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There is a certain justice in criticism. The critic is like a midwife — a tyrannical midwife.
Stephen Spender
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Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.
Stephen Spender
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Then, as they land, they hear the tolling bell
Reaching across the landscape of hysteria,
To where larger than all the charcoaled batteries
And imaged towers against that dying sky,
Religion stands, the church blocking the sun.
Stephen Spender
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When a child, my dreams rode on your wishes,
I was your son, high on your horse,
My mind a top whipped by the lashes
Of your rhetoric, windy of course.
Stephen Spender
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Let your ghost follow
The young men to the Pole, up Everest, to war: by
love, be shot.
For the uncreating chaos descends
And claims you in marriage: though a man, you were
ever a bride
Stephen Spender
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When you smiled,
Everything in the room was shattered;
Only you remained whole
In frozen wonder, as though you stared
At your image in the broken mirror
Where it had always been silverly carried.
Stephen Spender
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After the first powerful plain manifesto
The black statement of pistons, without more fuss
But gliding like a queen, she leaves the station.
Stephen Spender
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And then the heart in its white sailing pride
Launches among the swans and the stretched lights
Laid on the water, as on your cheek
The other kiss and my listening
Life, waiting for all your life to speak.
Stephen Spender
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You drive the landscape like a herd of clouds
Moving against your horizontal tower
Of steadfast speed.
All England lies beneath you like a woman
With limbs ravished
By one glance carrying all these eyes.
Stephen Spender
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I think continually of those who were truly great... The names of those who in their lives fought for life, Who wore at their hearts the fire's center. Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun, And left the vivid air signed with their honor.
Stephen Spender
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Pylons, those pillars
Bare like nude, giant girls that have no secret.
Stephen Spender
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Eye, gazelle, delicate wanderer,
Drinker of horizon's fluid line;
Ear that suspends on a chord
The spirit drinking timelessness;
Touch, love, all senses...
Stephen Spender
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Here where I lie is the hot pit
Crowding on the mind with coal
And the will turned against it
Only drills new seams of darkness
Through the dark-surrounding whole.
Our vivid suns of happiness
Withered from summer, drop their flowers;
Hands of the longed, withheld tomorrow
Fold on the hands of yesterday
In double sorrow.
Stephen Spender
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You stared out of the window on the emptiness
Of a world exploding:
Stones and rubble thrown upwards in a fountain
Blasted sideways by the wind.
Every sensation except loneliness
Was drained out of your mind
By the lack of any motionless object the eye could
find.
You were a child again
Who sees for the first time things happen.
Stephen Spender
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Under the olive trees, from the ground
Grows this flower, which is a wound.
It is easier to ignore
Than the heroes' sunset fire
Of death plunged in their willed desire
Raging with flags on the world's shore.
Stephen Spender
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All the lessons learned, unlearned;
The young, who learned to read, now blind
Their eyes with an archaic film;
The peasant relapses to a stumbling tune
Following the donkey s bray;
These only remember to forget. But somewhere some word presses
On the high door of a skull and in some corner
Of an irrefrangible eye
Some old man memory jumps to a child
— Spark from the days of energy.
And the child hoards it like a bitter toy.
Stephen Spender
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All have become so nervous and so cold
That each man hates the cause and distant words
Which brought him here, more terribly than bullets.
Stephen Spender
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History is the ship carrying living memories to the future.
Stephen Spender
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History has tongues
Has angels has guns — has saved has praised —
Today proclaims
Achievements of her exiles long returned
Now no more rootless, for whom her printed page
Glazes their bruised waste years in one
Balancing present sky.
Stephen Spender
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No One
Shall Hunger:
Man shall spend equally.
Our Goal Which We Compel:
Man shall be man.
Stephen Spender
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My single pair of eyes
Contain the universe they see;
Their mirrored multiplicity
Is packed into a hollow body
Where I reflect the many, in my one.'
Stephen Spender
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Involved in my own entrails and a crust
Turning a pitted surface towards a space,
I am a world that watches through a sky
And is persuaded by mirrors
To regard its being as an external shell,
One of a universe of stars and faces.
Stephen Spender
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One, a poet, went babbling like a fountain
Through parks. All were jokes to children.
All had the pale unshaven stare of shuttered plants
Exposed to a too violent sun.
Stephen Spender
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Extensive whiteness drowned
All sense of space. We tramped through
Static, glaring days, Time's suspended blank.
Stephen Spender
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Deep in the winter plain, two armies
Dig their machinery, to destroy each other.
Men freeze and hunger. No one is given leave
On either side, except the dead, and wounded.
Stephen Spender
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Quote of the day
Joy is like restless day; but peace divine Like quiet night; Lead me, O Lord, — till perfect Day shall shine Through Peace to Light.
Adelaide Anne Procter
Stephen Spender
Wikipedia
Born:
February 28, 1909
Died:
July 16, 1995
(aged 86)
Bio:
Sir Stephen Harold Spender was an English poet, novelist and essayist who concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle in his work.
Known for:
World within world (1951)
The Temple (1988)
New Selected Journals, 1939-1995
The struggle of the modern (1963)
Trial of a judge (1938)
Most used words:
life
eyes
sun
light
love
man
young
centre
air
time
lives
history
kiss
dead
sky
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