home; not to that hotel, in one of the alleys of Paris, where the concierge barred the way wit

In poetry you have to see language as both music and content.

All that I remember of the autumn is waiting for Giovanni to come to trial. Then, at last, he came to trial, was found guilty, and placed under sentence of death. All winter long I counted the days. And the nightmare of this house began. Much has been written of love turning to hatred, of the heart growing cold with the death of love. It is a remar