Conrad Aiken Quotes
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Once I loved, and she I loved was darkened.Again I loved, and love itself was darkened.Vainly we follow the circle of shadowy days.The screen at last grows dark, the flutes are silent.The doors of night are closed. We go our ways.
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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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'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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Each gleaming point of light is like a seedDilating swiftly to coiling fires.Each cloud becomes a rapidly dimming face,Each hurrying face records its strange desires.
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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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Come back, true love! Sweet youth, return!-But time goes on, and will, unheeding,Though hands will reach, and eyes will yearn,And the wild days set true hearts bleeding.
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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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The young boy whistles, hurrying down the street,The young girl hums beneath her breath.One goes out to beauty, and does not know it.And one goes out to death.
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There, in the high bright window he dreams, and seesWhat we are blind to,-we who mass and crowdFrom wall to wall in the darkening of a cloud.
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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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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.
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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.