I wish not to lie here.

Have moved under the thin bone vault like cloudsUnder the blue one: love and desire and pain,Thunderclouds of wrath and white gales of fearHave hung inside here: and sometimes the curious desire of knowingValues and purpose and the causes of thingsHas coasted like a little observer air-plane over the imagesThat filled this mind: it never…

and smelt it like water,Life is become less lovely, the net nearer than the skin, alittle troublesome, a little terrible.I pledged myself awhile ago not to seek refuge, neither in deathnor in a walled garden,In lies nor gated loyalties, nor in the gates of contempt, thateasily lock the world out of doors.Here on the rock…

Would last the earth out, not dying till the planet died. I wrote a schoolboy poemAbout the last man walking in stoic dignity along the dead shoreOf the last sea, alone, alone, alone, remembering allHis racial past. But now I don’t think so. They’ll die faceless in flocks,And the earth flourish long after mankind is…

To see to some hives of bees. It was clear that he lived alone andcraved companionship, yet he talked littleUntil we came to a place where the gorge widened, and deer-huntershad camped on a slip of sandBeside the stream. They had left the usual rectangle of firedstones and ashes, also some crumpledSheets of a recent…

The wing trails like a banner in defeat,No more to use the sky forever but live with famineAnd pain a few days: cat nor coyoteWill shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons.He stands under the oak-bush and waitsThe lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedomAnd flies in a…

At the camps of the living men in the valley, the army-mechanics’barracks, the roads where they try the tanksAnd the armored cars: ‘We also,’ they say, ‘trembled in ourtime. We felt the world change in the rain,Our people like yours were falling under the wheel. Greatpast and declining present are a pitiful burdenFor living men;…