How will this beauty, when I am far hence,
Sweep back upon me and engulf my mind!
How will these hours, when we twain are gray,
Turned in their sapphire tide, come flooding o’er us!
“O mortal nature,
If thou art
Frail and so vile in all,
How canst thou reach so high with thy poor sense;
Yet if thou art
Noble in any part
How is the noblest of thy speech and thought
So lightly wrought
Or to such base occasion lit and quenched?”
Ezra Pound | “Her Monument, the Image Cut Thereon” (after Leopardi)