Conrad Aiken Quotes
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.
Conrad Aiken
Quotes to Explore
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.
Conrad Aiken
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...
Conrad Aiken
Death is a meeting place of sea and sea.
Conrad Aiken
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.
Conrad Aiken
His thoughts were blown and scattered like leaves;He thought of the pail . . . Why, then, was it forgotten?Because he would not need it?
Conrad Aiken
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.
Conrad Aiken
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.
Conrad Aiken
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.
Conrad Aiken
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.
Conrad Aiken
'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.'
Conrad Aiken
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.
Conrad Aiken
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.
Conrad Aiken
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.
Conrad Aiken
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.
Conrad Aiken
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.
Conrad Aiken
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.
Conrad Aiken
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.
Conrad Aiken
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.
Conrad Aiken
From some, the light was scarcely more than a gloom:From some, a dazzling desire.
Conrad Aiken
'When you are dead your spirit will find my spirit,And then we shall die no more.'
Conrad Aiken
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 . . .
Conrad Aiken
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.
Conrad Aiken
Over the darkened city, the city of towers,The city of a thousand gates,Over the gleaming terraced roofs, the huddled towers,Over a somnolent whisper of loves and hates,The slow wind flows, drearily streams and falls,With a mournful sound down rain-dark walls.
Conrad Aiken
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.
Conrad Aiken
