TERMS STARTING WITH
TERMS ANYWHERE
A great deal of what is too obscure to be intelligible, breaking now and again into bursts of great poetry, wherein deep esoteric meanings are apparent: such are the 77 poems of Taliesin.
AjantA. A complex of some thirty caves and subsidiary structures in India, renowned for its exemplary Buddhist artwork. Named after a neighboring village, the caves are carved from the granite cliffs at a bend in the Wagurna River valley, northeast of AURANGABAD, in the modern Indian state of Maharashtra. The grottoes were excavated in two phases, the first of which lasted from approximately 100 BCE to 100 CE, the second from c. 462 to 480, and consist primarily of monastic cave residences (VIHARA) and sanctuaries (CAITYA). The sanctuaries include four large, pillared STuPA halls, each enshrining a central monumental buddha image, which renders the hall both a site for worship and a buddha's dwelling (GANDHAKUtĪ), where he presides over the activities of the monks in residence. The murals and sculpture located at AjantA include some of the best-preserved examples of ancient Buddhist art. Paintings throughout the complex are especially noted for their depiction of accounts from the Buddha's previous lives (JATAKA). Despite the presence of some AVALOKITEsVARA images at the site, it is Sanskrit texts of mainstream Buddhism, and especially the MuLASARVASTIVADA school, that are the source and inspiration for the paintings of AjantA. Indeed, almost all of AjantA's narrative paintings are based on accounts appearing in the MuLASARVASTIVADA VINAYA, as well as the poems of Aryasura and AsVAGHOsA. On the other hand, the most common type of sculptural image at AjantA (e.g., Cave 4) is a seated buddha making a variant of the gesture of turning the wheel of the dharma (DHARMACAKRAMUDRA), flanked by the two bodhisattvas AVALOKITEsVARA and VAJRAPAnI. The deployment of this mudrA and the two flanking bodhisattvas indicates that these buddha images are of VAIROCANA and suggests that tantric elements that appear in the MAHAVAIROCANABHISAMBODHISuTRA and the MANJUsRĪMuLAKALPA, both of which postdate the AjantA images, developed over an extended period of time and had precursors that influenced the iconography at AjantA. Inscriptions on the walls of the earliest part of the complex, primarily in Indian Prakrits, attest to an eclectic, even syncretic, pattern of religious observance and patronage. Later epigraphs found at the site associate various patrons with Harisena (r. 460-477), the last known monarch of the VAkAtaka royal family. VarAhadeva, for example, who patronized Cave 16, was one of Harisena's courtiers, while Cave 1 was donated by Harisena himself, and Cave 2 may have been patronized by a close relative, perhaps one of Harisena's wives. Cave 16's central image, a buddha seated on a royal throne with legs pendant (BHADRASANA), is the first stone sculpture in this iconographic form found in western India. Introduced to India through the tradition of KUSHAN royal portraiture, the bhadrAsana has been interpreted as a position associated with royalty and worldly action. This sculpture may thus have functioned as a portrait sculpture; it may even allegorize Harisena as the Buddha. In fact, it is possible that VarAhadeva may have originally intended to enshrine a buddha seated in the cross-legged lotus position (VAJRAPARYAnKA) but changed his plan midway in the wake of a regional war that placed Harisena's control over the AjantA region in jeopardy. Around 480, the constructions at AjantA came to a halt with the destruction of the VAkAtaka family. The caves were subsequently abandoned and became overgrown, only to be discovered in 1819 by a British officer hunting a tiger. They quickly became the object of great archaeological and art historical interest, and were designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983.
Also, the ancient Roman fire god, who has always been identified with the Greek Hephaestos, popularly regarded by the Latins as having his workshops under several volcanic islands, but especially under Mt. Aetna. The isle of Lemnos was always sacred to him. He is represented, as are similar divinities such as the Hindu Visvakarman or Tvashtri, as a fashioner, artificer, or architectural builder of the cosmic structure; and like his counterparts, the smith of the gods and maker of their divine weapons, lord of the constructive arts, master of a thousand handicrafts, etc. Not only was his forge in Olympus supplied with fire, anvils, and all the necessities of a blacksmith, according to the figurative stories of Greek and Latin mythology, but he was attended by automatic handmaidens whom Vulcan himself had fashioned. The deity is prominent in the Homeric poems, where he is represented as the son of Jupiter and Juno.
angel of the order of powers. In one of her poems
anthology ::: n. --> A discourse on flowers.
