Hilda Doolittle quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Hilda Doolittle

Hilda Doolittle Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Hilda Doolittle on Wise Famous Quotes.

Not God
with wine,
nor death,
nor hate for a cry,
but God with a song

The heart
the heart
the heart
how it thrives on hate.

There is no man can take,
there is no pool can slake,
ultimately I am alone;
ultimately I am done.

Cheat me not with time,
with the dull ache of flesh,
for all flesh turns,
even the loveliest
ankle and frail thigh,
to bitterest dust.

The elixir of life, the philosopher's stone
is yours if you surrender
sterile logic, trivial reason.

O happy, happy each
man whom predestined fate
leads to the holy rite
of hill and mountain worship.

Fall the deep curtains,
delicate the weave,
fair the thread.

There must be real gods
see, the painted gods
how fair!

Light threatens, is active, is gone,
so it is with a song.

Sing
and your hell is heaven,
your heaven less hell.

In my garden
the winds have beaten
the ripe lilies;
in my garden, the salt
has wilted the first flakes
of young narcissus.

We are these people,
wistful, ironical, wilful,
who have no part in
new-world reconstruction,
in the confederacy of labour.

Every concrete object
has abstract value, is timeless
in the dream parallel.

We don't have to know,only to be:let go the jumble of worn words,reason and vanity.

War is a fevered god who takes alike maiden and king and clod ...

The Greeks have snatched up their spears.
They have pointed the helms of their ships
Toward the bulwarks of Troy.

I had drawn away into the salt,
myself, a shell
emptied of life.

You are wind in a stark tree,
you are the stark tree unbent,
you are a strung bow,
you are an arrow.

One flower may slay the winter
and meet death.

Dance until the earth dance.

But beauty is set apart,
beauty is cast by the sea,
a barren rock,
beauty is set about
with wrecks of ships ...

Love that I bear
within my breast
how is my armour melted
how my heart

Maid
of the luminous grey-eyes,
Mistress
of honey and marble implacable white thighs
and Goddess,
chaste daughter of Zeus.

When you would think,
"what was the use of it,"
you'll remember
something you can't grasp
and you'll wonder
what it was.

Thoth, Hermes, the stylus,
the palette, the pen, the quill endure,
though our books are a floor
of smouldering ash under our feet.

The stallion and his mare,
unbridled, with arrow-pattern,
are worked on.
the blue cloth
before the door
of religion and inspiration ...

You will not see
that desire begets
love,
until it all flames
into one concise
and metallic blaze.

When the shingles hissed
in the rain incendiary,
other values were revealed to us

Ardent
yet chill and formal,
how I ache
to tempt a chisel
as a sculptor.

No one knows,
the heart of a child,
how it grows
until it is too late.

Take what the old-church
found in Mithra's tomb,
candle and script and bell,
take what the new-church spat upon
and broke and shattered.

I smiled,
I waited,
I was circumspect;
O never, never, never write that I
missed life or loving.

For this beauty,
beauty without strength,
chokes out life.

(Those women whom the distaff
no longer claims
nor spun cloth)
driven made,
mad,
mad
by Bacchus.

Lovers may come and go,
there was the memory of blood,
the low call.

I spit
honey out of my mouth:
nothing is second-best
after the sweet of Eros.

I could not accept from wisdom
what love taught,
woman is perfect.

The quivering
of Psyche's butterflies.

Lift up our eyes to you?
no, God, we stare and stare,
upon a nearer thing
that greets us here,
Death, violent and near.

A slight wind shakes the seed-pods
my thoughts are spent
as the black seeds.

For you are abstract,
making no mistake,
slurring no word
in the rhythm you make,
the poem,
writ in the air.

Escape
from the power of the hunting pack,
and to know that wisdom is best
and beauty
sheer holiness.

Why wait for Death to mow?
why wait for Death to sow
us in the ground?

Dead men would start and move
toward me to learn of love.

Ah love is bitter and sweet,
but which is more sweet
the bitterness or the sweetness,
none has spoken it.

I fear no man, no woman;
flower does not fear
bird, insect nor adder.

The things I have
are nameless,
old and true;
they may not be named;
few may live and know.

O ruthless, perilous, imperious hate,
you can not thwart
the promptings of my soul.

Love is a garment
riven in the light
that rises from Parnassus,
showing
the night is over.

The race may or may not be to the swift,
but tell me, is it likely
that the fight will be entrusted to the dead?

No poetic phantasy
but a biological reality,
a fact: I am an entity
like bird, insect, plant
or sea-plant cell;
I live; I am alive.

I will be free,
no lover's kiss
to bind me to earth,
no bliss of love
to counteract
actual bliss.

Love, why have you sought the horde
of spearsmen, why the tent
Achilles pitched beside the river-ford?

No one knows the colour of a flower
till it is broken.

Music sets up ladders,
it makes us invisible,
it sets us apart,
it lets us escape;
but from the visible
there is no escape.

Could beauty be beaten out,
O youth the cities have sent
to strike at each other's strength,
it is you who have kept her alight.

Who dreams of a son,
save one,
childless, having no bright
face to flatter its own,
who dreams of a son?

It is no madness to say
you will fall, you great cities.

The whole white world is ours.

My eye-balls are glass,
my limbs marble,
my face fixed
in its marble mask.

Long hours
trail in their purple
and long years are lost
in just this moment
while our souls are near,
our mouths separate.

I testify
to rainbow feathers, to the span of heaven
and walls of colour,
the colonnades of jasper.

Passionate grave thought,
belief enhanced,
ritual returned and magic.

Until it seems the whole city will be covered with gold pollen shaken from the bell-towers, lilies plundered with the weight of massive bees ...