79 quotes
The major abstraction is the idea of man
And major man is its exponent, abler
In the abstract than in his singular,
More fecund as principle than particle.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
I can
Do all that angels can. I enjoy like them,
Like men besides, like men in light secluded,
Enjoying angels.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
The first idea is an imagined thing.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
The first idea was not our own. Adam
In Eden was the father of Descartes
And eve made air the mirror of herself,
Of her sons and of her daughters.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
The President ordains the bee to be
Immortal.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
Of these beginnings, gay and green, propose
The suitable amours. Time will write them down.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
Nothing had happened because nothing had changed.
Yet the General was rubbish in the end.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
The words they spoke were voices that she heard.
She looked at them and saw them as they were
And what she felt fought off the barest phrase.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
As a man and woman meet and love forthwith.
Perhaps there are moments of awakening,
Extreme, fortuitous, personal, in which
We more than awaken, sit on the edge of sleep,
As on an elevation, and behold
The academies like structures in a mist.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
Bethou me, said sparrow, to the crackled blade,
And you, and you, bethou me as you blow,
When in my coppice you behold me be.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
We reason of these things with later reason
And we make of what we see, what we see clearly
And have seen, a place dependent on ourselves.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
They married well because the marriage-place
Was what they loved. It was neither heaven nor hell.
They were love’s characters come face to face.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
A dead shepherd brought tremendous chords from hell
And bad the sheep carouse. Or so they said.
Children in love with them brought early flowers
And scattered them about, no two alike.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
Red-in-red repetitions never going
Away, a little rusty, a little rouged,
A little roughened and ruder, a crown
The eye could not escape, a red renown
Blowing itself upon the tedious ear.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
The partaker partakes of that which changes him.
The child that touches takes character from the thing,
The body, it touches. The captain and his men
Are one and the sailor and the sea are one.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
This was their ceremonial hymn: Anon
We loved but would no marriage make. Anon
The one refused the other one to take,
Foreswore the sipping of the marriage wine.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined
On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
With six meats and twelve wines or else without
To walk another room...Monsieur and comrade,
The soldier is poor without the poet’s lines.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
The poem refreshes life so that we share,
For a moment, the first idea... It satisfies
Belief in an immaculate beginning
And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,
To an immaculate end.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
Apotheosis is not
The origin of the major man. He comes,
Compact in invincible foils, from reason,
Lighted at midnight by the studious eye,
Swaddled in revery, the object of
The hum of thoughts evaded in the mind.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)