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Our loss put six feet under ground Is measured by the magnolia's root; Our gain's the intellectual sound Of death's feet round a weedy tomb.
Allen Tate -
Men expect too much, do too little, Put the contraption before the accomplishment, Lack skill of the interior mind To fashion dignity with shapes of air. Luxury, yes but not elegance!
Allen Tate
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Narcissism and the Confederate dead cannot be connected logically, or even historically; even were the connection an historical fact, they would not stand connected as art, for no one experiences raw history.
Allen Tate -
So the dubbed conceit Played nursery of cheat To clear the I of sleet....
Allen Tate -
Now remember courage, go to the door,Open it and see whether coiled on the bedOr cringing by the wall, a savage beastMaybe with golden hair, with deep eyesLike a bearded spider on a sunlit floorWill snarl-and man can never be alone.
Allen Tate -
The dreary flies, lazy and casual, Stick to the ceiling, buzz along the wall. O heart, the spider shuffles from the mould Weaving, between the pinks and grapes, his pall.
Allen Tate -
What was I saying? An Egyptian king Once touched long fingers, which are not anything.
Allen Tate -
What is the flesh and blood compounded ofBut a few moments in the life of time?This prowling of the cells, litigious love,Wears the long claw of flesh-arguing crime.
Allen Tate
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Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation.
Allen Tate -
Venus knows country matters: country knows Venus: For Love, Dione's boy, was born on the farm.
Allen Tate -
We know our end A packet of worm-seed, a garden of spent tissues.
Allen Tate -
There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.
Allen Tate -
Culture is the study of perfection, and the constant effort to achieve it.
Allen Tate -
But we shall not know the world by looking at it; we know it by looking at the hovering fly.
Allen Tate
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There's precious little to say between day and dark, Perhaps a few words on the implacable will Of time sailing like a magic barque Or something as fine for the amenities...
Allen Tate -
Men expect too much, do too little.
Allen Tate -
Antiquity breached mortality with myths. Narcissus is vocabulary. Hermes decorates A cornice on the Third National Bank.
Allen Tate -
Among friends one has the privilege of saying nothing; the civility consists in the assumption that one's silence will be civilly understood. I can imagine a small gathering of friends who say nothing all evening: they recoil from saying anything that the others don't want to hear; and their silence would be the subtlest courtesy.
Allen Tate -
I thought I heard the dark pounding its head On a rock, crying: Who are the dead?
Allen Tate -
Ah, Christ, I love you rings to the wild sky And I must think a little of the past: When I was ten I told a stinking lie That got a black boy whipped...
Allen Tate
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I had kept opaque Down deeper than the canyons undersea The sullen spectrum of a buried lake Nobody saw; not seen even by me....
Allen Tate -
Struck in the wet mire Four thousand leagues from the ninth buried city I thought of Troy, what we had built her for.
Allen Tate -
Punctilious abyss, the yawn of space Come once a day to suffocate the sight.
Allen Tate -
So face with calm that heritage And earn contempt before the age.
Allen Tate