64 quotes
Let your ghost follow
The young men to the Pole, up Everest, to war: by
love, be shot.
For the uncreating chaos descends
And claims you in marriage: though a man, you were
ever a bride
The Still Centre (1939)
Some old man memory jumps to a child
— Spark from the days of energy.
And the child hoards it like a bitter toy.
Selected Poems (1941)
To break out of the chaos of my darkness
Into a lucid day is all my will.
The Still Centre (1939)
I wear your kiss like a feather
Laid upon my cheek
The Still Centre (1939)
Since we are what we are, what shall we be
But what we are? We are, we have
Six feet and seventy years, to see
The light, and then resign it for the grave.
Ah, like a comet through flame she moves entranced
Wrapt in her music no bird song, no, nor bough
Breaking with honey buds, shall ever equal.
Death is another milestone on their way.
With laughter on their lips and with winds blowing round them
They record simply
How this one excelled all others in making driving belts.
“Close analysis” is useful to critics and readers. But for the poet there is the danger of disintegration of poetry into paraphrase, examination of technique, influences, all analysed in the language of criticism.
The Struggle of the Modern (1963)
Eye, gazelle, delicate wanderer,
Drinker of horizon’s fluid line;
Ear that suspends on a chord
The spirit drinking timelessness;
Touch, love, all senses...
Your quicksilver declaiming eye
Had frozen to the stare of a straight line
Which only saw goals painted in its beam
And made an artificial darkness all around
Which thickened into Allies.
The Still Centre (1939)
All have become so nervous and so cold
That each man hates the cause and distant words
Which brought him here, more terribly than bullets.
The Still Centre (1939)
Deep in the winter plain, two armies
Dig their machinery, to destroy each other.
Men freeze and hunger. No one is given leave
On either side, except the dead, and wounded.
The Still Centre (1939)
Under the olive trees, from the ground
Grows this flower, which is a wound.
It is easier to ignore
Than the heroes' sunset fire
Of death plunged in their willed desire
Raging with flags on the world's shore.
The Still Centre (1939)
I am for neither West nor East, but for myself considered as a self — one of the millions who inhabit the earth...
World Within World (1951)
My dream becomes my dream... come true...
What the eye delights in, no longer dictates
My greed to enjoy: boys, grass, the fenced-off
deer.
It leaves those figures that distantly play
On the horizon's rim: they sign their peace, in games.
The Still Centre (1939)
Then, as they land, they hear the tolling bell
Reaching across the landscape of hysteria,
To where larger than all the charcoaled batteries
And imaged towers against that dying sky,
Religion stands, the church blocking the sun.
Poems (1933)
Our single purpose was to walk through snow
With faces swung to their prodigious North
Like compass iron.
The Still Centre (1939)
Both Hopkins and Lawrence were religious not just in the ritualistic sense but in the sense of being obsessed with the word — the word made life and truth — with the need to invent a language as direct as religious utterance.
The Struggle of the Modern (1963)
In railway halls, on pavements near the traffic,
They beg, their eyes made big by empty staring
And only measuring Time, like the blank clock.