William Plomer Quotes

11 Sourced Quotes

The commonplace needs no defence,
Dullness is in the critic's eyes,
Without a licence life evolves
From some dim phase its own surprise;

Under these yellow-twinkling elms,
Behind these hedges trimly shorn,
As in a stable once, so here
It may be born, it may be born.

William Plomer
Peristalsis calls for roughage,
Haulms and fibres, husks and grit,
Nature's way to open bowels,
Maybe – let them practise it.

William Plomer
Brzeska and Brooke were among those she knew
And she lived long enough to meet Lawrences, too,
D. H. and T. E. – she who'd known R. L. S.,
Talked to Hardy of Kim, and to Kipling of Tess!

William Plomer
A family portrait not too stale to record
Of a pleasant old buffer, nephew to a lord,
Who believed that the bank was mightier than the sword,
And that an umbrella might pacify barbarians abroad:
Just like an old liberal
Between the wars.

William Plomer
With first-rate sherry flowing into second-rate whores,
And third-rate conversation without one single pause.

William Plomer
Everything sings
in snowy stillness
in marble wonder,
in formal myth,
believed because
impossible,
believed as only
a poem can be,
the anti-fact
of a holy spore
spreading the Word
unsaid before.

William Plomer
The dead are non-living
the hungry are non-fed:
don't think because you're non-unconscious
that you're alive – you're non-dead.

William Plomer
When her guests were awash with champagne and with gin
She was recklessly sober, as sharp as a pin:
An abstemious man would reel at her look
As she rolled a bright eye and praised his last book.

William Plomer
Oh, the twenties and the thirties were not otherwise designed
Than other times when blind men into ditches led the blind,
When the rich mouse ate the cheese and the poor mouse got the rind,
And man, the self-destroyer, was not lucid in his mind.

William Plomer
Out of that bungled, unwise war
An alp of unforgiveness grew.

William Plomer
On a sofa upholstered in panther skin
Mona did researches in original sin.

William Plomer