Conrad Aiken Quotes
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'I bound her to me in all soft ways,I bound her to me in a net of days,Yet now she has gone in silence and said no word.How can we face these dazzling things, I ask you?There is no use: we cry: and are not heard.
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Let us retrace our steps: I have deceived you:Nothing is here I could not frankly tell you:No hint of guilt, or faithlessness, or threat.Dreams-they are madness. Staring eyes-illusion.Let us return, hear music, and forget . . .
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We rub the darkness from our eyes,And face our thousand devious secret mornings . . .And do not see how the pale mist, slowly ascending,Shaped by the sun, shines like a white-robed dreamerCompassionate over our towers bending.
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Time is a dream, he thinks, a destroying dream;It lays great cities in dust, it fills the seas;It covers the face of beauty, and tumbles walls.Where was the woman he loved? Where was his youth?Where was the dream that burned his brain like fire?Even a dream grows grey at last and falls.
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What was this dream we had, a dream of music,Music that rose from the opening earth like magicAnd shook its beauty upon us and died away?The long cold streets extend once more before us.The red sun drops, the walls grow grey.
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Separate we come, and separate we go, And this be it known, is all that we know.
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Before him, numberless lovers smiled and talked.And death was observed with sudden cries,And birth with laughter and pain.And the trees grew taller and blacker against the skiesAnd night came down again.
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The music ends. The screen grows dark. We hurryTo go our devious secret ways, forgettingThose many lives . . . We loved, we laughed, we killed,We danced in fire, we drowned in a whirl of sea-waves.The flutes are stilled, and a thousand dreams are stilled.
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Music I heard with you was more than music,And bread I broke with you was more than bread;Now that I am without you, all is desolate;All that was once so beautiful is dead.
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'I will ask them all, I will ask them all their dreams,I will hold my light above them and seek their faces.I will hear them whisper, invisible in their veins . . .'The eternal asker of answers becomes as the darkness,Or as a wind blown over a myriad forest,Or as the numberless voices of long-drawn rains.
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Weave, weave, weave, you streaks of rain!I am dissolved and woven again...Thousands of faces rise and vanish before me.Thousands of voices weave in the rain.
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Was forty, then, too old for work like this?Why should it be? He'd never been afraid-His eye was sure, his hand was steady . . .But dreams had meanings.