Quotes by Poets - Page 441

What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

We suffer each other to have each other a while.

Li-Young Lee

There is no Space or TimeOnly intensity, And tame thingsHave no immensity

Mina Loy

There is another world, and it is in this one.

Paul Éluard

You are an Universe of Universes and your soul a source of songs.

Rubén Darío

In Xanadu did Kubla KhanA stately pleasure-dome decree:Where Alph, the sacred river, ranThrough caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go.

Theodore Roethke

Poetry is life distilled.

Gwendolyn Brooks

the worstthing that ever happenedtothe worldwasthe white man coming across gun powder.–– the end of the world | the beginning of white supremacy

Nayyirah Waheed

I'll say I love you,Which will lead, of course,to disappointment,but those words unsaidpoison every next moment.I will try to disappoint youbetter than anyone else has.

Stephen Dunn

Under the greenwood tree,Who loves to lie with meAnd tune his merry note,Unto the sweet bird's throat;Come hither, come hither, come hither.Here shall he seeNo enemyBut winter and rough weather.

William Shakespeare

You may write me down in historyWith your bitter, twisted lies,You may tread me in the very dirtBut still, like dust, I'll rise.Does my sassiness upset you? Why are you beset with gloom? 'Cause I walk like I've got oil wellsPumping in my living room.Just like moons and like suns,With the certainty of tides,Just like hopes springing high,Still I'll rise.Did you want to see me broken? Bowed head and lowered eyes? Shoulders falling down like teardrops.Weakened by my soulful cries.Does my haughtiness offend you? Don't you take it awful hard'Cause I laugh like I've got gold minesDiggin' in my own back yard.You may shoot me with your words,You may cut me with your eyes,You may kill me with your hatefulness,But still, like air, I'll rise.Does my sexiness upset you? Does it come as a surpriseThat I dance like I've got diamondsAt the meeting of my thighs? Out of the huts of history's shameI riseUp from a past that's rooted in painI riseI'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.Leaving behind nights of terror and fearI riseInto a daybreak that's wondrously clearI riseBringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,I am the dream and the hope of the slave.I riseI riseI rise.

Maya Angelou

The season was waning fastOur nights were growing cold at lastI took her to bed with silk and song,'Lay still, my love, I won’t be long;I must prepare my body for passion.''O, your body you give, but all else you ration.''It is because of these dreams of a sylvan scene:A bleeding nymph to leave me serene...I have dreams of a trembling wench.''You have dreams,' she said, 'that cannot be quenched.''Our passion,' said I, 'should never be feared;As our longing for love can never be cured.Our want is our way and our way is our will,We have the love, my love, that no one can kill.''If night is your love, then in dreams you’ll fulfill...This love, our love, that no one can kill.'Yet want is my way, and my way is my will,Thus I killed my love with a sleeping pill.

Roman Payne

Some men are born sodomites, some achieve sodomy, and some have sodomy thrust upon them...

Aleister Crowley

You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;tThey called me the hyacinth girl.'t —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,t Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could nott Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neithert Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,t Looking into the heart of light, the silence.t Od' und leer das Meer.

T.S Eliot

I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.

Pablo Neruda

I love you as the plant that never blooms but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers; thanks to your love a certain solid fragrence risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body. and: No one can stop the river of your hands, your eyes and their sleepiness, my dearest. You are the trembling of time, which passes between the vertical light and the darkening sky. and: From the stormy archipelagoes I brought my windy accordian, waves of crazy rain, the habitual slowness of natural things: they made up my wild heart.

Pablo Neruda

I would not come in.I meant not even if asked,And I hadn't been.

Robert Frost

That’s what I do: I make coffee and occasionally succumb to suicidal nihilism. But you shouldn’t worry — poetry is still first. Cigarettes and alcohol follow

Anne Sexton

It costs me never a stab nor squirm / To tread by chance upon a worm. / Aha, my little dear, / I say, Your clan will pay me back one day.

Dorothy Parker

To see a World in a grain of sand,And a Heaven in a wild flower,Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,And Eternity in an hour.

William Blake

The lamb misused breeds public strifeAnd yet forgives the butcher's knife.

William Blake

I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart againstThe want of you;Of squeezing it into little inkdrops,And posting it.

