The feeling without the picture
Is failure of poetry and failure of love.
Yes, we can feel!
Even if what we feel isn’t real.
If love succeeds, the beautiful picture
Makes you feel as the poet feels.
When, hopelessly, the love ends, you remember pictures
With greater feeling. Her pictures belong to you.
You’re a greater poet now. At least you feel this is true.
When feelings attach themselves to distant pictures
And the heart looks out at everything sad,
The misery overwhelms, and the poetry is bad;
You cannot give birth to pictures,
And you dwell with bitter thoughts.
This is the woman who is not a poet at all;
She used words, but she herself was the picture,
A demon picture! who made me—but did not make the poet—fall.