A collection of flowers; a garland.
A collection of flowers of literature, that is, beautiful passages from authors; a collection of poems or epigrams; -- particularly applied to a collection of ancient Greek epigrams.
A service book containing a selection of pieces for the festival services.
Asvaghosa. (T. Rta dbyangs; C. Maming; J. Memyo; K. Mamyong 馬鳴) (c. second century CE). An Indian Buddhist poet from sRAVASTĪ, renowned for his epic kAvya poem, the BUDDHACARITA, the first complete biography of the Buddha. According to traditional accounts, Asvaghosa was born into a brAhmana family in AyodhyA during the reign of the KUSHAN king KANIsKA and was converted to Buddhism by the VAIBHAsIKA teacher PARsVA. His poetic works are esteemed for their distinguished artistic merit, considered representative of the high Sanskritic literary tradition. While the Buddhacarita is Asvaghosa's most famous work, he authored numerous other epic poems including the Saundarananda ("The Handsome Nanda," an account of NANDA's conversion) and the sAriputraprakarana ("Story of sARIPUTRA"). East Asian tradition also attributes to Asvaghosa the DASHENG QIXIN LUN (Awakening of Faith), a treatise on TATHAGATAGARBHA thought that is now widely presumed to be an indigenous Chinese treatise (see APOCRYPHA). ¶ A second tantric Asvaghosa, author of the GURUPANCAsIKA (a brief text detailing the proper worship of a tantric guru), lived in about the tenth century.
Azrael and Other Poems. See Welsh.
balladry ::: n. --> Ballad poems; the subject or style of ballads.
bard: An ancient Celtic poet, singer and harpist who recited heroic poems by memory, or more generally, in modern usage, a synonym for any poet. When referred to as The Bard, this is a reference to Shakespeare.
Bhagavad Gita: Sanskrit for Song of the Divine One. The title of a celebrated philosophic epic poem, inserted in the Mahabharata (q.v.), containing a dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna, which clearly indicates the relationship between morality and absolute ethical values in the Hindu philosophy of action (Karma Yoga); it is considered to be one of the most influential philosophical poems of Sanskrit literature; the exact date of origin is unknown.
Bo Juyi. [alt. Bai Juyi] (J. Haku Kyoi; K. Paek Koi 白居易) (772-846). A celebrated Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty; also known as Yaotian (Enjoying Heaven) and Layman Xiangshan. Bo Juyi was born in Henan to a destitute family with a scholarly background. He passed the civil examinations at the age of twenty-seven and held various government positions throughout his political career. Bo Juyi was exiled in 815 from the capital of Chang'an for his criticisms of governmental policies, after which he turned to Buddhism for solace. Bo Juyi befriended numerous CHAN masters of his time and studied under Foguang Ruman (d.u.), a disciple of the renowned Chan master MAZU DAOYI. He acquired his Buddhist toponym Xiangshan during his residence at the monastery of XIANGSHANSI. In addition to his famous collections of poems, such as the Changhen ge, Bo Juyi also left numerous funerary inscriptions that he composed for deceased monks. His writings were compiled together in his Baishi wenji, in seventy-five rolls.
bokuseki. (墨蹟). In Japanese, "ink traces"; generally referring to any sort of calligraphy executed by an ink brush on paper or silk. The Japanese monk Murata Juko (1422-1502) is said to have hung in his tea room the calligraphy of the Song-dynasty CHAN master YUANWU KEQIN, which he had received from his teacher IKKYu SoJUN, a practice that seems to have had no precedent in Japan. Following his lead, monks largely from the GOZAN lineage began to collect the calligraphy of eminent Song-dynasty Chan masters such as DAHUI ZONGGAO and XUTANG ZHIYU to display in their private quarters and tea rooms. From the time of the Zen and tea master Sen no Rikyu (Soeki Rikyu; 1521-1591), the calligraphy of Japanese Zen monks such as MYoAN EISAI, DoGEN KIGEN, and MUSo SoSEKI began to be seen as valuable commodities. The calligraphy of Zen masters belonging to the DAITOKUJI lineage such as SoHo MYoCHo, Ikkyu Sojun, and TAKUAN SoHo also came to be highly prized. Beginning with Sen no Rikyu, the practice of collecting relatively simple calligraphy, comprised largely of a single, horizontally executed line, came to be favored over those containing longer poems or sermons written in vertical lines.
