Poetry

Gnomes who eat stardust make, with methods that only angels know, out of mushrooms that eagles devour and that with quiet and time grow on the clouds, the shining armour of the brave and gallant knight. Thus enabled, the knight rides on Pegasus into the mountainous caverns where the sun never shines; he finds the happy dragon who is dazzled by his armour, and, while the dragon is confused, he takes through the shallow ground and into the light the faith and knowledge of poetry. He brings it to us so we may employ, sometimes seriously, other times freely, never impossible, imaginative always, mountainous caverns through shallow ground, full of luckless confusing turns, where a dragon guards the essence of poetry.

December 1969