19 quotes
Seek out reality, leave things that seem.
The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)
All women dote upon an idle man
Although their children need a rich estate.
No man has ever lived that had enough
Of children’s gratitude or woman’s love.
The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)
Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young
We loved each other and were ignorant.
The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.
The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)
The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)
Swift has sailed into his rest;
Savage indignation there
Cannot lacerate his breast.
Imitate him if you dare,
World-besotted traveller; he
Served human liberty.
The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)
Only God, my dear,
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.
The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)
Test every work of intellect or faith,
And everything that your own hands have wrought
And call those works extravagance of breath
That are not suited for such men as come
Proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.
The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)
Why should the imagination of a man
Long past his prime remember things that are
Emblematical of love and war?
The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)
Somewhere beyond the curtain
Of distorting days
Lives that lonely thing
That shone before these eyes
Targeted, trod like Spring.
The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)
The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor’s drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night walkers’ song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.
The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)
Only the dead can be forgiven;
But when I think of that my tongue's a stone.
The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)
What were all the world’s alarms
To mighty Paris when he found
Sleep upon a golden bed
That first dawn in Helen’s arms?
The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.
The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)
Speech after long silence; it is right,
All other lovers being estranged or dead,
Unfriendly lamplight hid under its shade,
The curtains drawn upon unfriendly night,
That we descant and yet again descant
Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song:
Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young
We loved each other and were ignorant.
The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)
I am content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch,
A blind man battering blind men;
Or into that most fecund ditch of all,
The folly that man does
Or must suffer, if he woos
A proud woman not kindred of his soul.
The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)
Whether they knew or not,
Goldsmith and Burke, Swift and the Bishop of Cloyne
All hated Whiggery; but what is Whiggery?
A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind
That never looked out of the eye of a saint
Or out of drunkard’s eye.
The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)
Things said or done long years ago,
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day
But something is recalled,
My conscience or my vanity appalled.
The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)
The finished man among his enemies?—
How in the name of Heaven can he escape
That defiling and disfigured shape
The mirror of malicious eyes
Casts upon his eyes until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape?
The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)