“Soundlessly, shadow with shadow, we wrestled together,
Till the grey dawn.”

Skyline Pigeon
Song lyrics, Empty Sky (1969)

Act I
Buchanan Dying (1974)
Context: Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When they judged the earth flat, it was flat. As long as men thought slavery tolerable, tolerable it was. We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows.

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: Selected Poems and Four Plays

Source: Paraphrased from a response to an audience questions at FREEOK 2013 Lawrence Krauss The Higgs and the Story of Science https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iPZNgzi9Aw

Hérodiade.
Hérodiade (1898)
Context: I feel in my sinews
The spreading of shadows
Converging together
With a shiver
And in solitary vigil
After flights triumphal
My head rise
From this scythe
Through a clean rupture
That serves to dissever
The ancient disharmony
With the body
As drunk from fasting
It persists in following
With a haggard bound
Its gaze profound
Up where the frozen
Absolute has chosen
That nothing shall measure
Its vastness, O glacier
But according to a ritual
Illumined by the principle
That chose my consecration
It extends a salutation.

Variant: How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.
Source: Sister Carrie

The Better Part (1901)
Context: I believe that brutality tends to defeat itself. Prizefighters die young, gourmands get the gout, hate hurts worse the man who nurses it, and all selfishness robs the mind of its divine insight, and cheats the soul that would know. Mind alone is eternal. He, watching over Israel, slumbers not nor sleeps. My faith is great: out of the transient darkness of the present the shadows will flee away, and Day will yet dawn. I am an Anarchist.

Book IV, ode vii, line 16
Odes (c. 23 BC and 13 BC)