Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts

Friday, July 15, 2022

Blake: From The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.

The fox condemns the trap, not himself.

What is now proved was once only imagined.

Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.

Expect poison from the standing water.

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

To create a little flower is the labor of ages.

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. 

 

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell



Monday, June 06, 2022

From A Perfect June Day


 Trees are fingers of the earth for the wind to play with.

Monday, December 09, 2019

Monday, January 08, 2018

At death you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. 


Philip Larkin, The Old Fools

Friday, September 15, 2017

Dedicated to My Brother Gyorgy

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?

Robert Browning

Thursday, February 16, 2017

Voices in My Head

[W]hat a meditative poem contributes to the history of consciousness is a reenactment in real time of the volatile inner life of a human being. Such a poem does not present itself as plot or character portrayal or argument, but rather ... as a hypothesis .... and include[s] waverings, self-contradictions, repudiations, aspirations, and doubts; they are not offered as a philosophical system.

Helen Vendler,  The New York Review of Books (February 23, 2017)




Sunday, July 21, 2013

To Evening

You set me and my thoughts a-wandering
along the path to the eternal void; and then
this wretched time flees, and with it
the throng of woes afflicting it and me;
and while I behold your peacefulness, that warlike
spirit that rages within me sleeps. 

From "Alla sera" by Ugo Foscolo, translated by Allen Shearer, seen on a Metro bus

Sunday, August 02, 2009

From now on, you are you.


Mahmoud Darwish, From Now On You Are You