64 quotes
No one
Shall hunger: Man shall spend equally.
Our goal which we compel: Man shall be man.
Extensive whiteness drowned
All sense of space. We tramped through
Static, glaring days, Time's suspended blank.
The Still Centre (1939)
The immediate reaction of the poets who fought in the war was cynicism...
The Struggle of the Modern (1963)
For I had expected always
Some brightness to hold in trust,
Some final innocence
To save from dust
One, a poet, went babbling like a fountain
Through parks. All were jokes to children.
All had the pale unshaven stare of shuttered plants
Exposed to a too violent sun.
The Still Centre (1939)
His name never appeared in the papers.
The world maintained its traditional wall
Round the dead with their gold sunk deep as a well,
Whilst his life, intangible as a Stock Exchange
rumour, drifted outside.
The Still Centre (1939)
What I had not foreseen
Was the gradual day
Weakening the will
Leaking the brightness away
When a child, my dreams rode on your wishes,
I was your son, high on your horse,
My mind a top whipped by the lashes
Of your rhetoric, windy of course.
I regard my life as rather a failure in the only thing in which I wanted it to succeed. I have not written the books I ought to have written and I have written a lot of books I should not have written.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire's centre.
Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun
And left the vivid air signed with their honour.
Poems (1933)
When you smiled,
Everything in the room was shattered;
Only you remained whole
In frozen wonder, as though you stared
At your image in the broken mirror
Where it had always been silverly carried.
The Still Centre (1939)
And then the heart in its white sailing pride
Launches among the swans and the stretched lights
Laid on the water, as on your cheek
The other kiss and my listening
Life, waiting for all your life to speak.
The Still Centre (1939)
The essential is
That all the 'I's should remain separate
Propped up under flowers, and no one suffer
For his neighbour. Then horror is postponed
For everyone until it settles on him
And drags him to that incommunicable grief
Which is all mystery or nothing.
The Still Centre (1939)
In the last sweep of love, they pass over fields
Behind the aerodrome, where boys play all day
Hacking dead grass: whose cries, like wild birds
Settle upon the nearest roofs
But soon are hid under the loud city.
Poems (1933)
All the posters on the walls
All the leaflets in the streets
Are mutilated, destroyed or run in rain,
Their words blotted out with tears,
Skins peeling from their bodies
In the victorious hurricane.
Selected Poems (1941)
You drive the landscape like a herd of clouds
Moving against your horizontal tower
Of steadfast speed.
All England lies beneath you like a woman
With limbs ravished
By one glance carrying all these eyes.
The Still Centre (1939)
Involved in my own entrails and a crust
Turning a pitted surface towards a space,
I am a world that watches through a sky
And is persuaded by mirrors
To regard its being as an external shell,
One of a universe of stars and faces.
The Still Centre (1939)
And if this I were destroyed,
The image shattered,
My perceived, rent world would fly
In an explosion of final judgement
To the ends of the sky,
The colour in the iris of the eye.
Opening, my eyes say 'Let there be light',
Closing, they shut me in a coffin.
The Still Centre (1939)
Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,
See how these names are fêted in the waving grass
And by the streamers of the white cloud
And whispers of the wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire's centre.
Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun
And left the vivid air signed with their honour.
Poems (1933)
I simply had to get there.