Quotes by Poets - Page 433

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bedAnd sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.(I think I made you up inside my head.)
Sylvia Plath
At the edge of madness you howl diamonds and pearls.
Aberjhani
Pensive they sit, and roll their languid eyes.
John Keats
More or Less Love Poems #11:No babeWe'd neverSwing together butthe syncopationwould be something wild
Diane di Prima
Now goes under, and I watch it go under, the sunThat will not rise again.Today has seen the setting, in your eyes cold and senseless as the sea,Of friendship better than bread, and of bright charityThat lifts a man a little above the beasts that run.That this could be!That I should live to seeMost vulgar Pride, that stale obstreperous clown,So fitted out with purple robe and crownTo stand among his betters! Face to faceWith outraged me in this once holy place,Where Wisdom was a favoured guest and huntedTruth was harboured out of danger,He bulks enthroned, a lewd, an insupportable stranger!I would have sworn, indeed I swore it:The hills may shift, the waters may decline,Winter may twist the stem from the twig that bore it,But never your love from me, your hand from mine.Now goes under the sun, and I watch it go under.Farewell, sweet light, great wonder!You, too, farewell,-but fare not well enough to dreamYou have done wisely to invite the night before the darkness came.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Life is a poem most people never read.
Laurence Overmire
Without thinking, I knelt in the grass, like someone meaning to pray. When I tried to stand again, I couldn't move,my legs were utterly rigid. Does grief change you like that?Through the birches, I could see the pond.The sun was cutting small white holes in the water.I got up finally; I walked down to the pond. I stood there, brushing the grass from my skirt, watching myself,like a girl after her first loverturning slowly at the bathroom mirror, naked, looking for a sign.But nakedness in women is always a pose.I was not transfigured. I would never be free.
Louise Glück
some see things as they are: others as they are” (p.82) ~CXCI
Manav Sachdeva Maasoom
Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness
Muriel Rukeyser
Only in books the flat and final happens, Only in dreams we meet and interlock....
Philip Larkin
Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
Wallace Stevens
beauty’ is related not to ‘loveliness’ but to a state in which reality plays a part.
William Carlos Williams
When there's a moon the shadows in the house grow larger;invisible hands draw back the curtains,a pallid finger writes forgotten words on dustof the piano...
Yiannis Ritsos
Poetry is an intimate act. It's about bringing forth something that's inside you--whether it is a memory, a philosophical idea, a deep love for another person or for the world, or an apprehension of the spiritual. It's about making something, in language, which can be transmitted to others--not as information, or polemic, but as irreducible art.
Dorianne Laux
Places We LovePlaces we love exist only through us,Space destroyed is only illusion in the constancy of time,Places we love we can never leave,Places we love together, together, together,And is this room really a room, or an embrace,And what is beneath the window: a street or years?And the window is only the imprint left byThe first rain we understood, returning endlessly,And this wall does not define the room, but perhaps the nightYour son began to move in your sleeping blood,A son like a butterfly of flame in your hall of mirrors,The night you were frightened by your own light,And this door leads into any afternoonWhich outlives it, forever peopledWith your casual movements, as you stepped,Like fire into copper, into my only memory;When you go, space closes over like water behind you,Do not look back: there is nothing outside you,Space is only time visible in a different way,Places we love we can never leave.
Ivan V. Lalić
Crystal ball and candle light, I want your dance tonight. Show me the power of love as we stand together in the middle of the night.
Santosh Kalwar
We may kill each other someday.
Santosh Kalwar
Try to be thoughtful, don't make the poor man say it;see how human he is,he has children of his own,it is your job to ask:And now he can never not nod.And now he can never say no.And now he can never not say.
Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno
Las lágrimas que no se lloranesperan en pequeños lagos?O serán ríos invisiblesque corren hacia la tristeza?
Pablo Neruda
Had we but world enough, and time
Andrew Marvell
A poem should not meanBut be.
Archibald MacLeish
Cuando vayamos al maryo te diré mi secreto:Me envuelve, pero no es ola...Me amarga..., pero no es sal...
