We love the things we love for what they are.

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on TheeAnd I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.

The heart can think of no devotionGreater than being shore to the ocean-Holding the curve of one position,Counting an endless repetition.

A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.

Keats mourned that the rainbow, which as a boy had been for him a magic thing, had lost its glory because the physicists had found it resulted merely from the refraction of the sunlight by the raindrops. Yet knowledge of its causation could not spoil the rainbow for me. I am sure that it is not given to man to be omniscient. There will always be something left to know, something to excite the imagination of the poet and those attuned to the great world in which they live (p. 64)

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

Some say the world will end in fire,Some say in ice.From what I've tasted of desire,I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twiceI think I know enough of hateTo say that for destruction iceIs also greatAnd would suffice.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

The rain to the wind said,You push and I'll pelt.'They so smote the garden bedThat the flowers actually knelt,And lay lodged--though not dead.I know how the flowers felt.