Quotes by Poets - Page 430

Here is Menard's own intimate forest: 'Now I am traversed by bridle paths, under the seal of sun and shade...I live in great density...Shelter lures me. I slump down into the thick foliage...In the forest, I am my entire self. Everything is possible in my heart just as it is in the hiding places in ravines. Thickly wooded distance separates me from moral codes and cities.
Gaston Bachelard
The VagabondGive to me the life I love,Let the lave go by me,Give the jolly heaven aboveAnd the byway nigh me.Bed in the bush with stars to see,Bread I dip in the river -There's the life for a man like me,There's the life for ever.Let the blow fall soon or late,Let what will be o'er me;Give the face of earth aroundAnd the road before me.Wealth I seek not, hope nor love,Nor a friend to know me;All I seek, the heaven aboveAnd the road below me.Or let autumn fall on meWhere afield I linger,Silencing the bird on tree,Biting the blue finger.White as meal the frosty field -Warm the fireside haven -Not to autumn will I yield,Not to winter even!Let the blow fall soon or late,Let what will be o'er me;Give the face of earth around,And the road before me.Wealth I ask not, hope nor love,Nor a friend to know me;All I ask, the heaven aboveAnd the road below me.
Robert Louis Stevenson
we want it visibletto showwhen even the most tvisible joyttwill reveal itselfonly when we havetttransformed it within.there’s nowhere, my love, the world can existexpect within.
Rainer Maria Rilke
I went down not long agoto the Mad River, under the willowsI knelt and drank from that crumpled flow, call itwhat madness you will, there's a sicknessworse than the risk of death and that'sforgetting what we should never forget.Tecumseh lived here.The wounds of the pastare ignored, but hang onlike the litter that snags among the yellow branches,newspapers and plastic bags, after the rains.Where are the Shawnee now?Do you know? Or would you have to write to Washington, and even then,whatever they said,would you believe it? SometimesI would like to paint my body red and go intothe glittering snowto die.His name meant Shooting Star.From Mad River country north to the borderhe gathered the tribesand armed them one more time. He vowedto keep Ohio and it took himover twenty years to fail.After the bloody and final fighting, at Thames,it was over, excepthis body could not be found,and you can do whatever you want with that, sayhis people came in the black leaves of the nightand hauled him to a secret grave, or thathe turned into a little boy again, and leapedinto a birch canoe and wentrowing home down the rivers. Anywaythis much I'm sure of: if we meet him, we'll know it,he will still beso angry.
Mary Oliver
Base words are uttered only by the baseAnd can for such at once be understood;But noble platitudes — ah, there's a caseWhere the most careful scrutiny is neededTo tell a voice that's genuinely goodFrom one that's base but merely has succeeded.
W.H. Auden
How can the bird that is born for joySit in a cage and sing?How can a child, when fears annoy,But droop his tender wing,And forget his youthful spring?
William Blake
These poems, with all their crudities, doubts and confusions, are written for the love of man and in Praise of God, and I'd be a damn fool if they weren't.
Dylan Thomas
Again I see you, But me I don't see!, The magical mirror in which I saw myself has been broken, And only a piece of me I see in each fatal fragment - Only a piece of you and me!...
Fernando Pessoa
The first year was like icing. Then the cake started to show through …
John Ashbery
. . .because we had survivedsisters and brothers, daughters and sons,we discovered bones that rosefrom the dark earth and sangas white birds in the treesBecause the story of our lifebecomes our lifeBecause each of us tells the same storybut tells it differentlyand none of us tells it the same way twice . . (from, Why We Tell Stories)
Lisel Mueller
I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you're an artist, by children if you're not.
Philip Larkin
The campus, an academy of trees,under which some hand, the wind's I guess,had scattered the pale lightof thousands of spring beauties,petals stained with pink veins;secret, blooming for themselves.We sat among them.Your long fingers, thin body,and long bones of improbable genius;some scattered gene as Kafka must have had.Your deep voice, this passing dust of miracles.That simple that was myself, half conscious,as though each moment was a pagewhere words appeared; the bent hammer of the typestruck against the moving ribbon.The light air, the restless leaves;the ripple of time warped by our longing.There, as if we were paintedby some unknown impressionist.
Ruth Stone
I’ve been here before, dreaming myselfbackwards, among grappling hooks of light.True to the seasons, I’ve lived every wordspoken. Did I walk into someone’s nightmare?
Yusef Komunyakaa
Un día habré dormido con un sueño tan largo que ni tus besos puedan avivar el letargo. Un día estaré sola, como está la montaña entre el largo desierto y la mar que la baña.
Alfonsina Storni
Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness.
Edgar Allan Poe
Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.
Robert Penn Warren
The muffled syllables that Nature speaksFill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,She makes a sweeter music than is heard.
George Santayana
Te amo sin saber cómo, ni cuándo, ni de dónde, te amo directamente sin problemas ni orgullo: así te amo porque no sé amar de otra manera, sino así de este modo en que no soy ni eres, tan cerca que tu mano sobre mi pecho es mía, tan cerca que se cierran tus ojos con mi sueño.
Pablo Neruda
Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winterthat only by wintering through it will your heart survive.
Rainer Maria Rilke
When When it’s over, it’s over, and we don’t know any of us, what happens then.So I try not to miss anything.I think, in my whole life, I have never missed The full moonor the slipper of its coming back.Or, a kiss.Well, yes, especially a kiss.
Mary Oliver
DogfishI wantedThe past to go away, I wantedTo leave it, like another country; I wantedMy life to close, and openLike a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song Where it fallsDown over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery; I wanted To hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,Whoever I was, I wasAliveFor a little while.…mostly, I want to be kind.And nobody, of course, is kind,Or mean,For a simple reason.And nobody gets out of it, having to Swim through the fires to stay inThis world.
