Elizabeth Jennings Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

Do they know they're old,
These two who are my father and my mother
Whose fire from which I came, has now grown cold?

Elizabeth Jennings
I hate a word like 'pets': it sounds so much
Like something with no living of its own.

Elizabeth Jennings
Imagination greets the baleful tide
And seeks a ceremony in its coming.
Desire for vision is incorrigibly
Demanding. We are the citizens, not seers,
Asking our little governments to bring
Order and shape to guide a way to sing.

Elizabeth Jennings
It is the dark, the dark that draws me back Into a chaos where Vocations, visions fail, the will grows slack And I am stunned by silence everywhere.

Elizabeth Jennings
We will the tragedy upon
Ourselves. There is more suffering
In watching jealousy or grief
Move to completion in a life
Not ours, than in the offering To have the entire burden on
Our hearts and feel the pain within.

Elizabeth Jennings
I have come into the hour of a white healing.
Grief 's surgery is over and I wear
The scar of my remorse and of my feeling.

Elizabeth Jennings
When I re-read my past work I can see a development to such an effect, indeed, that some of them no longer seem to be any part of me.

Elizabeth Jennings
Since clarity suggests simplicity And since the simple thing is here inapt, I choose obscurities of tongue and touch, The shadow side of language and the dark Hinted in conversations close to quarrel, Conceived within the mind in aftermaths.

Elizabeth Jennings
Never to possess,
Therefore never lose, –
This is a creed of fire,
The burning of excess,
The cold ash of loss,
Continual desire.

Elizabeth Jennings
It was a yellow voice, a high, shrill treble in the nursery
White always and high, I remember it so,
White cupboard, off-white table, mugs, dolls' faces
And I was four or five. The garden could have been
Miles away. We were taken down to the green
Asparagus beds, the cut lawn, and the smell of it
Comes each summer after rain when white returns. Our bird,
A canary called Peter, sang behind bars. The black and white cat
Curled and snoozed by the fire and danger was far away.

Elizabeth Jennings
But every season is a kind
Of rich nostalgia.
We give names –
Autumn and summer, winter, spring –
As though to unfasten from the mind
Our moods and give them outward forms.
We want the certain, solid thing.

Elizabeth Jennings
Insects move and men like insects. Why Are we set here, frightened of our reflections, Living in fear yet desperate not to die?

Elizabeth Jennings
Art is not self-expression while, for me, 'confessional poetry' is almost a contradiction in terms.

Elizabeth Jennings