Chan zong Yongjia ji. (J. Zenshu Yokashu; K. Sonjong Yongga chip 禪宗永嘉集). In Chinese, "Collection of Yonjia of the Chan School," attributed to the CHAN master YONGJIA XUANJUE; also known as the Yongjia ji, Yongjia chanzong ji, and Yongjia chanji. This text was an influential collection of poems that delineated the fundamental principles of meditation and the proper means of practice. The collection consists of ten major sections: (1) "intent and formalities in appreciating the way," (2) "haughtiness in keeping moral precepts (sĪLA)," (3) "the pure cultivation of the three modes of action," (4) "song of sAMATHA," (5) "song of VIPAsYANA," (6) "song of UPEKsA," (7) "gradual cultivation of the three vehicles," (8) "principle and phenomena are nondual," (9) "letters of encouragement to a friend," and (10) "vows." There is a famous commentary on this text by the Song-dynasty monk Xingding (d.u.) entitled the (Chan zong) Yongjia ji zhu. In 1464, a vernacular Korean translation of Xingding's text, with translation and commentary attributed to King Sejo (1455-1468) of the Choson dynasty, was published in Korea by the official Bureau of Scriptural Publication; this was one of the earliest texts composed in the new vernacular writing system of Han'gŭl.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: Born in England in 1772, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an influential Romantic poet. He is well regarded for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan. See romanticism.
Crashaw, Richard. Steps to the Temple. Sacred Poems.
Dahui Pujue chanshi zongmen wuku. (J. Daie Fukaku zenji shumon muko; K. Taehye Pogak sonsa chongmun mugo 大慧普覺禪師宗門武庫). In Chinese, "CHAN Master Dahui Pujue's Arsenal of the Tradition," edited in one roll by the monk Daoqian (d.u.); also known by the abbreviated titles Dahui wuku and Zongmen wuku. The preface to the text is dated 1186. Daoqian edited together over a hundred of his teacher DAHUI ZONGGAO's stories, anecdotes, inscriptions, and poems. The wide range of material that appears in the Dahui Pujue chanshi zongmen wuku serves as an important source for the study of the lives and thoughts of eminent monks and laymen, some of whom would otherwise no longer be known to us. Most of the stories, however, concern the deeds and words of Dahui's teachers YUANWU KEQIN and Dantang Wenzhun (1061-1115), Yuanwu's teacher WUZU FAYAN, and Dantang's teacher ZHENJING KEWEN.
diction ::: n. --> Choice of words for the expression of ideas; the construction, disposition, and application of words in discourse, with regard to clearness, accuracy, variety, etc.; mode of expression; language; as, the diction of Chaucer&
divan ::: n. --> A book; esp., a collection of poems written by one author; as, the divan of Hafiz.
In Turkey and other Oriental countries: A council of state; a royal court. Also used by the poets for a grand deliberative council or assembly.
A chief officer of state.
A saloon or hall where a council is held, in Oriental countries, the state reception room in places, and in the houses of the
Donne, John: Born in 1572 Donne was a metaphysical poet who wrote sonnets, love poems, satires, elegies and religious poetry. His writing is noted for its sensual style and vividness. He died in 1631. See metaphysical.
