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Stephen Spender quotes - page 2
Across this dazzling Mediterranean August morning The dolphins write such Ideograms: With power to wake Me prisoned in My human speech They sign: 'I AM!
Stephen Spender
There was a wood, Habitation of foxes and fleshy burrows, Where I learnt to uncast my childhood, and not alone, I learnt, not alone. There were four hands, four eyes, A third mouth of the dark to kiss. Two people And a third not either: and both double, yet different. I entered with myself. I left with a woman.
Stephen Spender
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.
Stephen Spender
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:.
Stephen Spender
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.
Stephen Spender
Extensive whiteness drowned All sense of space. We tramped through Static, glaring days, Time's suspended blank.
Stephen Spender
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.
Stephen Spender
They think how one life hums, revolves and toils, One cog in a golden singing hive...
Stephen Spender
Your heart was loaded with its fate like lead Pressing against the net of flesh: and those Countries that crept back across the boundaries Where you had forced open the arena Of limelit France with your star at the centre, Closed in on you, terrified no longer At the diamond in your head Which cut their lands and killed their men.
Stephen Spender
I simply had to get there.
Stephen Spender
After the first powerful plain manifesto The black statement of pistons, without more fuss But gliding like a queen, she leaves the station.
Stephen Spender
You stared out of the window on the emptiness Of a world exploding: Stones and rubble thrown upwards in a fountain Blasted sideways by the wind. Every sensation except loneliness Was drained out of your mind By the lack of any motionless object the eye could find. You were a child again Who sees for the first time things happen.
Stephen Spender
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.
Stephen Spender
I wear your kiss like a feather Laid upon my cheek.
Stephen Spender
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.
Stephen Spender
Here where I lie is the hot pit Crowding on the mind with coal And the will turned against it Only drills new seams of darkness Through the dark-surrounding whole. Our vivid suns of happiness Withered from summer, drop their flowers; Hands of the longed, withheld tomorrow Fold on the hands of yesterday In double sorrow.
Stephen Spender
Critics of visual arts and of music describe in words - that is to say, a system of signs other than those made by brushes on canvas or chisels into stone or notes of music - those characteristics of painting or sculpture or music which can be described or analysed. Visual artists and composers can disregard critics on the ground that the medium of verbal criticism bears so indirect a relation to the medium in which they make something. Poets are in a different situation. With the development of so-called scientific methods of criticism they are made ever conscious that criticism of poetry is in the same medium of work as the art which they practise. "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.
Stephen Spender
More beautiful and soft than any moth With burring furred antennae feeling its huge path Through dusk, the air-liner with shut-off engines Glides over suburbs and the sleeves set trailing tall To point the wind. Gently, broadly, she falls, Scarcely disturbing charted currents of air.
Stephen Spender
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.
Stephen Spender
At dawn she lay with her profile at that angle Which, when she sleeps, seems the carved face of an angel.
Stephen Spender
The guns spell money's ultimate reason In letters of lead on the spring hillside. But the boy lying dead under the olive trees Was too young and too silly To have been notable to their important eye. He was a better target for a kiss.
Stephen Spender
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.
Stephen Spender
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