
“A secret needs two faces to bounce between; a secret needs to see itself in another pair of eyes.”
Epilogue
Christine (1983)
Against Unworthy Praise http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1433/
The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910)
Context: p>O heart, be at peace, because
Nor knave nor dolt can break
What's not for their applause
Being for a woman's sake.
Enough if the work has seemed,
So did she your strength renew,
A dream that a lion had dreamed
Till the wilderness cried aloud,
A secret between you two,
Between the proud and the proud.What, still you would have their praise!
But here's a haughtier text,
The labyrinth of her days
That her own strangeness perplexed;
And how what her dreaming gave
Earned slander, ingratitude,
From self-same dolt and knave;
Aye, and worse wrong than these.
Yet she, singing upon her road,
Half lion, half child, is at peace.</p
“A secret needs two faces to bounce between; a secret needs to see itself in another pair of eyes.”
Epilogue
Christine (1983)
“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”
Variant: I love you as one loves certain dark things, secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
Source: 100 Love Sonnets
“There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one.”
Source: Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), II
Context: There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply.
Source: The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies (1906), p. 462
Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 193
Fraser's Magazine, New Series, vol. 5 (1872) p. 160