Editions Club The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe is a
Flamelike, inscrutable the almighty Guest” From: The Guest - Collected Poems of Sri Aurobindo
Flamelike, inscrutable the almighty Guest” From: The Guest—Collected Poems of Sri Aurobindo
Hanshan. (J. Kanzan; K. Hansan 寒山) (d.u.; fl. mid-eighth century). In Chinese, "Cold Mountain"; sobriquet of a legendary Tang dynasty poet and iconoclast of near-mythic status within Chinese Buddhism. The HANSHAN SHI, one of the best-loved collection of poems in the Chinese Buddhist tradition, is attributed to this obscure figure. Hanshan (Cold Mountain) is primarily known as a hermit who dwelled on Mt. Tiantai, in present-day Zhejiang province. References to Hanshan are scattered throughout the discourse records (YULU) of various Chan masters and biographies of eminent monks (GAOSENG ZHUAN). Hanshan also became a favored object in brushstroke art (BOKUSEKI), in which he is often depicted together with SHIDE and FENGGAN. Together, these three iconoclasts are known as the "three recluses of Guoqing [monastery]."
Hanshan shi. (J. Kanzan shi; K. Hansan si 寒山詩). In Chinese, "Cold Mountain's Poems," attributed to the legendary Chinese iconoclast HANSHAN (Cold Mountain); also known as Hanshan shiji. Sometime between 766 and 779, Hanshan is presumed to have retired to Mt. Tiantai (in present-day Zhejiang province), where he composed his famous poetry. The poems of the legendary monks FENGGAN and SHIDE are also included at the end of Hanshan's poetry collection. During the Song dynasty, the Hanshan shi was also known as the Sanyin ji ("Collection of the Three Recluses"). The Hanshan shi was widely read for its sharp satire of his times and its otherworldliness. The earliest edition was published in 1189 at the monastery of Guoqingsi on Mt. Tiantai.
(Heb. Garden of Spice) Commentary on liturgical poems containing much midrashic material, written in c. 1234 by Abraham ben Azriel; central Europe.
Hera (Greek) Olympian divinity, sister and consort of Zeus, counterpart of the Roman Juno. According to the Homeric poems she was accorded the same honors by the other divinities as Zeus himself, who counseled with her and also shared with her secret things unknown to the other gods. She is represented as Queen of Heaven only at a later date. Like Zeus she had the power to confer the gift of prophecy. Mother of Ares, Hephaistos, and Hebe, she was the goddess of marriage and birth, patron divinity of woman from birth to death, and of domestic duties. Sanctuaries for the worship of Hera existed in many parts of Greece, the principal center being Argos.
Huyèn Quang. (玄光) (1254-1334). Third patriarch of the TRÚC LM school of the Vietnamese THIỀN (C. Chan) tradition; his personal name was Lý Đạo Tái and he was a native of Giang Hạ (present-day Hà Bắc province). After passing the civil-service examination and serving as a scholar-official, he left home to become a monk in 1305, when he was already fifty-one years old. He first studied under Chan master Bão Phác of Lẽ Vĩnh monastery and then became a follower of Tràn Nhan Tông and, after the latter's death, of Pháp Loa, who was thirty years his junior. After a short stint as abbot of Van Yen monastery on Mount Yen Tử, he moved to Côn Sơn monastery. Huyèn Quang was already seventy-seven years old when he succeeded Pháp Loa as the third patriarch of the Trúc Lam school in 1331 but seems never to have had the ambition to lead the Buddhist order. He died at Côn Sơn in 1334. Huyèn Quang was a talented poet, who left behind more than twenty poems, most of which deal with the beauty of the natural world.
