Conrad Aiken quotes - page 2

Weave, weave, weave, you streaks of rain!
I am dissolved and woven again...
Thousands of faces rise and vanish before me.
Thousands of voices weave in the rain. (Conrad Aiken)

And we recall, with a gleaming stab of sadness, Vaguely and incoherently, some dream Of a world we came from, a world of sun-blue hills... A black wood whispers around us, green eyes gleam; Someone cries in the forest, and someone kills.

Conrad Aiken

Once I loved, and she I loved was darkened. Again I loved, and love itself was darkened. Vainly we follow the circle of shadowy days. The screen at last grows dark, the flutes are silent. The doors of night are closed. We go our ways.

Conrad Aiken

My veins are afire with music, Her eyes have kissed me, my body is turned to light; I shall dream to her secret heart tonight...

Conrad Aiken

Two lovers move in the crowd like a link of music, We press upon them, we hold them, and let them pass; A chord of music strikes us and straight we tremble; We tremble like wind-blown grass.

Conrad Aiken

From high black walls, gleaming vaguely with rain, Each yellow light looked down like a golden eye. They trembled from coign to coign, and tower to tower, Along high terraces quicker than dream they flew. And some of them steadily glowed, and some soon vanished, And some strange shadows threw.

Conrad Aiken

My heart is torn with the sound of raucous voices, They shout from the slums, from the streets, from the crowded places, And tunes from the hurdy-gurdy that coldly rejoices Shoot arrows into my heart.

Conrad Aiken

Each gleaming point of light is like a seed Dilating swiftly to coiling fires. Each cloud becomes a rapidly dimming face, Each hurrying face records its strange desires.

Conrad Aiken

Lovers walk in the noontime by that fountain. Pigeons dip their beaks to drink from the water. And soon the pond must freeze.

Conrad Aiken

He would not yield, he thought, and walk more slowly, As if he knew for certain he walked to death: But with his usual pace,-deliberate, firm, Looking about him calmly, watching the world, Taking his ease...

Conrad Aiken

And, growing tired, we turn aside at last,
Remember our secret selves, seek out our towers,
Lay weary hands on the banisters, and climb;
Climbing, each, to his little four-square dream
Of love or lust or beauty or death or crime. (Conrad Aiken)

The poet walked alone in a cold late rain, And thought his grief was like the crying of sea-birds; For his lover was dead, he never would love again.

Conrad Aiken

The young boy whistles, hurrying down the street, The young girl hums beneath her breath. One goes out to beauty, and does not know it. And one goes out to death.

Conrad Aiken

I walk in a cloud of wonder; I am glad. I mingle among the crowds; my heart is pounding; You do not guess the adventure I have had!... Yet you, too, all have had your dark adventures, Your sudden adventures, or strange, or sweet... My peril goes out from me, is blown among you. We loiter, dreaming together, along the street.

Conrad Aiken

Whitman had a profound influence on me. ... He was useful to me in the perfection of form, as a sort of compromise between the strict and the free.

Conrad Aiken

His thoughts were blown and scattered like leaves; He thought of the pail... Why, then, was it forgotten? Because he would not need it?

Conrad Aiken

Over the darkened city, the city of towers, The city of a thousand gates, Over the gleaming terraced roofs, the huddled towers, Over a somnolent whisper of loves and hates, The slow wind flows, drearily streams and falls, With a mournful sound down rain-dark walls.

Conrad Aiken

We reach vague-gesturing hands, we lift our heads, Hear sounds far off,-and dream, with quivering breath, Our curious separate ways through life and death.

Conrad Aiken

It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning When the light drips through the shutters like the dew, I arise, I face the sunrise, And do the things my fathers learned to do. Stars in the purple dusk above the rooftops Pale in a saffron mist and seem to die, And I myself on a swiftly tilting planet Stand before a glass and tie my tie.

Conrad Aiken

In one room, silently, lover looks upon lover, And thinks the air is fire.

Conrad Aiken

And there was one, beneath black eaves, who thought,
Combing with lifted arms her golden hair,
Of the lover who hurried towards her through the night;
And there was one who dreamed of a sudden death
As she blew out her light. (Conrad Aiken)

One of us sings in the street, and we listen to him; The words ring over us like vague bells of sorrow. He sings of a house he lived in long ago. It is strange; this house of dust was the house I lived in; The house you lived in, the house that all of us know.

Conrad Aiken

Let us describe the evening as it is:- The stars disposed in heaven as they are: Verlaine and Shakspere rotting, where they rot, Rimbaud remembered, and too soon forgot; Order in all things, logic in the dark; Arrangement in the atom and the spark; Time in the heart and sequence in the brain- Such as destroyed Rimbaud and fooled Verlaine. And let us then take godhead by the neck- And strangle it, and with it, rhetoric.

Conrad Aiken

In the mazes of loitering people, the watchful and furtive, The shadows of tree-trunks and shadows of leaves, In the drowse of the sunlight, among the low voices, I suddenly face you.

Conrad Aiken

Our hands are hot and raw with the stones we have laid, We have built a tower of stone high into the sky, We have built a city of towers.

Conrad Aiken

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