the art of poetry
　　
　　To look at the river made of time and water
　　and remember that time is another river,
　　to know that we lose ourselves like the river
　　and that faces go by like the water.
　　
　　To feel that wakefulness is another sleep
　　that dreams it is not dreaming and that the death
　　that our flesh fears is that death
　　every night that is called sleep.
　　
　　To see in the day or in the year a symbol
　　of the days of mankind and of his years,
　　to change the outrage of the years
　　into a music, a rumor, and a symbol,
　　
　　to see in death sleep, in sunset
　　a sad gold, such is the poetry
　　that is immortal and poor. Poetry
　　returns like dawn and sunset.
　　
　　Sometimes in the evening a face
　　looks at us from the bottom of a mirror;
　　art should be like that mirror
　　that reveals our own face to us.
　　
　　They tell that Ulysses, tired of wonders,
　　wept with love at the sight of his Ithaca,
　　green and humble. Art is that Ithaca
　　of green eternity, not of wonders.
　　
　　It is also like the endless river
　　that passes and remains and is the mirror of one same
　　inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
　　and is another, like the endless river.