Ikkyu Sojun. (一休宗純) (1394-1481). Japanese ZEN master in the RINZAISHu, also known by his sobriquet Kyoun shi (Master Crazy Cloud). Materials on Ikkyu's life are an often indistinguishable mixture of history and legend. Little is known of Ikkyu's early years, but he is said to have been the illegitimate son of Emperor Gokomatsu (r. 1382-1392, 1392-1412). In 1399, Ikkyu was sent to the monastery of ANKOKUJI in Kyoto. In 1410, he left Ankokuji to study under Ken'o Soi (d. 1414), who belonged to the MYoSHINJI branch of Rinzai Zen. After Ken'o's death in 1414, Ikkyu continued his studies under the monk Kaso Sodon (1352-1428) in Katada (present-day Shiga prefecture) near Lake Biwa. Kaso gave him the name Ikkyu, which he continued to use. While studying under Kaso, Ikkyu had his first awakening experience and also acquired some notoriety for his antinomian behavior. Perhaps because of his rivalry with a fellow student named Yoso Soi (1378-1458), Ikkyu left Kaso shortly before his death and headed for the city of Sakai. During this transition period, Ikkyu is said to have briefly returned to lay life, marrying a blind singer and fathering a son. Ikkyu's life in Sakai is shrouded in legend (most of which date to the Tokugawa period). There, he is said to have led the life of a mad monk, preaching in taverns and brothels. In 1437, Ikkyu is also said to have torn up the certificate of enlightenment that his teacher Kaso had prepared for him before his death. In 1440, Ikkyu was called to serve as the abbot of the monastery of DAITOKUJI, but he resigned his post the next year. Ikkyu devoted much of his later life to his famous poetry and brushstroke art. Later, Ikkyu had a falling out with Yoso, who as abbot secured Daitokuji's prominent place in Kyoto. In 1455, Ikkyu published a collection of his poems, the Jikaishu ("Self-Admonishment Collection"), and publicly attacked Yoso. In 1456, Ikkyu restored the dilapidated temple Myoshoji in Takigi (located halfway between Sakai and Kyoto). There, he installed a portrait of the Zen master Daito (see SoHo MYoCHo). Ikkyu also began identifying himself with the Chinese Chan master XUTANG ZHIYU, the spiritual progenitor of the Daitokuji lineage(s), by transforming portraits of Xutang into those of himself. In 1474, Ikkyu was appointed abbot of Daitokuji, which had suffered from a devastating fire during the onin war, and he committed himself to its reconstruction, until his death in 1481. Among his writings, his poetry collection Kyounshu ("Crazy Cloud Anthology") is most famous. Also well known is his Gaikotsu ("Skeletons"), a work, illustrated by Ikkyu himself, about his conversations with skeletons. See also WU'AI XING.
improvvisatore ::: n. --> One who composes and sings or recites rhymes and short poems extemporaneously.
in Percy MacKaye’s Uriel and Other Poems is not
In this article we explore definitions of the words ‘artifice’ and ‘artificer’ from various dictionary sources, their use in two poems, one by Marge Percy, The Bonsai Tree and the other, Sailing to Byzantium by William Butler Yeats, followed by all the brilliant uses by Sri Aurobindo in his magnum opus, Savitri.
in this poet’s mystical poems. It is the title of one
Ishin Suden. (以心崇傳) (1569-1633). Japanese ZEN master in the RINZAISHu. Suden was born in Kii (present-day Wakayama prefecture) and, while still a youth, left home to become a monk at the Zen monastery of NANZENJI. In 1608, he was appointed the scribe of the new shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616). Suden was put in charge of foreign correspondence and was also given the important title of soroku, or registrar general of monks. As soroku, Suden established the hatto ("laws") for temples and monasteries and put them under the direct control of the bakufu government. Suden thus came to be known as the kokui no saisho, or "black-robed minister." With the assistance of the bakufu, Suden also restored Nanzenji to its former glory. Konchi'in, the name of Suden's residences at both Nanzenji and Edo, came to be synonymous with Suden and his policies. After Ieyasu's death, Suden continued to assist the second shogun Tokugawa Hidetada (1579-1632) in political and religious affairs. In 1626, Suden was given the honorary title Ensho Honko kokushi (State Preceptor Perfectly Illuminating, Original Radiance) from Emperor Gomizunoo (r. 1611-1629). His diary, the Honko kokushi nikki, is a valuable source for studying the sociopolitical history of the early Tokugawa bakufu. Suden also left a collection of poems known as the Kanrin gohoshu.
Khuddaka-patha (Pali) Khuddaka-pāṭha [from khuddaka little one + pāṭha reading, text] A Buddhist scripture given to neophytes upon joining the Samgha (the Buddhist brotherhood); first book in the Khuddaka-Nikaya — a collection of short canonical Buddhist books. This brief text contains some of the most beautiful poems in Buddhist literature, and the reverential feelings evoked by reading it are unquestionably the principal reason for its use. It opens with a profession of faith in the Buddha, in the Doctrine, and in the Order.
