Quotes by Poets - Page 101

i was ok in the seaput me back
Steve Roggenbuck
Hence, in a season of calm weatherThough inland far we be,Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
William Wordsworth
The calming sea reaches out to me. Inviting me to its pure serenity."-Elizabeth's Quotes (inspired by a Pablo Neruda quote "I need the sea because it teaches me.")
Elizabeth E. Castillo
That's what sailing is, a dance, and your partner is the sea. And with the sea you never take liberties. You ask her, you don't tell her. You have to remember always that she's the leader, not you. You and your boat are dancing to her tune.
Michael Morpurgo
You have to understand the sea, he said, to listen to her, to look out for her moods, to get to know her and respect her and love her. Only then can you build boats that feel at home on the sea.
Michael Morpurgo
The sea can do craziness, it can do smooth, it can lie down like silk breathing or toss havoc shoreward; it can give gifts or withhold all; it can rise, ebb, froth like an incoming frenzy of fountains, or it can sweet-talk entirely. As I can too, and so, no doubt, can you, and you.
Mary Oliver
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legsUpon the slimy sea.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
In a sea of strangers,you've longed to know me.Your life spent sailingto my shores.
Lang Leav
Searching my heart for its true sorrow, This is the thing I find to be: That I am weary of words and people, Sick of the city, wanting the sea.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
Herman Melville
Day and night, their frail and crippled ships defy the tempest.
Jorge Luis Borges
Cities on the ocean have a choice whether to turn their faces or their backs to the water, lining the shore either with pretty hotels and rich homes or dim warehouses, narrow streets, and greasy piers. All prairie towns turn away from the prairie, however. The huddled houses form a storm-battened island in the midst of endless space.
Joseph Bottum
Like bubbles on the sea of matter borne, they rise, they break, and to that sea return.
Alexander Pope
I only thoughtOf lying quiet there where I was thrownLike sea-weed on the rocks, and suffer herTo prick me to a pattern with her pin,Fibre from fibre, delicate leaf from leaf,And dry out from my drowned anatomyThe last sea-salt left in me.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
You are the sick prince of my cerise innovations and in your drowning caresses I walk the sea
Frank O'Hara
I would not that death should take me asleep. I would not have him meerly seise me, and only declare me to be dead, but win me, and overcome me. When I must shipwrack, I would do it in a Sea, where mine impotencie might have some excuse; not in a sullen weedy lake, where I could not have so much as exercise for my swimming.
John Donne
Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure.
Herman Melville
The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up—flaked up, with rose-water snow.
Herman Melville
Next morning the not-yet-subsided sea rolled in long slow billows of mighty bulk, and striving in the Pequod's gurgling track, pushed her on like giants' palms outspread. The strong, unstaggering breeze abounded so, that sky and air seemed vast outbellying sails; the whole world boomed before the wind. Muffled in the full morning light, the invisible sun was only known by the spread intensity of his place; where his bayonet rays moved on in stacks. Emblazonings, as of crowned Babylonian kings and queens, reigned over everything. The sea was as a crucible of molten gold, that bubblingly leaps with light and heat.
Herman Melville
There is no silence upon the earth or under the earth like the silence under the sea;No cries announcing birth,No sounds declaring death.There is silence when the milt is laid on the spawn in the weeds and fungus of the rock-clefts;And silence in the growth and struggle for life.The bonitoes pounce upon the mackerel,And are themselves caught by the barracudas,The sharks kill the barracudasAnd the great molluscs rend the sharks,And all noiselessly--Though swift be the action and final the conflict,The drama is silent.There is no fury upon the earth like the fury under the sea.For growl and cough and snarl are the tokens of spendthrifts who know not the ultimate economy of rage.Moreover, the pace of the blood is too fast.But under the waves the blood is sluggard and has the same temperature as that of the sea.There is something pre-reptilian about a silent kill.Two men may end their hostilities just with their battle-cries,'The devil take you,' says one.'I'll see you in hell,' says the other.And these introductory salutes followed by a hail of gutturals and sibilants are often the beginning of friendship, for who would not prefer to be lustily damned than to be half-heartedly blessed?No one need fear oaths that are properly enunciated, for they belong to the inheritance of just men made perfect, and, for all we know, of such may be the Kingdom of Heaven.But let silent hate be put away for it feeds upon the heart of the hater.Today I watched two pairs of eyes. One pair was black and the other grey. And while the owners thereof, for the space of five seconds, walked past each other, the grey snapped at the black and the black riddled the grey.One looked to say--'The cat,'And the other--'The cur.'But no words were spoken;Not so much as a hiss or a murmur came through the perfect enamel of the teeth; not so much as a gesture of enmity.If the right upper lip curled over the canine, it went unnoticed.The lashes veiled the eyes not for an instant in the passing.And as between the two in respect to candour of intention or eternity of wish, there was no choice, for the stare was mutual and absolute.A word would have dulled the exquisite edge of the feeling.An oath would have flawed the crystallization of the hate.For only such culture could grow in a climate of silence--Away back before emergence of fur or feather, back to the unvocal sea and down deep where the darkness spills its wash on the threshold of light, where the lids never close upon the eyes, where the inhabitants slay in silence and are as silently slain.
