26 quotes
A poet can only write about what is true to his own experience, not about what he would like to be true to his experience.
The Still Centre (1939)
Whatever happens, I shall never be alone,
I shall always have a fare, an affair, or a revolution.
The Still Centre (1939)
I'm pressed into the inside of a mask
At the back of love, the back of air, the back of light.
The Still Centre (1939)
Of course, the entire effort is to put myself
Outside the ordinary range
Of what are called statistics. A hundred are killed
In the outer suburbs. Well, well, I carry on.
The Still Centre (1939)
My single pair of eyes
Contain the universe they see;
Their mirrored multiplicity
Is packed into a hollow body
Where I reflect the many, in my one.
The Still Centre (1939)
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)
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)
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)
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)
Our single purpose was to walk through snow
With faces swung to their prodigious North
Like compass iron.
The Still Centre (1939)
Extensive whiteness drowned
All sense of space. We tramped through
Static, glaring days, Time's suspended blank.
The Still Centre (1939)
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)
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)