I am getting on well with this anecdote,    When suddenly I recall    The many times I have told it of old,    And all the worked-up phrases, and the…

    I have run where festival was loud    With drum and brass among the crowd    Of panic revellers, whose cries    Affront the quiet of the skies;    Whose dancing lights contract…

    At your mouth, white and milk-warm sphinx,    I taste a strange apocalypse:    Your subtle taper finger-tips    Weave me new heavens, yet, methinks,    I know the wiles and each iynx    That…

    Evenings in trains,    When the little black twittering ghosts    Along the brims of cuttings,    Against the luminous sky,    Interrupt with their hurrying rumour every thought    Save that one is young…

   All fly – yet who is misanthrope? –     The actual men and things that pass    Jostling, to wither as the grass    So soon: and (be it heaven’s hope,    Or…

    Instants in the quiet, small sharp stars,    Pierce my spirit with a thrust whose speed    Baffles even the grasp of time.    Oh that I might reflect them    As swiftly,…

    Books and a coloured skein of thoughts were mine;    And magic words lay ripening in my soul    Till their much-whispered music turned a wine    Whose subtlest power was…

    The eyes of the portraits on the wall    Look at me, follow me,    Stare incessantly:    I take it their glance means nothing at all?     – Clearly, oh clearly!…

    In the middle of countries, far from hills and sea,    Are the little places one passes by in trains    And never stops at; where the skies extend    Uninterrupted,…

    Sitting on the top of the ‘bus,    I bite my pipe and look at the sky.    Over my shoulder the smoke streams out    And my life with it.    “Conservation…