E. J. Pratt
With this idea, being a man with long experience of the sea (and they certainly have a great advantage over other men in any sort of task)...
Garcilaso de la Vega
He said he owned the land,He said he owned the sea,Through his sweet lies and manipulation,He was trying to own me
Charmaine J.Forde
My soul is full of longingfor the secret of the sea,and the heart of the great oceansends a thrilling pulse through me.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
We are like some particle in motion always moving and meeting other particle.
Santosh Kalwar
You’re nasty and you’re loud,you’re mean enough for two,If I could be a cloud,I’d rain all day on you.
Jack Prelutsky
Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.
Adrienne Rich
Poets sing our human music for us.
Carol Ann Duffy
Poets can't march in protest or do that sort of thing. I feel that's against the rules, and pointless. If mankind wants a great big final bang, that's what it'll get. One should never protest against anything unless it's going to have an effect. None of those marches do. One should either be silent or go straight to the top.
Robert Graves
The poet must be more useful than any other member if his tribe.
Comte de Lautréamont
Only poets and philosophers see the world as it really is, for only to them is it given to live without illusions. To see clearly is to not act.
Fernando Pessoa
For the way of the comets is the poet's way.
Marina Tsvetaeva
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet's destiny is to love.
Robert Graves
There are poets,there are philosophers, there are spiritualists and me. I try to foot the bill of these mighty three.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
A single wire hanger on a nail by itselfIsn't bad though a stack of them on a floorIs too gloomy for words.
Dara Weir
All we’re trying to do is word the world. Detail is one way we do that. We enumerate, notate, name the things seen.
Eamon Grennan
The eclipses ofpoets are not foretold in the calender.
Marina Tsvetaeva
. . . a racer snake / slicking off / like a signature into the weeds.
Tony Crunk
We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness. Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels.
William Carlos Williams
It may be enough, however, to have it said that we survive in exact relationship to the dedication of our poets (include preachers, musicians, and blues singers).
Maya Angelou
Men of dreams, the lovers and the poets, are better in most things than the men of my sort; the men of intellect. You take your being from your mothers. You live to the full: it is given you to love with your whole strength, to know and taste the whole of life. We thinkers, though often we seem to rule you, cannot live with half your joy and full reality. Ours is a thin and arid life, but the fullness of being is yours; yours the sap of the fruit, the garden of lovers, the joyous pleasaunces of beauty. Your home is the earth, ours the idea of it. Your danger is to be drowned in the world of sense, ours to gasp for breath in airless space. You are a poet, I a thinker. You sleep on your mother's breast, I watch in the wilderness. On me there shines the sun; on you the moon with all the stars. Your dreams are all of girls, mine of boys—
Hermann Hesse
Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives.
Thomas Hardy
As to whether a poem has been written by a great poet or not, this is important only to historians of literature. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that I have written a beautiful line; let us take this as a working hypothesis. Once I have written it, that linedoes me no good, because, as I’ve already said, that line came to me from the Holy Ghost, from the subliminal self, or perhaps from some other writer. I often find I am merely quoting something I read some time ago, and then that becomes a rediscovering. Perhaps it is better that a poet should be nameless.
Jorge Luis Borges
. . . Orpheus struck dumb with hindsight.
A.E. Stallings
The bats inebriate the sky . . .
A.E. Stallings
Because who hasn't tried to pull their arms from the sleeves of gravity's lead coat?Who doesn't have at least one pair of wax wings out in the garage?
Lucia Perillo
Still, no one finally knows what a poet is supposed either to be or to do. Especially in this country, one takes on the job—because all that one does in America is considered a "job"—with no clear sense as to what is required or where one will ultimately be led. In that respect, it is as particular an instance of a "calling" as one might point to. For years I've kept in mind, "Many are called but few are chosen." Even so "called," there were no assurances that one would be answered.
Robert Creeley
One may prefer spring and summer to autumn and winter, but preference is hardly to the point. The earth turns, and we live in the grain of nature, turning with it.
Robert Hass
Golf is a worrier's game, inward, concentrated, a matter of inches, invented by the same people who gave us Presbyterianism.
Robert Hass
Although Poets are vain and ambitious, their vanity and ambition are of the purest kind attainable in this world. They are ambitious to be accepted for what they altimately are as revealed in their poetry.
Stephen Spender
From oriole to crow, note the declineIn music. Crow is realist. But, then,Oriole, also, may be realist.
Wallace Stevens
We say God and the imagination are one . . .How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Wallace Stevens
Poetry is a finikin thing of airThat lives uncertainly and not for longYet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.
Wallace Stevens
Between roars the lion purrs.
William Stafford
Evening came, a paw, to the gray hut by the river.
William Stafford
All good poems are victories over something.
Stephen Dunn
I had no more alphabetthan the journeying of the swallows,the pure and tiny waterof the small, fiery birdthat dances rising from the pollen.
Pablo Neruda
Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
He wanders, like a day-appearing dream,Through the dim wildernesses of the mind; Through desert woods and tracts, which seem Like ocean, homeless, boundless, unconfined.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
On the last day of the worldI would want to plant a tree
W.S. Merwin