EE Cummings

[untrammeled]

you've got to come out of the measurable doing universe into the immeasurable house of being

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life is more true than reason will deceive
(more secret or than madness did reveal)
deeper is life than lose: higher than have
--but beauty is more each than living's all

multiplied by infinity sans if
the mightiest meditations of mankind
cancelled are by one merely opening leaf
(here less than nothing's more than everything)

death, as men call him, ends what they call men
--but beauty is more now than dying's when

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no man, if men are gods: but if gods must
be men, the sometimes only man is this
(most common, for each anguish is his grief;
and,for his joy is more than joy, most rare)

A fiend, if fiends speak truth; if angels burn

By their own generous completely light,
an angel; or(as various worlds he'll spurn
rather than fail immeasurable fate)
coward, clown, traitor, idiot, dreamer, beast--

such was a poet and shall be and is

--who'll solve the depths of horror to defend
a sunbeam's architecture with his life:
and carve immortal jungles of despair
to hold a mountain's heartbeat in his hand