Poets From England

"If you like poetry let it be first-rate; Milton, Shakespeare, Thomson, Goldsmith, Pope (if you will, though I don't admire him), Scott, Byron, Camp[b]ell, Wordsworth, and Southey. Now don't be startled at the names of Shakespeare and Byron. Both these were great men, and their works are like themselves. You will know how to choose the good and avoid the evil; the finest passages are always the purest, the bad are invariably revolting, you will never wish to read them over twice."

"I can only say with deeper sincerity and fuller significance — what I have always said in theory — Wait God's will."

"I can be on guard against my enemies, but God deliver me from my friends!"

"If we would build on a sure foundation in friendship, we must love friends for their sake rather than for our own."

"What have I to do with millions [of people]? The eighty I know despise me."

"Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour ... If at my convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?"

"Have you yet read Miss Martineau’s and Mr. Atkinson’s new work, Letters on the Nature and Development of Man? If you have not, it would be worth your while to do so. Of the impression this book has made on me, I will not now say much. It is the first exposition of avowed atheism and materialism I have ever read; the first unequivocal declaration of disbelief in the existence of a God or a future life I have ever seen. In judging of such exposition and declaration, one would wish entirely to put aside the sort of instinctive horror they awaken, and to consider them in an impartial spirit and collected mood. This I find difficult to do. The strangest thing is, that we are called on to rejoice over this hopeless blank — to receive this bitter bereavement as great gain — to welcome this unutterable desolation as a state of pleasant freedom. Who could do this if he would? Who would do this if he could? Sincerely, for my own part, do I wish to know and find the Truth; but if this be Truth, well may she guard herself with mysteries, and cover herself with a veil. If this be Truth, man or woman who beholds her can but curse the day he or she was born. I said however, I would not dwell on what I thought; rather, I wish to hear what some other person thinks,--someone whose feelings are unapt to bias his judgment. Read the book, then, in an unprejudiced spirit, and candidly say what you think of it. I mean, of course, if you have time — not otherwise."

"If you think, from this prelude, that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken. Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations; reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool and solid lies before you; something unromantic as Monday morning, when all who have work wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake themselves thereto."

"I describe imperfect characters. Every character in this book will be found to be more or less imperfect, my pen refusing to draw anything in the model line."

"This is a terrible hour, but it is often that darkest point which precedes the rise of day; that turn of the year when the icy January wind carries over the waste at once the dirge of departing winter, and the prophecy of coming spring."

"God, how pointless and empty the world is! Days filled with cheap and tarnished moments succeed each other, restless and haunted nights follow in bitter routine: the sun shines without brightness, and the moon rises without light."

"I want your life filling and stirring me. I want your happiness beneath my heart and your sorrows in my eyes and your peace in the fingers of my hand."

"Suddenly he saw them, the bottles of aguardiente, of anís, of jerez, of Highland Queen, the glasses, a babel of glasses—towering, like the smoke from the train that day—built to the sky, then falling, the glasses toppling and crashing, falling downhill from the Generalife Gardens, the bottles breaking, bottles of Oporto, tinto, blanco, bottles of Pernod, Oxygènée, absinthe, bottles smashing, bottles cast aside, falling with a thud on the ground in parks, under benches, beds, cinema seats, hidden in drawers at Consulates, bottles of Calvados dropped and broken, or bursting into smithereens, tossed into garbage heaps, flung into the sea, the Mediterranean, the Caspian, the Caribbean, bottles floating in the ocean, dead Scotchmen on the Atlantic highlands—and now he saw them, smelt them, all, from the very beginning—bottles, bottles, bottles, and glasses, glasses, glasses, of bitter, of Dubonnet, of Falstaff, Rye, Johnny Walker, Vieux Whiskey blanc Canadien, the apéritifs, the digestifs, the demis, the dobles, the noch ein Herr Obers, the et glas Araks, the tusen taks, the bottles, the bottles, the beautiful bottles of tequila, and the gourds, gourds, gourds, the millions of gourds of beautiful mescal . . ."

"I wake to a darkness in which I must follow myself endlessly, hating the I who so eternally pursues and confronts me. If we could rise from our misery, seek each other once more, and find again the solace of each other’s lips and eyes."

"The poor old creature seemed now indeed like someone being drawn, lured, into events of which he has no real comprehension, by people with whom he wishes to be friendly, even to play, who entice him by encouraging that wish and by whom, because they really despise and desire to humilate him, he is finally entangled."

"What is man but a little soul holding up a corpse?"

"There was no callousness in their faces, no cruelty. Death they knew, better than the law, and their memories were long. They sat ranked now, motionless, frozen, discussing nothing, without a word, turned to stone. It was natural to have left the matter to the men. And yet, in these old women it was as if, through the various tragedies of Mexican history, pity, the impulse to approach, and terror, the impulse to escape (as one had learned at college), having replaced it, had finally been reconciled by prudence, the conviction it is better to stay where you are."

"In the war to come correspondents would assume unheard of importance, plunging through flame to feed the public its little gobbets of dehydrated excrement."

"He had peered out at the garden, and it was as though bits of his eyelids had broken off and were flittering and jittering before him, turning into nervous shapes and shadows, jumping to the guilty chattering in his mind, not quite voices yet, but they were coming back, they were coming back; a picture of his soul as a town appeared once more before him, but this time a town ravaged and stricken in the black path of his excess and shutting his burning eyes he had thought of the beautiful functioning of the system in those who were truly alive, switches connected, nerves rigid only in real danger, and in nightmareless sleep now calm, not resting, yet poised: a peaceful village."