Amy Lowell

Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been; I am also call'd No-more, Too-late, Farewell

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

I will come back to you, I swear I will;And you will know me still.I shall be only a little tallerThan when I went.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Resolve, and thou art free.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Valentine's Day is the poet's holiday.

Ted Kooser

forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.and perhaps it will be pleasing to have remembered these things one day

Virgil

Listen! If stars are litIt means there is someone who needs it,It means someone wants them to be,That someone deems those specks of spitMagnificent!

Vladimir Mayakovsky

If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem.

William Carlos Williams

Anger's like a battery that leaks acid right out of meAnd it starts from the heart 'til it reaches my outer me

Criss Jami

A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.

Robert Frost

I felt a Cleaving in my Mind—As if my Brain had split—I tried to match it—Seam by Seam—But could not make it fit.

Emily Dickinson

I shall have peace, as leafy trees are peaceful When rain bends down the bough; And I shall be more silent and cold-hearted Than you are now.

Sara Teasdale

The young student sits with his head bent over his books, and his mind straying in youth's dreamland; where prose is prowling on the desk and poetry hiding in the heart.

Rabindranath Tagore

But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,But often, in the din of strife,There rises an unspeakable desireAfter the knowledge of our buried life;A thirst to spend our fire and restless forceIn tracking out our true, original course;A longing to inquireInto the mystery of this heart which beatsSo wild, so deep in us—to knowWhence our lives come and where they go.

Matthew Arnold

When you were sleeping on the sofaI put my ear to your ear and listenedto the echo of your dreams.That is the ocean I want to dive in, merge with the bright fish, plankton and pirate ships.I walk up to people on the street that kind of look like youand ask them the questions I would ask you.Can we sit on a rooftop and watch stars dissolve into smokerising from a chimney? Can I swing like Tarzan in the jungle of your breathing? I don’t wish I was in your arms, I just wish I was peddling a bicycle toward your arms.

Jeffrey McDaniel

I could feel the day offering itself to me,and I wanted nothing morethan to be in the moment-but which moment?Not that one, or that one, or that one,

Billy Collins

The History TeacherTrying to protect his students' innocencehe told them the Ice Age was really justthe Chilly Age, a period of a million yearswhen everyone had to wear sweaters.And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,named after the long driveways of the time.The Spanish Inquisition was nothing morethan an outbreak of questions such as"How far is it from here to Madrid?""What do you call the matador's hat?"The War of the Roses took place in a garden,and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom on Japan.The children would leave his classroomfor the playground to torment the weakand the smart,mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,while he gathered up his notes and walked homepast flower beds and white picket fences,wondering if they would believe that soldiersin the Boer War told long, rambling storiesdesigned to make the enemy nod off.

Billy Collins

Lord, may the pain be ours, And the weakness that it brings, But at least give us the strength, Of not showing it to anyone!

Fernando Pessoa

Jack Prelutsky

You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise you're merely imitating yourself, going nowhere, because that's always easiest.

John Berryman

September has come, it is hersWhose vitality leaps in the autumn,Whose nature prefersTrees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace.So I give her this month and the nextThough the whole of my year should be hers who has rendered alreadySo many of its days intolerable or perplexedBut so many more so happy.Who has left a scent on my life, and left my wallsDancing over and over with her shadowWhose hair is twined in all my waterfallsAnd all of London littered with remembered kisses.

Louis MacNeice

Since then, at an uncertain hour, That agony returns: And till my ghastly tale is told, This heart within me burns.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Haiku is not a shriek, a howl, a sigh, or a yawn; rather, it is the deep breath of life.

Santōka Taneda

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road.Healthy, free, the world before me.The long brown path before me leading me wherever I choose.Henceforth, I ask not good fortune, I myself am good fortune.Henceforth, I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing.

Walt Whitman

Cada vez que te enamores no expliques a nadie nada, deja que el amor te invada sin entrar en pormenores

Mario Benedetti

Love me like a wrong turn on a bad roadlate at night.

Kim Addonizio

HEARTWORKEach day is born with a sunriseand ends in a sunset, the same way weopen our eyes to see the light, and close them to hear the dark.You have no control overhow your story begins or ends.But by now, you should know thatall things have an ending.Every spark returns to darkness.Every sound returns to silence.And every flower returns to sleepwith the earth.The journey of the sunand moon is predictable.But yours, is your ultimateART.

