There is an inevitable connection between music and poetry. - Marianne Moore

A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.

china eyes and furry countenance confront the nymph’s large eyes — gray eyes that now are black, for she with controlled agitated glance explores the insect’s face and all’s a-quiver with significance. It is Goya’s scene of the tame magpie faced by crouching cats. Butterflies do not need home advice. As though the admiring nymph were patent-leather cricket singing loud or gnat-catching garden-toad, the swallow- tail bewitched and haughty,

You do not seem to realize that beauty is a liability rather
than
an asset - that in view of the fact that spirit creates form
we are justified in supposing
that you must have brains. For you, a symbol of the
unit, stiff and sharp,
conscious of surpassing by dint of native superiority and
liking for everything
self-dependent, anything an

ambitious civilization might produce: for you, unaided, to
attempt through sheer
reserve, to confuse presumptions resulting from
observation, is idle. You cannot make us
think you a delightful happen-so. But rose, if you are
brilliant, it
is not because your petals are the without-which-nothing
of pre-eminence. Would you not, minus
thorns, be a what-is-this, a mere
perculiarity? They are not proof against a worm, the
elements, or mildew;
but what about the predatory hand? What is brilliance
without co-ordination? Guarding the
infinitesimal pieces of your mind, compelling audience to
the remark that it is better to be forgotten than to be re-
membered too violently,
your thorns are the best part of you.