Khuông Viẹt. (匡越) (933-1011). Prominent Vietnamese monk and royal advisor, a native of Thửờng Lạc (nowadays Thanh Hóa Province, in northern Vietnam). His personal name was Ngô Chan Lưu. According to the THIỀN UYỂN T̤P ANH, he was a descendent of Ngô Thuận Đé. As a young man, he studied Confucianism but later turned to Buddhism, receiving full ordination from CHAN Master Van Phong. Khuông Việt was widely read in the Buddhist scriptures and diligently investigated the teachings of Chan. When he was in his forties, his fame reached the royal court, and King Đinh Tien Hoàng (r. 968-979), the founder of the Đinh dynasty (968-980), summoned him to the capital city and honored him with the rank General Supervisor of Monks. The king also granted him the sobriquet Khuông Việt Thái Sư (Great Master Who Brings Order to Việt). King Le Đại Hành (r. 980-1005), the founder of the former Le dynasty (980-1009), invited him to participate in all military, administrative, and diplomatic affairs, and he was often appointed to receive Chinese envoys. Khuông Việt was particularly famed for his exchange of couplets and poems with the Song-dynasty envoy Li Jue, who reported favorably on Vietnam to the Song-dynasty Emperor.
khush ::: mutrib meaning musician, minstrel; a singer; who or what causes one to dance and skip about for joy; khush meaning sweet, delightful, pleasing. Beginning words of a widely known and highly revered ghazal, generally attributed to Hafiz, which contains the oft quoted refrain tāza ba tāza naw ba naw. (see The Hafez Poems of Gertrude Bell, pg 81)
Kyunyo. (均如) (923-973). Korean monk, exegete, poet, and thaumaturge during the Koryo dynasty, also known as Wont'ong. According to legend, Kyunyo is said to have been so ugly that his parents briefly abandoned him at a young age. His parents died shortly thereafter, and Kyunyo sought refuge at the monastery of Puhŭngsa in 937. Kyunyo later continued his studies under the monk Ǔisun (d.u.) at the powerful monastery of Yongt'ongsa near the Koryo-dynasty capital of Kaesong. There, Kyunyo seems to have gained the support of King Kwangjong (r. 950-975), who summoned him to preach at the palace in 954. Kyunyo's successful performance of miracles for the king won him the title of great worthy (taedok) and wealth for his clan. Kyunyo became famous as an exegete of the AVATAMSAKASuTRA. His approach to this scripture was purportedly catalyzed by the deep split between the exegetical traditions associated with the Korean exegete WoNHYO (617-686) and the Chinese-Sogdian exegete FAZANG (643-712). Kyunyo sought to bridge these two traditions of Hwaom (C. HUAYAN) exegesis in his numerous writings, which came to serve as the orthodox doctrinal standpoint for the clerical examinations (SŬNGKWA) in the Koryo-period KYO school, held at the royal monastery of WANGNYUNSA. In 963, Kyunyo was appointed the abbot of the new monastery of Kwibopsa, which the king established near the capital. Kyunyo's life and some examples of his poetry are recorded in the Kyunyo chon; the collection includes eleven "native songs," or hyangga, one of the largest surviving corpora of Silla-period vernacular poems, which used Sinographs to transcribe Korean. His Buddhist writings include the Sok Hwaom kyobun'gi wont'ong ch'o, Sok Hwaom chigwijang, Sipkujang wont'ong ki, and others.
legitimate ::: a. --> Accordant with law or with established legal forms and requirements; lawful; as, legitimate government; legitimate rights; the legitimate succession to the throne; a legitimate proceeding of an officer; a legitimate heir.
Lawfully begotten; born in wedlock.
Authorized; real; genuine; not false, counterfeit, or spurious; as, legitimate poems of Chaucer; legitimate inscriptions.
Conforming to known principles, or accepted rules; as,
lyric ::: a. --> Alt. of Lyrical ::: n. --> A lyric poem; a lyrical composition.
