43 quotes
Poetry should begin with emotion in the poet, and end with the same emotion in the reader. The poem is simply the instrument of transferance
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique.
The Less Deceived (1955)
Poetry = heightened talking. Novel = heightened story. Painting = heightened seeing.
Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets—and yet
No one actually starves.
The Less Deceived (1955)
Life and literature is a question of what one thrills to, and further than that no man shall ever go without putting his foot in a turd.
Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.
The Less Deceived (1955)
Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end of age.
The Whitsun Weddings (1964)
I thought of London spread out in the sun,
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat.
The Whitsun Weddings (1964)
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
High Windows (1974)
What was the rock my gliding childhood struck,
And what bright unreal path has led me here?
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
The Whitsun Weddings (1964)
My mother, not content with being motionless, deaf and speechless, is now going blind. That's what you get for not dying, you see.
Next year we are to bring the soldiers home
For lack of money, and it is all right.
Places they guarded, or kept orderly,
Must guard themselves, and keep themselves orderly.
High Windows (1974)
I am beginning to think of the creative imagination as a fruit machine on which victories are rare and separated by much vain expense, and represent a rare alignment of mental and spiritual qualities that normally are quite at odds.
Give me your arm, old toad;
Help me down Cemetery Road.
The Whitsun Weddings (1964)
I came to the conclusion that an enormous amount of research was needed to form an opinion on anything, & therefore I abandoned politics altogether as a topic of conversation.
The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare
Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can't come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.
High Windows (1974)
Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me:
‘Why do you let me lie here wastefully?
I am all you never had of goods and sex.
You could get them still by writing a few cheques.’
High Windows (1974)
And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.
The Less Deceived (1955)
Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
The Whitsun Weddings (1964)