Still the mind smiles at its own rebellions, <br />Knowing all the while that civilization and the other evils <br />That make humanity ridiculous, remain <br />Beautiful in the whole fabric, excesses that balance each other <br />Like the paired wings of a flying bird. <br />Misery and riches, civilization and squalid savagery, <br />Mass war and the odor of unmanly peace: <br />Tragic flourishes above and below the normal of life. <br />In order to value this fretful time <br />It is necessary to remember our norm, the unaltered passions, <br />The same-colored wings of imagination, <br />That the crowd clips, in lonely places new-grown; the unchanged <br />Lives of herdsmen and mountain farms, <br />Where men are few, and few tools, a few weapons, and their <br />dawns are beautiful. <br />From here for normal one sees both ways, <br />And listens to the splendor of God, the exact poet, the sonorous <br />Antistrophe of desolation to the strophe multitude.<br /><br />Robinson Jeffers<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/still-the-mind-smiles/
