What end impersonal, what breathless age, Incontinent of quiet and of years, What calm catastrophe will yet assuage This final drouth of penitential … - Yvor Winters

By practice and conviction formed,
With ancient stubbornness ingrained,
Although her body clung and swarmed,
My own identity remained.

Now verse is more valuable than prose … for the simple reasons that its rhythms are faster and more highly organized than are those of prose, and so lend themselves to a greater complexity and compression of relationship, and that the intensity of this convention renders possible a greater intensity of other desirable conventions, such as poetic language and devices of rhetoric.

And you are here beside me, small,
Contained and fragile, and intent
On things that I but half recall — Yet going whither you are bent. I am the past, and that is all.