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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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O sweet clean earth, from whom the green blade cometh!When we are dead, my best belovèd and I,Close well above us, that we may rest forever,Sending up grass and blossoms to the sky.
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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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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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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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From some, the light was scarcely more than a gloom:From some, a dazzling desire.
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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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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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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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We flow, we descend, we turn . . . and the eternal dreamerMoves among us like light, like evening air . . .
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We reach vague-gesturing hands, we lift our heads,Hear sounds far off,-and dream, with quivering breath,Our curious separate ways through life and death.