W. D. Snodgrass Quotes
1926–2009 United States
William De Witt Snodgrass (January 5, 1926 – January 13, 2009) was an American poet who also wrote under the pseudonym S. S.
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Random W. D. Snodgrass quote
21 quotes
The sleek, expensive girls I teach,
Younger and pinker every year,
Bloom gradually out of reach.
You must call up every strength you own
And you can rip off the whole facial mask.
Ah, what avails the tenure race,
Ah, what the Ph.D.,
When all departments have a place
For nincompoops like thee?
Have you subversive, out of date,
Or controversial ideas?
I have not learned how often I
Can win, can love, but choose to die.
Is it, then, your opinion
Women are putty in your hands?
Is this the face to launch upon
A thousand one night stands?
In darkness and in hedges
I sang my sour tone
and all my love was howling
conspicuously alone.
After experience taught me that all the ordinary
Surroundings of social life are futile and vain
Where, where is the long, flowing hair,
The velvet suit, the broad bow tie;
Where is the other-worldly air,
Where the abstracted eye?
And you, whiner, who wastes your time
Dawdling over the remorseless earth,
What evil, what unspeakable crime
Have you made your life worth?
You seem to be all finished, so
We'll plug your old recalcitrant anus
And tie up your discouraged penis
In a great, snow-white bow of gauze.
They wear their godhead lightly.
They look out from their hill and say,
To themselves, "We have nowhere to go but down;
The great destination is to stay."
You still whispered you would not die.
Yet the nights I heard you cry
Like a whipped child
Where are the beard, the bongo drums,
Tattered T-shirt and grubby sandals,
As who, released from Iowa, comes
To tell of wondrous scandals?
Up the reputable walks of old established trees
They stalk, children of the nouveaux riches; chimes
Of the tall Clock Tower drench their heads in blessing.
—All this Dark Age machinery
On which we had tormented you
To life.
I taught myself to name my name,
To bark back, loosen love and crying;
To ease my woman so she came,
To ease an old man who was dying.
I happened to find
Your picture. That picture. I stopped there cold,
Like a man raking piles of dead leaves in his yard
Who has turned up a severed hand.
Riot in Algeria, in Cyprus, in Alabama;
Aged in wrong, the empires are declining,
And China gathers, soundlessly, like evidence.
What shall I say to the young on such a morning?—
Mind is the one salvation?—also grammar?—
No; my little ones lean not toward revolt.
Though trees turn bare and girls turn wives,
We shall afford our costly seasons;
There is a gentleness survives
That will outspeak and has its reasons.
There is a loveliness exists,
Preserves us, not for specialists.