"Yes, I do love you, I have all the love in the world left for you, only that love seems so far away from me and so strange too, for it is as though I could almost hear it, a droning or weeping, but far, far away, and a sad lost sound, it might be either approaching or receding, I can’t tell which."

"There was something in the wild strength of this landscape, once a battlefield, that seemed to be shouting at him, a presence born of that strength whose cry his whole being recognized as familiar, caught and threw back into the wind, some youthful passage of courage and pride — the passionate, yet so nearly always hypocritical, affirmation of one’s soul perhaps, he thought, of the desire to be, to do, good, what was right."

"How alike are the groans of love, to those of the dying."

"And how could he know whether it was a good omen or not without another drink?"

"In the final analysis there was no one you could trust to drink with you to the bottom of the bowl."

"How shall the murdered man convince his assassin he will not haunt him."

"For a time they confronted each other like two mute unspeaking forts."

"But my lord, Yvonne, surely you know by this time I can’t get drunk however much I drink."

"And this is how I sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world: but the name of this land is hell."

"What beauty can compare to that of a cantina in the early morning?"

"Nothing in the world was more terrible than an empty bottle! Unless it was an empty glass."

"The howling pariah dogs, the cocks that herald dawn all night, the drumming, the moaning that will be found later white plumage huddled on telegraph wires in back gardens or fowl roosting in apple trees, the eternal sorrow that never sleeps of great Mexico."

"No se puede vivir sin amar."

"Though tragedy was in the process of becoming unreal and meaningless it seemed one was still permitted to remember the days when an individual life held some value and was not a mere misprint in a communiqué."

"There was no mistaking, even in the uncertain light, the hand, half crabbed, half generous, and wholly drunken, of the Consul himself, the Greek e’s, the flying buttresses of d’s, the t’s like lonely wayside crosses save where they crucified an entire word."

"The will of man is unconquerable. Even God cannot conquer it."

"What for you lie?" the Chief of Rostrums repeated in a glowering voice. "You say your name is Black. No es Black." He shoved him backwards toward the door. "You say you are a wrider." He shoved him again. "You no are a wrider." He pushed the Consul more violently, but the Consul stood his ground. "You are no a de wrider, you are de espider, and we shoota de espiders in Méjico."

"Christ," he remarked, puzzled, "this is a dingy way to die."

"[Standing and leaning on a bridge] Where are the advertisements? Where the shopping arcade, the coal merchant and the parked cars? This is a part of the Metropolitan Railway that's been entirely forgotten. Beyond Aylesbury it lies in flat fields with huge elms and distant blue hills."

"Steam took us onwards, through the ripening fields, Ripe for development. Where the landscape yields Clay for warm brick, timber for post and rail Through Amersham to Aylesbury and the Vale. In those wet fields the railway didn't pay. The Metro stops at Amersham to-day."

"Child of the First War, Forgotten by the Second. We called you Metro-Land. We laid our schemes Lured by the lush brochure, down byways beckoned, To build at last the cottage of our dreams, A City clerk turned countryman again, And linked to the Metropolis by train."

"There was sun enough for lazing upon beaches, There was fun enough for far into the night. But I’m dying now and done for, What on earth was all the fun for? For God’s sake keep that sunlight out of sight."

"[Sitting at table] Is this Buckingham Palace? Are we at the Ritz? No. This is the Chiltern Court Restaurant, built above Baker Street station, the gateway between Metro-land out there and London down there. The creation of the Metropolitan Railway."

"In the Garden City Café with its murals on the wall Before a talk on "Sex and Civics" I meditated on the Fall."

"Gaily into Ruislip Gardens Runs the red electric train, With a thousand Ta’s and Pardon’s Daintily alights Elaine; Hurries down the concrete station With a frown of concentration, Out into the outskirt’s edges Where a few surviving hedges Keep alive our lost Elysium—rural Middlesex again."

"And here, screened by shrubs, Walled in from public view, Lived the kept women. What puritan arms have stretched within these rooms To touch what tender breasts, As the cab-horse stamped in the road outside. Sweet secret suburb on the City's rim, St John's Wood."

"Milk and then just as it comes dear? I’m afraid the preserve’s full of stones; Beg pardon, I’m soiling the doileys With afternoon tea-cakes and scones."

"And girls in slacks remember Dad, And oafish louts remember Mum, And sleepless children’s hearts are glad, And Christmas-morning bells say ‘Come!’ Even to shining ones who dwell Safe in the Dorchester Hotel. And is it true? And is it true, This most tremendous tale of all, Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue, A Baby in an ox’s stall? The Maker of the stars and sea Become a Child on earth for me?"

"In the licorice fields at Pontefract My love and I did meet And many a burdened licorice bush Was blooming round our feet; Red hair she had and golden skin, Her sulky lips were shaped for sin, Her sturdy legs were flannel-slack'd The strongest legs in Pontefract."

"No love that in a family dwells, No carolling in frosty air, Nor all the steeple-shaking bells Can with this single Truth compare— That God was man in Palestine And lives to-day in Bread and Wine."

"And behind their frail partitions Business women lie and soak, Seeing through the draughty skylight Flying clouds and railway smoke.Rest you there, poor unbelov'd ones, Lap your loneliness in heat, All too soon the tiny breakfast, Trolley-bus and windy street!"