i fumbled to the window to experience the world
and to hear my madness singing, sitting on the kerbstone
(a blind old drunken man who sings and mutters,
with broken boot heels stained in many gutters)
and as he sang the world began to fall apart.

i should have been a pair of ragged claws
scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

--i have seen the darkness creep along the wall
i have heard my madness chatter before day
i have seen the world roll up into a ball
then suddenly dissolve and fall away.

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

John Stuart Mill

why should i blame her that she filled my days
with misery, or that she would of late
have taught to ignorant men most violent ways
or hurled the little streets upon the great,
had they but courage equal to desire?
what could have made her peaceful with a mind
that nobleness made simple as a fire,
with beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
that is not natural in an age like this,
being high and solitary and most stern?
why, what could she have done being what she is?
was there another troy for her to burn?