Book II, line 991 (tr. Munro)
De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)
Caelesti sumus omnes semine oriundi.
VII, 50
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book VII
Context: That which had grown from the earth, to the earth, But that which has sprung from heavenly seed, Back to the heavenly realms returns. This is either a dissolution of the mutual involution of the atoms, or a similar dispersion of the unsentient elements.
Source: Meditations (c. AD 121–180), Book VII, 50
The Bubble, as quoted in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Source: Drenai series, The Swords of Night and Day, Ch. 10
André Breton or the Quest of the Beginning
Source: Alternating Current (1967)
Context: If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.
Source: The Flame is Green (1971), Ch. 5 : Muerte De Boscaje
Context: “The world is a garden,” the old man said. “It is a farm, a plantation, a sheep-ranch. In the garden are the cities also; they too are a great part of the planting. Believe me, all these plantations are sowed with good seed. But the Enemy from the Beginning also sows the red blight: these are the charlocks, the tares, called zizania in the Vulgate. Do not be fooled as to what it is and who sowed it. Do not be fooled in the factory or the arsenal, in the ship-yard or the shop; do not be fooled on the bleak farms or in the crowded city, in the club or in the workers’ hall or in the drawing room. The wrong thing that is sowed is the red weed, the red blight. And the Enemy has done this.
"Or let us say that we have a green thing growing forever. Everything that is done is done by it. And on it we also have the red parasite crunching forever: and everything that is undone is undone by that. The parasite will present itself as a modern thing. It will call itself the Great Change. Less often, and warily, it will call itself the Great Renewal. But it can never be another thing than the Red Failure returned. It is a disease, it is a scarlet fever, a typhoid, a diphtheria; it is the Africa disease, it is the red leprosy, it is the crab-cancer. It is the death of the individual and of the corporate soul. And incidentally, but very often, it is also the death of the individual and of the corporate body. We are asked to swear fealty to the parasite disease which the enemy sowed from the beginning. I will not do it, and I hope that you will not."
"Return" st. 2, 1962; New Collected Poems, New Directions, 2002, ISBN 0-811-21488-5