Suzy Kassem

You're trying not to tell him you love him, and you're trying to choke down the feeling, and you're trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you've discovered something you don't even have a name for.

Richard Siken

Had we but world enough and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime. We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long love’s day.

Andrew Marvell

It is time to float on the waters of the night. Time to wrap my arms around this book and press it to my chest, life preserver in a sea of unremarkable men and women, anonymous faces on the street, a hundred thousand unalphabetized things, a million forgotten hours.

Billy Collins

Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance.

Carl Sandburg

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:Out of a misty dreamOur path emerges for awhile, then closesWithin a dream.

Ernest Dowson

Maria, lonely prostitute on a street of pain,You, at least, hail me and speak to meWhile a thousand others ignore my face.You offer me an hour of love,And your fees are not as costly as most.You are the madonna of the lonely,The first-born daughter in a world of pain.You do not turn fat men aside,Or trample on the stuttering, shy ones,You are the meadow where desperate menCan find a moment's comfort.Men have paid more to their wivesTo know a bit of peaceAnd could not walk away without the guiltThat masquerades as love.You do not bind them, lovely Maria, you comfort themAnd bid them return. Your body is more Christian than the Bishop'sWhose gloved hand cannot feel the dropping of my blood.Your passion is as genuine as most,Your caring as real!But you, Maria, sacred whore on the endless pavement of pain,You, whose virginity each man may make his ownWithout paying ought but your fee,You who know nothing of virgin births and immaculate conceptions,You who touch man's flesh and caress a stranger,Who warm his bed to bring his aching skin alive,You make more sense than stock markets and football gamesWhere sad men beg for virility.You offer yourself for a fee--and who offers himself for less?At times you are cruel and demanding--harsh and insensitive,At times you are shrewd and deceptive--grasping and hollow.The wonder is that at times you are gentle and concerned,Warm and loving.You deserve more respect than nuns who hide their sex for eternal love;Your fees are not so high, nor your prejudice so virtuous.You deserve more laurels than the self-pitying mother of many children,And your fee is not as costly as most.Man comes to you when his bed is filled with brass and emptiness,When liquor has dulled his sense enoughTo know his need of you.He will come in fantasy and despair, Maria,And leave without apologies.He will come in loneliness--and perhapsLeave in loneliness as well.But you give him more than soldiers who win medals and pensions,More than priests who offer absolutionAnd sweet-smelling ritual,More than friends who anticipate his deathOr challenge his life,And your fee is not as costly as most.You admit that your love is for a fee,Few women can be as honest.There are monuments to statesmen who gave nothing to anyoneExcept their hungry ego,Monuments to mothers who turned their childrenInto starving, anxious bodies,Monuments to Lady Liberty who makes poor men prisoners.I would erect a monument for you--who give more than most--And for a meager fee.Among the lonely, you are perhaps the loneliest of all,You come so close to loveBut it eludes youWhile proper women march to church and fantasizeIn the silence of their rooms,While lonely women take their husbands' armsTo hold them on life's surface,While chattering women fill their closets with clothes andTheir lips with lies,You offer love for a fee--which is not as costly as most--And remain a lonely prostitute on a street of pain.You are not immoral, little Maria, only tired and afraid,But you are not as hollow as the police who pursue you,The politicians who jail you, the pharisees who scorn you.You give what you promise--take your paltry fee--andWander on the endless, aching pavements of pain.You know more of universal love than the nations who thrive on war,More than the churches whose dogmas are private vendettas made sacred,More than the tall buildings and sprawling factoriesWhere men wear chains.You are a lonely prostitute who speaks to me as I pass,And I smile at you because I am a lonely man.

James Kavanaugh

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appeares, And true plaine hearts doe in the faces rest, Where can we finde two better hemispheares Without sharpe North, without declining West? What ever dyes, was not mixt equally; If our two loves be one, or, thou and I Love so alike, that none doe slacken, none can die.

John Donne

Does something which exists on the edge have no true relevance to the stable center, or does it, by being on the edge, become a part of the edge and thus a part of the boundary, the definition which gives the whole its shape?

Lucy Grealy

This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there – the unspoken, the spirit, the soul.

Octavio Paz

Il pleure dans mon coeurComme il pleut sur la ville.Tears are shed in my heart like the rain on the town.

Paul Verlaine

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