West Wind

Well, there is time left— fields everywhere invite you into them. And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away from wherever you are, to look for your soul?

If you think daylight is just daylight then it is just daylight.

Language is, in other words, not necessary, but voluntary. If it were necessary, it would have stayed simple; it would not agitate our hearts with ever-present loveliness and ever-cresting ambiguity; it would not dream, on its long white bones, of turning into song.

Tonight, at the edge of the field, I stood very still, and looked up, and tried to be empty of words.

I thought how I meant to live a quiet life how I meant to live a life of mildness and meditation tapping the careful words against each other

Here is an amazement—once I was twenty years old and in every motion of my body there was a delicious ease, and in every motion of the green earth there was a hint of paradise, and now I am sixty years old, and it is the same.

What countries, what visitations, what pomp would satisfy me as thoroughly as Blackwater Woods on a sun-filled morning, or, equally, in the rain?

And to tell the truth I don’t want to let go of the wrists of idleness, I don’t want to sell my life for money, I don’t even want to come in out of the rain.

For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees.