Now you know very well that there are no less than fifty-eight different pieces in a violin. These pieces are strangers to each ot...her, and it takes a century, more or less, to make them thoroughly acquainted. At last they learn to vibrate in harmony, and the instrument becomes an organic whole, as if it were a great seed-capsule which had grown from a garden-bed in Cremona, or elsewhere. Besides, the wood is juicy and full of sap for fifty years or so, but at the end of fifty or hundred years gets tolerably dry and comparatively resonant. Don't you see that all this is just as true of a poem? Counting each word as a piece, there are more pieces in an average copy of verses than in a violin. The poet has forced all these words together, and fastened them, and they don't understand it at first. But let the poem be repeated aloud and murmured over in the mind's muffled whisper often enough, and at length the parts become knit together in such absolute solidarity that you could not change a syllable without the whole world's crying out against you for meddling with the harmonious fabric. Observe, too, how the drying process takes place in the stuff of a poem just as in that of a violin.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Slave to a springtime passion for the earth. How Love burns through the Putting in the Seed... On through the watching for that early birth When, just as the soil tarnishes with weed, The sturdy seedling with arched body comes Shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Man-in-seed, in seed-at-zero, From the star-flanked fields of space,... Thunders on the foreign town With a sand-bagged garrison....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Behold I have given you every herb bearing seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of ...a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and ...it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He put before them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is ...the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »