If We Were In The Habit Of

I Think Miss Moore Was Right To Cut "the Steeple-jack" - The Poem Seems Plainer And Clearer In Its Shortened State But She Has Cut Too Much... The Reader May Feel Like Saying, "let Her Do As She Pleases With The Poem; It's Hers, Isn't It?" No; It's Much Too Good A Poem For That, It Long Ago Became Everybody's, And We Can Protest Just As We Could If Donatello Cut Off David's Left Leg.

I See At Last That All The Knowledge I Wrung From The Darkness - That Darkness Flung Me - Is Worthless As Ignorance: Nothing Comes From Nothing The Darkness From The Darkness. Pain Comes From The Darkness And We Call It Wisdom. It Is Pain.

Anyone Who Has Read Yeats's Wonderful Autobiography Will Remember His Sligo Shabby, Shadowed, Half Country And Half Sea, Full Of Confused Romance, Superstition, Poverty, Eccentricity, Unrecognized Anachronism, Passion And Ignorance And The Little Boy's Misery. Yeats Was Treated Well But Was Bitterly Unhappy; He Prayed That He Would Die, And Used Often To Say To Himself: "when You Are Grown Up, Never Talk As Grown-up People Do Of The Happiness Of Childhood.

A Correct Answer Is Like An Affectionate Kiss, Goethe Said; A Correct Answer, Gertrude Would Have Said, Is Like A Slap In The Face.

When You Begin To Read A Poem You Are Entering A Foreign Country Whose Laws And Language And Life Are A Kind Of Translation Of Your Own; But To Accept It Because Its Stews Taste Exactly Like Your Old Mother's Hash, Or To Reject It Because The Owl-headed Goddess Of Wisdom In Its Temple Is Fatter Than The Statue Of Liberty, Is An Equal Mark Of That Want Of Imagination, That Inaccessibility To Experience, Of Which Each Of Us Who Dies A Natural Death Will Die.