A composer of lyric poems.
A verse of the kind usually employed in lyric poetry; -- used chiefly in the plural.
MacKaye, Percy. Uriel and Other Poems. Boston:
Mahabharata (Sanskrit) Mahābhārata One of the two great epic poems of ancient India, the largest poetic work known to literature, consisting of 220,000 lines. The masses of tradition and tales in this epic make it the national treasury from which bards, poets, dramatists, and artists, as from an inexhaustible source, draw their themes. It contains the history of the family of the Bharatas in addition to a great many beautiful truly mystical and occult teachings, and a few really splendid minor episodes like the Bhagavad-Gita and Anugita. Tradition makes Vyasa — a generic name of high literary authority, used by at least several archaic writers — the author of this grand poem. The main theme of the epic is the great struggle between the Kauravas and the Pandavas, descendants through Bharata from Puru, the great ancestor of one branch of the Lunar race. The object of the struggle was the kingdom whose capital was Hastinapura (elephant city), the ruins of which are said to be traceable 57 miles northeast of Delhi, on an old bed of the Ganges.
Matsuo Basho. (松尾芭蕉) (1644-1694). A renowned Japanese Buddhist author of the Edo period. Although famous in the West especially for his haiku poetry, Basho is also known for his renga, or linked verse, prose works, literary criticism, diaries, and travelogues, which also contain many famous poems. His most celebrated work is his travel diary, a work in mixed prose and verse entitled Oku no Hosomichi ("Narrow Road to the Deep North"), published posthumously in 1702. He was born in Iga Province (present-day Mie prefecture) to a family of the samurai class, but abandoned that life in favor of living as a Buddhist monk, much like the Heian period (794-1185) SHINGONSHu monk SAIGYo (1118-1190), with whom he is often compared. Basho received instruction from the RINZAISHu master Butcho (1643-1715), and his work is commonly regarded as conveying a ZEN aesthetic, as in the famous haiku poem he wrote at his moment of awakening: "A timeless pond, the frog jumps, a splash of water" (J. furuike ya, kawazu tobikomu, mizu no oto).
metonymy ::: n. --> A trope in which one word is put for another that suggests it; as, we say, a man keeps a good table instead of good provisions; we read Virgil, that is, his poems; a man has a warm heart, that is, warm affections.
Muyong Suyon. (無用秀演) (1651-1719). Korean scholastic (KYO) monk of the Choson dynasty. Muyong lost both parents at the age of thirteen and lived with his elder brother, until he decided in 1669 to become a monk at the monastery of SONGGWANGSA. Three years later, he went to the monastery of SoNAMSA to continue his studies under Ch'imgoeng Hyonbyon (1616-1684). At Ch'imgoeng's recommendation, Muyong became a disciple of the eminent SoN master PAEGAM SoNGCH'ONG (1631-1700) at Songgwangsa. In 1680, Muyong held a public lecture at Sinsonam in the vicinity of Chinggwangsa. In order to accommodate the large number of people coming to his lectures, Muyong is said to have moved back to the larger monasteries of Sonamsa and Songgwangsa. Muyong at one point went into retreat to meditate, but he was forced to return to teaching at the request of all those people who wished to attend his lectures. He also assisted in Paegam's publication of Buddhist scriptures. After Paegam's death, he taught at the hermitage of Ch'ilburam. In 1719, when his disciple Yakt'an (1668-1754) organized a great assembly to study Hwaom (C. HUAYAN) doctrine and verse commentaries to the public cases (K. kongan; C. GONG'AN) of the Chan masters of old, Muyong was asked to preside. His essays, letters, and poems are collected in the Muyongdang chip.
