Eine Klage-Welt

I've been tagged by Sorlil to post "a phrase: a few lines from a poem, a song, or an overheard sentence that rings important inside you."

The below is sort of long, but it is hard to excerpt, and it's still only one section of a longer poem. It is mostly the last three lines that ring inside me, a definition of art, or at least a definition of poetry.

from "The Bouquet" by Wallace Stevens

Section III

The rose, the delphinium, the red, the blue,
Are questions of the looks they get. The bouquet,
Regarded by the meta-men, is quirked

And queered by the lavishings of their will to see.
It stands a sovereign of souvenirs
Neither remembered nor forgotten, nor old,

Nor new, nor in the sense of memory.
It is a symbol, a sovereign of symbols
In its interpretations voluble,

Embellished by the quicknesses of sight,
When in a way of seeing seen, an extreme,
A sovereign, a souvenir, a sign,

Of today, of this morning, of this afternoon,
Not yesterday, nor tomorrow, an appanage
Of indolent summer not quite physical

And yet of summer, the petty tones
Its colors make, the migratory daze,
The doubling second things, not mystical,

The infinite of the actual perceived,
A freedom revealed, a realization touched,
A real made more acute by an unreal.

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