On Alyosha, from "The Brothers Karamazov"

“Before anything else I declare that this youth, Alyosha, was in no sense a fanatic, nor even in my opinion at any rate a mystic at all. I shall state in advance my complete opinion: he was simply an early lover of mankind, and if he had struck out along the monastery road it was only because it had at that time made a strong impression on him and presented itself to him, so to speak, as an ideal of deliverance for his soul, straining as it was out of the murk of worldly hatred unto the light of love.”

Robert Lowell, from "The Poet at Seven" (an Imitation of Rimbaud)

What he feared most
were the sticky, lost December Sundays,
when he used to stand with his hair gummed back
at a little mahogany stand, and hold
a Bible pocked with cabbage-green mould.
Each night in his alcove, he had dreams.
He despised God, the National Guard,
and the triple drum-beat
of the town crier calling up the conscripts.
He loved the swearing
workers, when they crowded back, black
in the theatrical twilight to their wards.
He felt clean
when he filled his lungs with the smell—
half hay fever, half iodine—
of the wheat,
he watched its pubic golden tassels swell
and steam in the heat,
then sink back calm.

- Robert Lowell, from Imitations