36 quotes
The little sardine men crammed in a monster toy
Who tilt their aggregate beast against our crumbling Troy.
Poems (1937)
Something of glass about her, of dead water,
Chills and holds us,
Far more fatal than painted flesh or the lodestone of live hair
This despair of crystal brilliance.
Poems (1937)
Under the coffered gilt the court historian
Turns the mothy silks that time has left him.
Poems 1925–1940 (1940)
Holidays should be like this,
Free from over-emphasis,
Time for soul to stretch and spit
Before the world comes back on it.
Letters from Iceland (1937)
In my childhood trees were green
And there was plenty to be seen.
Plant and Phantom (1941)
Better authentic mammon than a bogus god.
Autumn Journal (1939)
And all of London littered with remembered kisses.
Autumn Journal (1939)
Some on commission, some for the love of learning,
Some because they have nothing better to do
Or because they hope these walls of books will deaden
The drumming of the demon in their ears.
Plant and Phantom (1941)
It’s no go the Yogi-Man, it’s no go Blavatsky,
All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi.
Poems (1937)
Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me,
Otherwise kill me.
His father gave him a box of truisms
Shaped like a coffin, then his father died;
The truisms remained on the mantelpiece.
Collected Poems (1966)
Crumbling between the fingers, under the feet,
Crumbling behind the eyes,
Their world gives way and dies
And something twangs and breaks at the end of the street.
Plant and Phantom (1941)
World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.
Poems (1937)
I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
club-footed ghoul come near me.
Springboard (1944)
Down the road someone is practising scales,
The notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails,
Man’s heart expands to tinker with his car
For this is Sunday morning, Fate’s great bazaar.
Poems (1937)
The dark was talking to the dead;
The lamp was dark beside my bed.
Plant and Phantom (1941)
Time was away and somewhere else,
There were two glasses and two chairs
And two people with the one pulse
(Somebody stopped the moving stairs):
Time was away and somewhere else.
Plant and Phantom (1941)
By a high star our course is set,
Our end is Life. Put out to sea.
Collected Poems (1966)
Spider, spider, spin
Your register and let me sleep a little,
Not now in order to end but to begin
The task begun so often.
Autumn Journal (1939)
Some now are happy in the hive of home,
Thigh over thigh and a light in the night nursery,
And some are hungry under the starry dome
And some sit turning handles.
Autumn Journal (1939)