Arthur Symons Quotes
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What we ask of him is, that he should find out for us more than we can find out for ourselves.... He must have the passion of a lover.
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Criticism is properly the rod of divination: a hazel switch for the discovery of buried treasure, not a birch twig for the castigation of offenders.
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Here in a little lonely roomI am master of earth and sea,And the planets come to me.
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My life is like a music-hall,Where, in the impotence of rage,Chained by enchantment to my stall,I see myself upon the stageDance to amuse a music-hall.
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My soul is like this cloudy, flaming opal ring.
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They pass upon their old, tremulous feet,Creeping with little satchels down the street,And they remember, many years ago,Passing that way in silks. They wander, slowAnd solitary, through the city ways,And they alone remember those old daysMen have forgotten.
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And I would have, now love is over,An end to all, an end:I cannot, having been your lover,Stoop to become your friend!
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They weave a slow andante as in sleep,Scaled yellow, swampy black, plague-spotted white;With blue and lidless eyes at watch they keepA treachery of silence; infinite.
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I have loved colours, and not flowers;Their motion, not the swallows wings;And wasted more than half my hoursWithout the comradeship of things.
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I have laid sorrow to sleep;Love sleeps.She who oft made me weepNow weeps.
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He knew that the whole mystery of beauty can never be comprehended by the crowd, and that while clearness is a virtue of style, perfect explicitness is not a necessary virtue.
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O my child, who wronged you first, and beganFirst the dance of death that you dance so well?Soul for soul: and I think the soul of a manShall answer for yours in hell.
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Sweet, can I sing you the song of your kisses?How soft is this one, how subtle this is,How fluttering swift as a bird's kiss that is,As a bird that taps at a leafy lattice;How this one clings and how that unclosesFrom bud to flower in the way of roses.
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The gray-green stretch of sandy grass,Indefinitely desolate;A sea of lead, a sky of slate;Already autumn in the air, alas!One stark monotony of stone,The long hotel, acutely white,Against the after-sunset lightWithers gray-green, and takes the grass's tone.
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Emmy's exquisite youth and her virginal air,Eyes and teeth in the flash of a musical smile,Come to me out of the past, and I see her thereAs I saw her once for a while.
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I heard the sighing of the reedsAt noontide and at evening,And some old dream I had forgottenI seemed to be remembering.
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The gipsy tents are on the down,The gipsy girls are here;And it's O to be off and away from the townWith a gipsy for my dear!
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The mystic too full of God to speak intelligibly to the world.
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The wind is rising on the sea,The windy white foam-dancers leap;And the sea moans uneasily,And turns to sleep, and cannot sleep.
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Without charm there can be no fine literature, as there can be no perfect flower without fragrance.