You can’t do much with verses, if you write them early. Nay, you should wait and collect sense and sweetness during all your life – a long one, hopefully, and then, in the very end, maybe you would be able to write ten lines which are worth while.
For verses are not, as people imagine, simply feelings (those one has early enough)-they are experiences. For the sake of a single verse, you must see many cities, men and things, must know the animals, must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning. You must be able to have memories of paths to unknown regions, of unexpected meetings, and of farewells anticipated long ago, - of childhood days still unexplained, and of the parents whom you had to hurt, when they were bringing you a joy, which you just couldn’t understand (it was a joy for someone else-), of children’s illnesses that start so strange, and with so many deep and difficult transformations, of days in silent rooms in expectation, yes, and of mornings by the sea, the sea in general, of oceans, of nightly journeys, where you rush along and fly with all the stars, - and it is not even enough, if you can think about all that. You need remembrances of many nights of love, where none resembled any other one, of cries of women giving birth, of light, white sleeping ones in childbed, about to close themselves. But you must also have seen people dying, have sat through wakes inside the room with open windows and with intermittent sounds. And it is not enough that you have memories. You must be able to forget them all, if there are many, and you must wait – wait patiently that they come back. For memories themselves are not yet “it”. Only if they become our own blood, our look and gesture, inside us, unnamed, no more distinguishable from ourselves, then, only then, in a very special hour, it may come to pass that the first word of a verse rises out of their midst and cometh forth.

G. V. Brunn 2008