Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit If there must be a god in the house, must be, Saying things in the rooms and on the stair, Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor, Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghost Or Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly. He must be incapable of speaking, closed, As those are: as light, for all its motion, is; As color, even the closest to us, is; As shapes, though they portend us, are. It is the human that is the alien, The human that has no cousin in the moon. It is the human that demands his speech From beasts or from the incommunicable mass. If there must be a god in the house, let him be one That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness, A vermillioned nothingness, any stick of the mass Of which we are too distantly a part. --Wallace Stevens

The Sonnets to Orpheus, Second Part, XIII Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it will your heart survive. Be forever dead in Eurydice--more gladly arise into the seamless life proclaimed in your song. Here, in the realm of decline, among momentary days, be the crystal cup that shattered with sound. Be--and yet know the great void where all things begin, the infinite source of your most intense vibration, so that, this once, you may give it your perfect assent. To all that is used-up, and to all the muffled and dumb creatures in the world's full reserve, the unsayable sums joyfully add yourself, and cancel the count. --Rainer Maria Rilke [Stephen Mitchell]