unless the sea swallow them

I always liked what someone said about the chamber music of Webern: that it was like a collection of objects in a dark room; and the sounds would illuminate them one by one.
Lots of poetry is like this: one isn't sure whether the poet knows what all the objects are and their relationship to each other, or whether they've been snatched back from the brink of rational or conscious thought, before they disappear over the lip of the world into what Lewis Thomas called the Scrambler in the Mind.

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