Skip to content

Donald Davidson Quotes

1893–1968 United States

Donald Grady Davidson (August 8, 1893 – April 25, 1968) was a U.S. poet, essayist, social and literary critic, and author. He is best known as a founding member of the Nashville, Tennessee, circle of poets known as the Fugitives and of an overlapping group, the Southern Agrarians.

United States
Essayists
Historians
Novelists
Poets

Random Donald Davidson quote

8 quotes

Then let my skeleton soul
Writhe upward from its loam,
Drink red morning again,
And look gently home.

The seed of Appomattox blooms; its fruit
Rots where eyes are dazed with a hungry searching,
And ears are deaf with steps that murmur and follow
No command.

I want the word that burns into my heart
Like God's coal alive on the Prophet's tongue.
I would listen now while memory is ablaze
To seal your testament within my soul.

We mourned with you then in brotherhood,
And I'll weep with you now for those whose names
Burn on your monuments like altar flames.

The probing knife of madness
Can start a dullard brain;
Cold cheeks feel kisses
And warm with tears again

The whispering in the marrow spreads to the brain;
The remembering heart carries it round again
Till it beats in the throat, the lips, the weeping eye
And is born at last in a blazing wordless outcry.

Farewell,
Army of Tennessee! Rough glory, rooted here,
Feeds the lone vow, the lingering touch
Of a late comrade sworn to remember you!
Lights glow from river and town. The darkness stabs.
And winter sweeps the undefended earth.

Then no soft arms could hold me from my wilderness
To reap at daylight's fallow edge, with bullet or knife,
That flicker of hoof or pelt, that flash of wings returning -
The dogs trace it - harvest of life that gives me life.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Donald Davidson (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.