"[Stefan] George had, of course, looked forward to a holy war which would renew the spiritually moribund society of his time; but the particular war that came must have struck him as vulgar and brutal." --Patrick Bridgwater, The German Poets of the First World War

"The frail, illegal fire balloons appear" --Elizabeth Bishop

"Or, as G K Chesterton said, 'If it is not true that a divine being fell, then one can only say that one of the animals went completely off its head.' " --Auden, intro to The Star Thrower

...Two insomniacs, still up at 3 AM & wanting to talk, but each not wanting to call the other in case they've achieved a precious sleep.

My seeing-eye dog bites me when i turn my back.

"...love automatically rhymes with blood,
nature with liberty, sadness with distance,
humane with everlasting, prince with mud,
and song and wind and life and death with none..." --Nabokov, "A Night of Russian Poetry"

   "Quaint Mazes

And, after all, it is to them we return.
Their triumph is to rise and be our hosts:
lords of unquiet or of quiet sojourn,
those muddy-hued and midge-tormented ghosts.

On blustery lilac-bush and terrace-urn
bedaubed with bloom Linnaean pentecosts
put their prolonged light; the chilly fountains burn.
Religion of the heart, with trysts and quests

And pangs of consolation, its hawk's hood
twitched off for sweet carnality, again
rejoices in old hymns of servitude,

haunting the sacred well, the hidden shrine,
it is the ravage of the heron wood;
it is the rood blazing upon the green."

--Geoffrey Hill, Tenebrae (1978)

"turn clouds the cauldrons of the martyrs' cries" -ibid

"It is as compleate a piece of madnesse to miscall and rave against the times, as thinke to recall men to reason by a fit of passion..." --Religio Medici

We mass-produce diseased souls; we heal them one by one, if at all.

"...mosques...were built with mortar that had been mixed with musk. ...It is even said...that the Mosque of Zobiade still smells of musk today." --John Trueman, The Romantic Story of Scent (1975)
[A great poem is such a mosque.]