As fine and intricate as thought

Amo Ergo Sum

Because I love
    The sun pours out its rays of living gold
    Pours out its gold and silver on the sea.

Because I love
    The earth upon her astral spindle winds
    Her ecstasy-producing dance.

Because I love
    Clouds travel on the winds through wide skies,
    Skies wide and beautiful, blue and deep.

Because I love
    Wind blows white sails,
    The wind blows over flowers, the sweet wind blows.

Because I love
    The ferns grow green, and green the grass, and green
    The transparent sunlit trees.

Because I love
    Larks rise up from the grass
    And all the leaves are full of singing birds.

Because I love
    The summer air quivers with a thousand wings,
    Myriads of jewelled eyes burn in the light.

Because I love
    The iridescent shells upon the sand
    Takes forms as fine and intricate as thought.

Because I love
    There is an invisible way across the sky,
    Birds travel by that way, the sun and moon
    And all the stars travel that path by night.

Because I love
    There is a river flowing all night long.

Because I love
    All night the river flows into my sleep,
    Ten thousand living things are sleeping in my arms,
    And sleeping wake, and flowing are at rest.

— Kathleen Raine

(Born this day in 1908.)

If words were weapons

Here's one of the most interesting personality quizzes that I've ever seen: If words were weapons, which poet would you be?

I don't know if there's any valid data being tapped to align your personality with that of great poets, or if the results are randomly generated. In any case, the questions, framed as part of the application process to some organization, are a little out of the ordinary, both amusing and thought-provoking.

Also, I love the use of spider graphs to illustrate the composition of the psyche (and I say this as someone who uses a lot of spider graphs in her workaday life).

I'm Kathleen Raine, "a promising new poet with enormous assertiveness and a willingness to take calculated risks" — a poet I'd never heard of before today. A selection of her poems is available online. Other poet types include Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, and T.S. Eliot ("one of the organization's most admired and feared poets."). Who are you?

It turns out that this quiz is part of the marketing campaign for a novel, Lexicon, by Max Barry. It's classified as science fiction:

Students harness the hidden power of language to manipulate the mind and learn to break down individuals by psychographic markers in order to take control of their thoughts. The very best will graduate as poets: adept wielders of language who belong to a nameless organization that is as influential as it is secretive.

Read the full description on the publisher's website. Consider me intrigued.