I If nature is life, nature is death: It is winter as it is spring: Confusion is variety, variety And confusion in everything Make experience the true conclusion Of all desire and opulence, All satisfaction and poverty. II When a hundred years had passed nature seemed to man a clock Another century sank away and nature seemed a jungle in a rock And now that nature has become a ticking and hidden bomb how we must mock Newton, Democritus, the Deity The heart's ingenuity and the mind's infinite uncontrollable insatiable curiosity. III Purple black cloud at sunset: it is late August and the light begins to look cold, and as we look, listen and look, we hear the first drums of autumn. Delmore Schwartz