27 quotes
A good poem helps to change the shape and significance of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.
The joy and function of poetry is, and was, the celebration of man, which is also the celebration of God.
Poetic Manifesto (1951)
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
Fern Hill (1946)
After the first death, there is no other.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night (1952)
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means.
Fern Hill (1946)
You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it technically tick [...] But you're back again where you began. You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words.
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.
Fern Hill (1946)
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.
Land of my fathers? My fathers can keep it!
What's never known is safest in this life.
Under the skysigns they who have no arms
have cleanest hands, and, as the heartless ghost
Alone's unhurt, so the blind man sees best.
None of us today want to read poems which we can understand as easily as the front page of the Express.
Light breaks where no sun shines;
Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides;
And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads,
The things of light
File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.
Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
In my craft or sullen art (1946)
And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways.
Fern Hill (1946)
The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps in the works of the poem so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash, or thunder in.
Poetic Manifesto (1951)
The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
These five kings did a king to death.
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sunlight
And the legends of the green chapels.
Light breaks on secret lots,
On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;
When logics die,
The secret of the soil grows through the eye,
And blood jumps in the sun;
Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.