Quotes to inspire and reflect

With Usura With usura hath no man a house of good stone each block cut smooth and well fitting.

There died a myriad, And of the best, among them, For an old bitch gone in the teeth, For a botched civilization. Charm, smiling at the good mouth, Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid, For two gross of broken statues, For a few thousand battered books.

Some quick to arm, some for adventure, some from fear of weakness, some from fear of censure, some for love of slaughter, in imagination, learning later… some in fear, learning love of slaughter; Died some, pro patria, walked eye-deep in hell believing in old men’s lies, the unbelieving came home, home to a lie.

Better mendacities Than the classics in paraphrase!

The age demanded an image Of its accelerated grimace, Something for the modern stage, Not, at any rate, an Attic grace.

His true Penelope was Flaubert, He fished by obstinate isles.

For three years, out of key with his time, He strove to resuscitate the dead art Of poetry; to maintain “the sublime” In the old sense. Wrong from the start— No, hardly, but seeing he had been born In a half savage country, out of date.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.

Winter is icumen in, Lhude sing Goddamm, Raineth drop and staineth slop, And how the wind doth ramm! Sing: Goddamm. 1

Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea.

The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind. The paired butterflies are already yellow with August Over the grass in the West garden; They hurt me. I grow older.

It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

All men by their nature give praise.

The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned.

Then back to the party! and femaled you jealously as if to discover whence and there should escape, what?

It’s the anarchy of poverty delights me.

are the desolate, dark weeks when nature in its barrenness equals the stupidity of man. The year plunges into night and the heart plunges lower than night.

Mothlike in mists, scintillant in the minute brilliance of cloudless days, with broad bellying sails they glide to the wind tossing green water from their sharp prows while over them the crew crawls.

I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold

In summer the song sings itself above the muffled words—

As the rain falls so does bathe every object of the world—

The crowd at the ball game is moved uniformly by a spirit of uselessness which delights them—

Say it, no ideas but in things.

as if the earth under our feet were an excrement of some sky and we degraded prisoners destined to hunger until we eat filth

so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens

The pure products of America go crazy—

From the petal’s edge a line starts that being of steel infinitely fine, infinitely rigid penetrates the Milky Way without contact—

They enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all save that they enter.

By the road to the contagious hospital under the surge of the blue mottled clouds driven from the northeast—a cold wind.

Old age is a flight of small cheeping birds skimming bare trees above a snow glaze.

I have discovered that most of the beauties of travel are due to the strange hours we keep to see them.

Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?

I walk back streets admiring the houses of the very poor.

Forgive us all our trespasses, Little creatures, everywhere!

No wreaths please— especially no hothouse flowers. Some common memento is better, something he prized and is known by: his old clothes—a few books perhaps.

So always look for the silver lining And try to find the sunny side of life.

I hear a sudden cry of pain! There is a rabbit in a snare.

As a white candle In a holy place, So is the beauty Of an aged face.

It takes a heap o’ livin’ in a house t’ make it home, A heap o’ sun an’ shadder, an’ ye sometimes have Afore ye really ’preciate the things ye lef’ behind, An’ hunger fer ’em somehow, with ’em allus on yer mind.

I hibernated in my past. 5

O Milky Way, sister in whiteness To Canaan’s rivers and the bright Bodies of lovers drowned, Can we follow toilsomely Your path to other nebulae? 6

Under Pont Mirabeau flows the Seine. 3

Come night, strike hour. Days go, I endure. 4

Shepherdess, O Eiffel Tower, your flock of bridges is bleating this morning. 1

The palm at the end of the mind, Beyond the last thought, rises… A gold-feathered bird Sings in the palm.

That scrawny cry—It was A chorister whose c preceded the choir. It was part of the colossal sun.

His self and the sun were one And his poems, although makings of his self, Were no less makings of the sun.

There it was, word for word, The poem that took the place of a mountain.