Mary Oliver
We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out of control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us kinship where all is represented as separation.", The Nation, October 7, 1996)
Adrienne Rich
In an old family albumEver again you return, Melancholy,O meekness of the solitary soul.A golden day glows and expires.Humbly the patient man surrenders to painRinging with melodious sound and soft madness.Look! There's the twilight.Night returns once more and a mortal thing lamentsAnd another suffers in sympathy.Shuddering under autumn starsYearly the head is bowed deeper.-Georg Trakl (1887-1914)
Georg Trakl
as some strings, untouched,sound when no one is speaking.So it was when love slipped inside us.
Jane Hirshfield
To pray you open your whole selfTo sky, to earth, to sun, to moonTo one whole voice that is youAnd know there is moreThat you can't see, can't hearCan't know except in momentsSteadly growing, and in languagesThat aren't always sound but otherCircles of motion.Like eagle that Sunday morningOver Salt River. Circled in blue skyIn wind, swept our hearts cleanWith sacred wings.We see you, see ourselves and knowThat we must take the utmost careAnd kindness in all things.Breathe in, knowing we are made ofAll this, and breathe, knowingWe are truly blessed because weWere born, and die soon within aTrue circle of motion,Like eagle rounding out the morningInside us.We pray that it will be doneIn beauty.In beauty.
Joy Harjo
Every particle of dust on a patch of earthWas a sun-cheek or brow of the morning star;Shake the dust off your sleeve carefully--That too was a delicate, fair face.
Omar Khayyám
Kiss me, so long but as a kiss may last!
Percy Bysshe Shelley
So live, that when thy summons comes to join The innumerable caravan which movesTo that mysterious realm where each shall take His chamber in the silent halls of death, Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,Scourged to his dungeon; but, sustain'd and soothed By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams."Thanatopsis
William Cullen Bryant
Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.
Charles Bukowski
where some god pissed a rain of reason to make things grow only to die,
Charles Bukowski
At first first nothing will happen to usand later on it will happen to us again.
Leonard Cohen
I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.
Siri Hustvedt
If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
Emily Dickinson
And then I feel the sun itselfas it blazes over the hills,like a million flowers on fire --clearly I'm not needed,yet I feel myself turninginto something of inexplicable value.-from The Buddha's Last Instruction
Mary Oliver
I had a dove and the sweet dove died; And I have thought it died of grieving: O, what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied, With a silken thread of my own hand's weaving.
John Keats
Spend all you have for loveliness,Buy it and never count the cost;For one white singing hour of peaceCount many a year of strife well lost,And for a breath of ecstasyGive all you have been, or could be.
Sara Teasdale
Henceforth an individual solace dear; Part of my Soul I seek thee, and thee claim My other half: with that thy gentle hand Seisd mine, I yielded, and from that time see How beauty is excelld by manly grace.
John Milton
Some who grow dull religious straight commenceAnd gain in morals what they lose in sense.
Alexander Pope
If Springtime crawls out of thewild mouths of flowers, thensurely, Winter crawls out of mine.
Cecilia Llompart
‎I was satisfied with haiku until I met you, jar of octopus, cuckoo's cry, 5-7-5, but now I want a russian novel, a 50-page description of you sleeping, another 75 of what you think staring at your window.
Dean Young
Straight between them ran the pathway,Never grew the grass upon it
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,Student of our sweet English tongue,Read out my words at night, alone:I was a poet, I was young.Since I can never see your face,And never shake you by the hand,I send my soul through time and spaceTo greet you. You will understand.
James Elroy Flecker
How blest am I in this discovering thee!To enter in these bonds is to be free;Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be. Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be
John Donne
Then all the charm Is broken--all that phantom-world so fair Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread, And each mis-shape the other.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The business of love is cruelty which,by our wills, we transform to live together.
William Carlos Williams
In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent; A thing brought forth that we didn't know we had in us, So we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out And stood in the light, licking its tail.
Czesław Miłosz
O, how this spring of love resemblethThe uncertain glory of an April day,Which now shows all the beauty of the sun,And by and by a cloud takes all away!
William Shakespeare
April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixingMemory and desire, stirringDull roots with spring rain.Winter kept us warm, coveringEarth in forgetful snow, feedingA little life with dried tubers.Summer surprised us, coming over the StarnbergerseeWith a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke's,My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,And I was frightened. He said, Marie,Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.In the mountains, there you feel free.I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
T.S Eliot
Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.
W.H. Auden
I have no riches but my thoughts, Yet these are wealth enough for me
Sara Teasdale
Let me remember you, soon will the winter be on us,Snow-hushed and heartless.
Sara Teasdale
What do I care, in the dreams and the languor of spring,That my songs do not show me at all?For they are a fragrance, and I am a flint and a fire,I am an answer, they are only a call
Sara Teasdale
We are each what never leaves us, what we never seethe back ofis the self. But what loves usis at the back, as Eurydice wasescorting him outwithout his knowing.
Christina Davis
Go then, O my inseperable, this once more,
Donald Justice
what if I fall? oh, my darling, but if you fly?
Erin Hanson
By the craggy hill-side,Through the mosses bare,They have planted thorn-treesFor pleasure here and there.If any man so daringAs dig them up in spite,He shall find their sharpest thornsIn his bed at night.
William Allingham
On the shining yards of heavenSee a wider dawn unfurled. . . . The eternal slaves of beautyAre the masters of the world.
Bliss Carman
I will try to disappoint youbetter than anyone else has.
Stephen Dunn
Why does a heart wear its eyesinto helllike slivers of false sunshine
Fanny Howe
Let your love flow where the beautiful things are and something beautiful will always come your way.
Robert M. Drake