Pale Fire (Vintage International)

And all the time, and all the time, my love, 950 You too are there, beneath the word, above The syllable, to underscore and stress The vital rhythm. One heard a woman’s dress Rustle in days of yore. I’ve often caught The sound and sense of your approaching thought. And all in you is youth, and you make new, By quoting them, old things I made for yo

Now I shall speak of evil as none has Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz; The white-hosed moron torturing a black Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac; Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools; Music in supermarkets; swimming pools; Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx, 930 Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, fra

I feel I understand Existence, or at least a minute part Of my existence, only through my art,

Now I shall spy on beauty as none has Spied on it yet. Now I shall cry out as None has cried out. Now I shall try what none Has tried. Now I shall do what none has done.

From the second story of my house the Shades’ living-room window remained clearly visible so long as the branches of the deciduous trees between us were still bare, and almost every evening I could see the poet’s slippered foot gently rocking. One inferred from it that he was sitting with a book in a low chair but one never managed to glimpse more

This friendship was the more precious for its tenderness being intentionally concealed, especially when we were not alone, by that gruffness which stems from what can be termed the dignity of the heart.

I love you when you call me to admire A jet’s pink trail above the sunset fire.

cognomen

120 A thousand years ago five minutes were Equal to forty ounces of fine sand. Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and Infinite aftertime: above your head They close like giant wings, and you are dead.