George Eliot – In a London Drawingroom

The sky is cloudy, yellowed by the smoke.

For view there are the houses opposite

Cutting the sky with one long line of wall

Like solid fog: far as the eye can stretch

Monotony of surface & of form

Without a break to hang a guess upon.

No bird can make a shadow as it flies,

For all is shadow, as in ways o'erhung

By thickest canvass, where the golden rays

Are clothed in hemp. No figure lingering

Pauses to feed the hunger of the eye

Or rest a little on the lap of life.

All hurry on & look upon the ground,

Or glance unmarking at the passers by

The wheels are hurrying too, cabs, carriages

All closed, in multiplied identity.

The world seems one huge prison-house & court

Where men are punished at the slightest cost,

With lowest rate of colour, warmth & joy.

George Eliot – I Grant You Ample Leave

"I grant you ample leave

To use the hoary formula 'I am'

Naming the emptiness where thought is not;

But fill the void with definition, 'I'

Will be no more a datum than the words

You link false inference with, the 'Since' & 'so'

That, true or not, make up the atom-whirl.

Resolve your 'Ego', it is all one web

With vibrant ether clotted into worlds:

Your subject, self, or self-assertive 'I'

Turns nought but object, melts to molecules,

Is stripped from naked Being with the rest

Of those rag-garments named the Universe.

Or if, in strife to keep your 'Ego' strong

You make it weaver of the etherial light,

Space, motion, solids & the dream of Time —

Why, still 'tis Being looking from the dark,

The core, the centre of your consciousness,

That notes your bubble-world: sense, pleasure, pain,

What are they but a shifting otherness,

Phantasmal flux of moments? —"

Thomas Stearns Eliot – Hysteria

As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her

laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were

only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill. 

I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary

recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her

throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles. 

An elderly waiter with trembling hands was hurriedly

spreading a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty

green iron table, saying: "If the lady and gentleman

wish to take their tea in the garden, if the lady and

gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden ..." 

I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be

stopped, some of the fragments of the afternoon might

be collected, and I concentrated my attention with

careful subtlety to this end.

Carl Sandburg – Graceland

Tomb of a millionaire,

A multi-millionaire, ladies and gentlemen,

Place of the dead where they spend every year

The usury of twenty-five thousand dollars

For upkeep and flowers

To keep fresh the memory of the dead.

The merchant prince gone to dust

Commanded in his written will

Over the signed name of his last testament

Twenty-five thousand dollars be set aside

For roses, lilacs, hydrangeas, tulips,

For perfume and color, sweetness of remembrance

Around his last long home.

(A hundred cash girls want nickels to go to the movies to-night.

In the back stalls of a hundred saloons, women are at tables

Drinking with men or waiting for men jingling loose silver dollars in their pockets.

In a hundred furnished rooms is a girl who sells silk or dress goods or leather stuff for

six dollars a week wages

And when she pulls on her stockings in the morning she is reckless about God and the

newspapers and the police, the talk of her home town or the name people call her.)

Carl Sandburg – Doors

An open door says, “Come in.”

A shut door says, “Who are you?”

Shadows and ghosts go through shut doors.

If a door is shut and you want it shut,

     why open it?

If a door is open and you want it open,

     why shut it?

Doors forget but only doors know what it is

     doors forget.