brass tacks
Birth, and copulation, and death.
That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks:
Birth, and copulation, and death.
I’ve been born, and once is enough.
“Fragment of the Agon,” Sweeney Agonistes in The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1952), 80–81.