Poet Quotes

There is strength deep bedded in our hearts, of which we reck but little till the shafts of heaven have pierced its fragile dwelling. Must not earth be rent before her gems are found?

See the wasp. He has pretty yellow stripes around his body, and a darning needle in his tail. If you will pat the wasp upon the tail we will give you a nice picture book.

All the things we hide in water
Hoping we won't see them go.
Forests growing under water
Press against the ones we know.

A poem needs disguises. It needs secrets. It thrives on the tension between what is said and not said; it prefers the oblique, the implied, the ironic, the suggestive; when it speaks, it wants you to lean forward a little to overhear; it wants you to understand things only years later.

J. D. McClatchy

To rid the grass of weed, to get
The whole root,
Thick, tangled, takes a strong mind

And desire - to make clean, make pure.
The weed, tough
As the rock it leaps against,

Unless plucked to the last
Live fiber
Will plunge up through dark again.

The weed also has the desire
To make clean,
Make pure, there against the rock.

There are fools who seek to understand the secrets of nature.

We are no more content to plod along the beaten paths - and so marriage must go the way of God.

A poem is a box, a thing, to put other things in. For safe keeping.

Marianne Boruch

Poetry is the vision in a man's soul which he translates as best he can with all the means at his disposal.

The Kingdom of Heaven is a military autocracy and there is no public opinion in it.

Didn't I seize the fire of ideas and make them leap, tear, fly, sing

The fool that eats till he is sick must fast till he is well.

George Walter Thornbury

My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns;
Love is the fire and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns;
The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals;
The metal in this furnace wrought are men's defiled souls.

Robert Southwell

The learned astronomer Analyzing the light of most remote star-swirls Has found them — or a trick of distance deludes his prism — All at incredible speeds fleeing outward from ours. I thought, no doubt they are fleeing the contagion Of consciousness that infects this corner of space.

Robinson Jeffers

'Qui procul hinc', the legend's writ,—
The frontier-grave is far away—
'Qui ante diem periit:
Sed miles, sed pro patria.'

How many have died without having given even one kiss to their chimera!

Théophile Gautier

Oh! make me Thine forever;
And should I fainting be,
Lord! let me never, never,
Outlive my love to Thee!

Kiss me with rain on your eyelashes, come on, let us sway together, under the trees, and to hell with thunder.

Edwin Morgan (poet)

Mother says there are locked rooms inside all women, kitchen of love, bedroom of grief, bathroom of apathy. Sometimes, the men, they come with keys, and sometimes the men, they come with hammers.

Rain knows the earth and loves it well, for rain is the passion of the earth.

Estela Portillo-Trambley

And o'er them the lighthouse looked lovely as hope,—
That star of life's tremulous ocean.

Paul Moon James

Art is interested in life at the moment when the ray of power is passing through it.

Boris Pasternak

Clear and simple in white and gold, Meadows blossom, of sunlit spaces, - The field is full as it well can hold And white with the drift of the ox-eye daisies!

Dora Read Goodale

If you're a writer, you can make the death of a canary stand for the whole mystery of death.

Nadine Gordimer

The country wears their going like a scar,
Today their relatives save to support and
Send others in planes for the new diaspora.