Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,

How hot the scent is of the summer rose, (more…)

At the end of the garden walk the wind

And its satellite wait for me;

Their meaning I will not know

Until I go there,

But the black-hatted undertaker (more…)

We sat within the farmhouse old,

Whose windows, looking o’er the bay,

Gave to the sea-breeze damp and cold,

An easy entrance, night and day.

Not far away we saw the port,

The strange, old-fashioned, silent town,

The lighthouse, the dismantled fort, (more…)

I have come to the borders of sleep,

The unfathomable deep

Forest where all must lose

Their way, however straight, (more…)

“Fred, where is north?”

“North? North is there, my love.

The brook runs west.”

“West-running Brook then call it.”

(West-running Brook men call it to this day.)

“What does it think it’s doing running west

When all the other country brooks flow east

To reach the ocean?

It must be the brook

Can trust itself to go by contraries (more…)

The swinging mill bell changed its rate

To tolling like the count of fate,

And though at that the tardy ran,

One failed to make the closing gate.

There was a law of God or man

That on the one who came too late

The gate for half an hour be locked,

His time be lost, his pittance docked. (more…)

Back out of all this now too much for us,

Back in a time made simple by the loss

Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off

Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,

There is a house that is no more a house (more…)

My book Auntie Mame circulated for five years, through the halls of fifteen publishers and finally ended up with Vanguard Press, which, as you can see, is rather deep into the alphabet.

One could always baffle Conrad by saying “humour”. (more…)

Henry Miller is not really a writer but a non-stop talker to whom someone has given a typewriter.

In real life, of course, it is the hare who wins. Every time. Look around you. And in any case, it is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. (more…)

The keener tempests come: and, fuming dun

From all the livid east or piercing north,

Thick clouds ascend, in whose capacious womb

A vapory deluge lies, to snow congealed.

Heavy they roll their fleecy world along,

And the sky saddens with the gathered storm. (more…)