Conrad Aiken Quotes
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Whitman had a profound influence on me. … He was useful to me in the perfection of form, as a sort of compromise between the strict and the free.
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My veins are afire with music,Her eyes have kissed me, my body is turned to light;I shall dream to her secret heart tonight...
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Death is a meeting place of sea and sea.
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The wandering one, the inquisitive dreamer of dreams,The eternal asker of answers, stands in the street,And lifts his palms for the first cold ghost of rain.
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Walk with me world, upon my right hand walk, speak to me Babel, that I may strive to assemble of all these syllables a single word before the purpose of speech is gone.
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His thoughts were blown and scattered like leaves;He thought of the pail . . . Why, then, was it forgotten?Because he would not need it?
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The poet walked alone in a cold late rain,And thought his grief was like the crying of sea-birds;For his lover was dead, he never would love again.
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A chorus of elfin voices blowing about meWeaves to a babel of sound. Each cries a secret.I run among them, reach out vain hands, and drown.
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I walk in a cloud of wonder; I am glad.I mingle among the crowds; my heart is pounding;You do not guess the adventure I have had! . . .Yet you, too, all have had your dark adventures,Your sudden adventures, or strange, or sweet . . .My peril goes out from me, is blown among you.We loiter, dreaming together, along the street.
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Our hands are hot and raw with the stones we have laid,We have built a tower of stone high into the sky,We have built a city of towers.
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We were all born of flesh, in a flare of pain,We do not remember the red roots whence we rose,But we know that we rose and walked, that after a whileWe shall lie down again.
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And, growing tired, we turn aside at last,Remember our secret selves, seek out our towers,Lay weary hands on the banisters, and climb;Climbing, each, to his little four-square dreamOf love or lust or beauty or death or crime.
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'I am the one who stood beside you and smiled,Thinking your face so strangely young . . . 'I am the one who loved you but did not dare.'
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Two lovers, here at the corner, by the steeple,Two lovers blow together like music blowing:And the crowd dissolves about them like a sea.Recurring waves of sound break vaguely about them,They drift from wall to wall, from tree to tree.
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'When you are dead your spirit will find my spirit,And then we shall die no more.'
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It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morningWhen the light drips through the shutters like the dew,I arise, I face the sunrise,And do the things my fathers learned to do.Stars in the purple dusk above the rooftopsPale in a saffron mist and seem to die,And I myself on a swiftly tilting planetStand before a glass and tie my tie.
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What did we build it for? Was it all a dream? . . .Ghostly above us in lamplight the towers gleam . . .And after a while they will fall to dust and rain;Or else we will tear them down with impatient hands;And hew rock out of the earth, and build them again.
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He would not yield, he thought, and walk more slowly,As if he knew for certain he walked to death:But with his usual pace,-deliberate, firm,Looking about him calmly, watching the world,Taking his ease . . .
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One of us sings in the street, and we listen to him;The words ring over us like vague bells of sorrow.He sings of a house he lived in long ago.It is strange; this house of dust was the house I lived in;The house you lived in, the house that all of us know.
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Two lovers move in the crowd like a link of music,We press upon them, we hold them, and let them pass;A chord of music strikes us and straight we tremble;We tremble like wind-blown grass.
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In the mazes of loitering people, the watchful and furtive,The shadows of tree-trunks and shadows of leaves,In the drowse of the sunlight, among the low voices,I suddenly face you
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And we recall, with a gleaming stab of sadness,Vaguely and incoherently, some dreamOf a world we came from, a world of sun-blue hills . . .A black wood whispers around us, green eyes gleam;Someone cries in the forest, and someone kills.
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Lovers walk in the noontime by that fountain.Pigeons dip their beaks to drink from the water.And soon the pond must freeze.
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From some, the light was scarcely more than a gloom:From some, a dazzling desire.