Dulce María Loynaz
And all at once the heavy nightFell from my eyes and I could see, --A drenched and dripping apple-tree,A last long line of silver rain,A sky grown clear and blue again.And as I looked a quickening gustOf wind blew up to me and thrustInto my face a miracleOf orchard-breath, and with the smell, --I know not how such things can be! --I breathed my soul back into me.Ah! Up then from the ground sprang IAnd hailed the earth with such a cryAs is not heard save from a manWho has been dead, and lives again.About the trees my arms I wound;Like one gone mad I hugged the ground;I raised my quivering arms on high;I laughed and laughed into the sky
Edna St. Vincent Millay
July 4th fireworks exhale over the Hudson sadly.It is beautiful that they have to disappear.It's like the time you said I love you madly.That was an hour ago. It's been a fervent year.
Frederick Seidel
When a group of people get up from a table, the table doesn’tknow which way any of them will go.
Galway Kinnell
I loved a woman whose beauty Like the moon moved all the humming heavens to music till the stars with their tiny teeth burst into song and I fell on the ground before her while the sky hardened and she laughed and turned me down softly, I was so young.
Peter Meinke
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;Coral is far more red than her lips' red;If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,But no such roses see I in her cheeks;And in some perfumes is there more delightThan in the breath that from my mistress reeks.I love to hear her speak, yet well I knowThat music hath a far more pleasing sound;I grant I never saw a goddess go;My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground: And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare.
William Shakespeare
And here, in thought, to thee-In thought that can alone, Ascend thy empire and so be A partner of thy throne, By winged Fantasy, My embassy is given, Till secrecy shall knowledge be In the environs of Heaven.
Edgar Allan Poe
And then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the saddest smile I ever saw.
Charles Bukowski
Be there a picnic for the devil,an orgy for the satyr,and a wedding for the bride.
Roman Payne
Did I live the spring I’d sought?It’s true in joy, I walked along,took part in dance, and sang the song.and never tried to bind an hourto my borrowed garden bower;nor did I once entreata day to slumber at my feet.Yet days aren’t lulled by lyric song,like morning birds they pass along,o’er crests of trees, to none belong;o’er crests of trees of drying dew,their larking flight, my hands, eschewThus I’ll say it once and true…From all that I saw, and everywhere I wandered,I learned that time cannot be spent,It only can be squandered.
Roman Payne
But drunkenly, or secretly, we swore,Disciples of that astigmatic saint,That we would never leave the islandUntil we had put down, in paint, in words,As palmists learn the network of a hand,All of its sunken, leaf-choked ravines,Every neglected, self-pitying inletMuttering in brackish dialect, the ropes of mangrovesFrom which old soldier crabs slippedSurrendering to slush,Each ochre track seeking some hilltop andLosing itself in an unfinished phrase,Under sand shipyards where the burnt-out palmsInverted the design of unrigged schooners,Entering forests, boiling with life,Goyave, corrosol, bois-canot, sapotille.Days!The sun drumming, drumming,Past the defeated pennons of the palms,Roads limp from sunstroke,Past green flutes of the grassThe ocean cannonading, come!Wonder that opened like the fanOf the dividing frondsOn some noon-struck sahara,Where my heart from its rib cage yelped like a pupAfter clouds of sanderlings rustily wheelingThe world on its ancient,Invisible axis,The breakers slow-dolphining over more breakers,To swivel our easels down, as firmAs conquerors who had discovered home.
Derek Walcott
literature will lose, sunlight will win, don't worry.
Franz Wright
One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.
Jane Hirshfield
This dewdrop world Is but a dewdrop worldAnd yet —
Kobayashi Issa
I rhymeTo see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
Seamus Heaney
No truer word, save God's, was ever spoken,Than that the largest heart is soonest broken.
Walter Savage Landor
Four billion people on this earthbut my imagination is still the same.It's bad with large numbers.It's still taken by particularity.It flits in the dark like a flashlight,illuminating only random faceswhile all the rest go by,never coming to mind and never really missed.
Wisława Szymborska
THERE is something in the autumn that is native to my blood—t Touch of manner, hint of mood;t And my heart is like a rhyme,t With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time.
Bliss Carman
it's so easy to be a poetand so hard to be a man.
Charles Bukowski
This is newness: every little tawdryObstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar,Glinting and clinking in a saint's falsetto. Only youDon't know what to make of the sudden slippiness,The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant.There's no getting up it by the words you know.No getting up by elephant or wheel or shoe.We have only come to look. You are too newTo want the world in a glass hat.
Sylvia Plath
And the Hippos were boiled in their tanks!
