Books like Συλλογή Αλαφροΐσκιωτος (1907)

Την ποίηση θα την κάνουμε μυθιστορίαΜυθιστορία της άνοιξης και του καλοκαιριούΜυθιστορία του σώματος και της ψυχήςΈλα να σπρώξουμε τους αιώνες μπροστά και πίσωΜε τα γόνατα με τα χέρια με το στήθοςΝ’ αφήσουμε χώρο στον εαυτό μας να σηκωθείΝα τεντώσει τα μπράτσα και ν’ ανασάνειΚαι να μπορέσει κάποτε σαν τον κεντρίσει ο πόθοςΝα πιάσει απ’ το δέντρο της πλάσης όλους τους καρπούςΜ’ όλα τα χελιδόνια να διασχίσει την οικουμένηΈνα ταξίδι σε μια αναπνοή.

We men hat go down for a livin’ in ships to the sea—We love it a different way from you poets that ’bide on the land.We are fond of it, sure! But, you take it as comin’ from me,There’s a fear and a hate in our love that a landsman can’t understand.Oh, who could help likin’ the salty smell, and the blueOf the waves that are lazily breathin’ as if they dreamed in the sun?She’s a Sleepin’ Beauty, the sea—but you can’t tell what she’ll do;And the seamen never trust her—they know too well what she’s done!

Let all the strains of joy mingle in my last song—the joy that makes the earth flow over in the riotous excess of the grass, the joy that sets the twin brothers, life and death, dancing over the wide world, the joy that sweeps in with the tempest, shaking and waking all life with laughter, the joy that sits still with its tears on the open red lotus of pain, and the joy that throws everything it has upon the dust, and knows not a word.

No Sierra landscape that I have seen holds anything truly dead or dull, or any trace of what in manufactories is called rubbish or waste; everything is perfectly clean and pure and full of divine lessons. This quick, inevitable interest attaching to everything seems marvelous until the hand of God becomes visible; then it seems reasonable that what interests Him may well interest us. When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as friendly fellow mountaineers.

For all the toll the desert takes of a man it gives compensations, deep breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars. It comes upon one with new force in the pauses of the night that the Chaldeans were a desert-bred people. It is hard to escape the sense of mastery as the stars move in the wide clear heavens to risings and settings unobscured. They look large and near and palpitant; as if they moved on some stately service not needful to declare. Wheeling to their stations in the sky, they make the poor world-fret of no account. Of no account you who lie out there watching, nor the lean coyote that stands off in the scrub from you and howls and howls.

He set his teeth and said nothing, but went with the shouting monkeys to a terrace above the red sandstone reservoirs that were half full of rainwater. There was a ruined summerhouse of white marble in the center of the terrace, built for queens dead a hundred years ago. The domed roof had half fallen in and blocked up the underground passage from the palace by which the queens used to enter; but the walls were made of screens of marble tracery—beautiful, milk-white fretwork, set with agates and cornelians and jasper and lapis lazuli, and as the moon came up behind the hill it shone through the openwork, casting shadows on the ground like black-velvet embroidery.