Memories and Recollections

May memory restore again and again

Time to plant tears, says the almanac. The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove and the child draws another inscrutable house.

Life and the memory of it cramped, dim, on a piece of Bristol board.

I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old. 5

Oh! the old swimmin’ hole! When I last saw the place, The scenes was all changed, like the change in my face.

Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose garden.

I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds, Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln.

In any man who dies there dies with him his first snow and kiss and fight. It goes with him. . . . Not people die but worlds die in them.

Memory says: Want to do right? Don’t count on me.

The dead don’t stay interested in us living people for very long. Gradually, gradually, they let go hold of the earth . . . and the ambitions they had . . . and the pleasures they had . . . and the things they suffered . . . and the people they loved. They get weaned away from earth—that’s the way I put it—weaned away.

What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage Whose world, or mine or theirs or is it of none? First came the seen, then thus the palpable What thou lovest well is thy true heritage.

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils, And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile.

I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

One day Lara went out and did not come back. . . . She died or vanished somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list which was afterwards mislaid.

Remember me when I am gone away, Gone far away into the silent land.

Any fool knows men and women think differently at times, but the biggest difference is this. Men forget, but never forgive; women forgive, but never forget.

Oh better than the minting / Of a gold-crowned king / Is the safe-kept memory / Of a lovely thing.

We wove a web in childhood, A web of sunny air.

Though nothing can bring back the hour

The law, wherein, as in a magic mirror, we see reflected, not only our own lives, but the lives of all men that have been!

 

It all came back to me last night, stirred By the sootfall of your things at bedtime, Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer For the black plunge-line nightdress.

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.

When a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind. . . . When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.