Jack Kerouac
I can't even make up a rhyme about an umbrella, let alone death and life and eternal peace.
Knut Hamsun
For all the ghosts and corpses that shall never know the breath of our childrenso longfor the sacrifice and endurance of our mothers and the sustained breath of our fatherswe live
Saul Williams
One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.
Charles Simic
Two girls discover the secret of lifein a sudden line of poetry.
Denise Levertov
Oh, friend, forget not, when you fain would noteIn me a beauty that was never mine,How first you knew me in a book I wrote,How first you loved me for a written line....
Edna St. Vincent Millay
I played God todayAnd it was fun!I made animals that men had never seenSo they would stop and scratch their headsInstead of scowling.I made words that men had never heardSo they would stop and stare at meInstead of running.And I made love that laughedSo men would giggle like childrenInstead of sighing.Tomorrow, perhaps, I won't be GodAnd you will know itBecause you won't see any three-headed catsOr bushes with bells on...I wish I could always play GodSo that lonely men could laugh!
James Kavanaugh
Little world, full of scars and gashes, ripened with another's pain,Your flowers feed on carrion--so do your birds;Men feed on each other because you taught them life was cheap,Flowing from your endless womb without pain or understanding.No midwife caresses your flesh or bathes clean your progeny,Life spurts from you, little world,and you regard it with disdain.Only bruised men sense your cruelty, men whose life has lost its meaning.
James Kavanaugh
Come to the beach with meAnd watch the pelicans die,Hear their feeble screamsCalling to an empty skyWhere once they playedAnd scouted for food,Not scavenging like the gullsBut plummeting unafraidInto friendly waters.Come to the beach with meAnd watch the pelicans die,Listen to their feeble screamsCalling to an empty sky.Maybe Christ will walk byAnd save them in their final toilOr work a miracle from the shore,A courtesy of Union Oil.Come to the beach with meAnd watch the pelicans die.My God! They'll never fly again.It's worse than Normandy somehow,For there we only murdered men.
James Kavanaugh
Pleasured equallyIn seeking as in finding,Each detail minding,Old Walt went seekingAnd finding.
Langston Hughes
It was language I loved, not meaning. I liked poetry better when I wasn't sure what it meant. Eliot has said that the meaning of the poem is provided to keep the mind busy while the poem gets on with its work -- like the bone thrown to the dog by the robber so he can get on with his work. . . . Is beauty a reminder of something we once knew, with poetry one of its vehicles? Does it give us a brief vision of that 'rarely glimpsed bright face behind/ the apparency of things'? Here, I suppose, we ought to try the impossible task of defining poetry. No one definition will do. But I must admit to a liking for the words of Thomas Fuller, who said: 'Poetry is a dangerous honey. I advise thee only to taste it with the Tip of thy finger and not to live upon it. If thou do'st, it will disorder thy Head and give thee dangerous Vertigos.
P.K. Page
My Muse sits forlornShe wishes she had not been bornShe sits in the coldNo word she says is ever told.
Stevie Smith
The Poem That Took The Place Of A MountainThere it was, word for word, The poem that took the place of a mountain. He breathed its oxygen, Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table. It reminded him how he had needed A place to go to in his own direction How he had recomposed the pines, Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds For the outlook that would be right, Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion: The exact rock where his inexactness Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged Where he could lie and gazing down at the sea, Recognize his unique and solitary home.
Wallace Stevens
On Waterloo Bridge where we said our goodbyes,the weather conditions bring tears to my eyes.I wipe them away with a black woolly gloveAnd try not to notice I've fallen in loveOn Waterloo Bridge I am trying to think:This is nothing. you're high on the charm and the drink.But the juke-box inside me is playing a songThat says something different. And when was it wrong?On Waterloo Bridge with the wind in my hairI am tempted to skip. You're a fool. I don't care.the head does its best but the heart is the boss-I admit it before I am halfway across
Wendy Cope
In pale moonlight / the wisteria's scent / comes from far away.
Yosa Buson
We walked through night until there was a poem.
Brenda Hillman
In the boundaryless forests, there’re dancers of nude.Yet in the confines of pasture, there’s promise of food.On which is your side?Ô, but tarry and bide,ere you decide,in both do confide.
Roman Payne
Maybe you're one of those people who writes poems, but rarely reads them. Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don't read, your writing is going to suck.
Kim Addonizio
Honest criticism and sensible appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.
T.S Eliot