“Hell is a city much like London A populous and smoky city.”

Soul meets soul on lovers’ lips.

We look before and after, And pine for what is not; Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Then black despair, The shadow of a starless night, was thrown Over the world in which I moved alone.

Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance, and Change? To these All things are subject but eternal love.

I wish no living thing to suffer pain.

I have made my bed In charnels and on coffins, where black death Keeps record of the trophies won.

There Is No God. This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken.

The jealous keys of truth’s eternal doors.

Music, when soft voices die Vibrates in the memory.

Fame, power, and gold, are loved for their own sakes – are worshipped with a blind, habitual idolatry.

All love is sweet Given or returned. Common as light is love, And its familiar voice wearies not ever.

Heaven’s ebon vault Studded with stars unutterably bright, Through which the moon’s unclouded grandeur rolls, Seems like a canopy which love has spread To curtain her sleeping world.

I have been a wanderer among distant fields. I have sailed down mighty rivers.

When the lamp is shattered The light in the dust lies dead – When the cloud is scattered The rainbow’s glory is shed.

Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.

It is not a merit to tolerate, but rather a crime to be intolerant.

Nature made the fields and man the cities.

Divine nature gave us fields, human skill built our cities.

Dancing with her on the city streets is where I want to be.

Los Angeles can be a really sad city.

City lights shine bright on my complexion, Self-reflection…red hairs flashing at the intersection. Life is a green light, one star, no script, Supporting actors…fresh peaches, no pit.

Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years.

The skyscraper is the point where art and the city meet.

So that the failures to pass a civil rights bill isn’t because of Black Power, isn’t because of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; it’s not because of the rebellions that are occurring in the major cities.