“nowhere shows Yama ‘as having anything to do with the punishment of the wicked.’ As king and judge of the dead, a Pluto in short, Yama is a far later creation. One has to study the true character of Yama-Yami throughout more than one hymn and epic poem, and collect the various accounts scattered in dozens of ancient works, and then he will obtain a consensus of allegorical statements which will be found to corroborate and justify the Esoteric teaching, that Yama-Yami is the symbol of the dual Manas, in one of its mystical meanings. For instance, Yama-Yami is always represented of a green colour and clothed with red, and as dwelling in a palace of copper and iron. Students of Occultism know to which of the human ‘principles’ the green and the red colours, and by correspondence the iron and copper, are to be applied. The ‘twofold-ruler’ — the epithet of Yama-Yami — is regarded in the exoteric teachings of the Chino-Buddhists as both judge and criminal, the restrainer of his own evil doings and the evil-doer himself. In the Hindu epic poems Yama-Yami is the twin-child of the Sun (the deity) by Sanjna (spiritual consciousness); but while Yama is the Aryan ‘lord of the day,’ appearing as the symbol of spirit in the East, Yami is the queen of the night (darkness, ignorance) ‘who opens to mortals the path to the West’ — the emblem of evil and matter. In the Puranas Yama has many wives (many Yamis) who force him to dwell in the lower world (Patala, Myalba, etc., etc.); and an allegory represents him with his foot lifted, to kick Chhaya, the handmaiden of his father (the astral body of his mother, Sanjna, a metaphysical aspect of Buddhi or Alaya). As stated in the Hindu Scriptures, a soul when it quits its mortal frame, repairs to its abode in the lower regions (Kamaloka or Hades). Once there, the Recorder, the Karmic messenger called Chitragupta (hidden or concealed brightness), reads out his account from the Great Register, wherein during the life of the human being, every deed and thought are indelibly impressed — and, according to the sentence pronounced, the ‘soul’ either ascends to the abode of the Pitris (Devachan), descends to a ‘hell’ (Kamaloka), or is reborn on earth in another human form” (TG 376).
Orphic Hymns ::: A collection of 87 religious poems from the late Greek and early Roman eras that are used as prayers to invoke the currents of the planets and of specific entities into one's reality.
Paekkok Ch'onŭng. (白谷處能) (1617-1680). Korean monk of the Choson dynasty, also known as Sinsu. Ch'onŭng received a traditional Confucian education from Ŭihyon (d.u.) and subsequently became a monk in 1631. He returned to Seoul a few years later and continued to study the Confucian classics from a Confucian scholar by the name of Sin Iksong. He later went to the monastery of SSANGGYESA in CHIRISAN and became the disciple of the Son master PYoGAM KAKSoNG, under whom he studied for the next twenty-three years. In 1680, while lecturing at KŬMSANSA, he passed away at the age of sixty-four. Ch'onŭng was particularly renowned for his writing and poetry, and maintained a close relationship with the leading Confucian scholars at the time. As a response to King Hyonjong's (r. 1660-1674) suppression of Buddhism, Ch'onŭng submitted to the court the Kanp'ye Sokkyo so ("Remonstration against the Ruination of sākyamuni's Teachings"), a critical response to the Confucian criticisms of Buddhism that were prevalent during that period. His writings can also be found in the Paekkok chip and Imsongdang taesa haengjang. The Paekkok chip is a collection of his poems and the biographies, stele inscriptions, and records of other monks. The Kanp'ye Sokkyo so can also be found in the Paekkok chip. He also authored the Imsongdang taesa haengjang, a record of the life of the Son master Imsong Ch'ungon (1567-1638).
Piyyutim ::: Medieval Jewish synagogue hymns and poems added to standard prayers of the talmudic liturgy.
poem ::: n. --> A metrical composition; a composition in verse written in certain measures, whether in blank verse or in rhyme, and characterized by imagination and poetic diction; -- contradistinguished from prose; as, the poems of Homer or of Milton.
A composition, not in verse, of which the language is highly imaginative or impassioned; as, a prose poem; the poems of Ossian.
poesy ::: n. --> The art of composing poems; poetical skill or faculty; as, the heavenly gift of poesy.
Poetry; metrical composition; poems.
A short conceit or motto engraved on a ring or other thing; a posy.
poetic techniques: Devices used in poems to create effect, such as metaphors, enjambment and alliteration.
poetry ::: n. --> The art of apprehending and interpreting ideas by the faculty of imagination; the art of idealizing in thought and in expression.
Imaginative language or composition, whether expressed rhythmically or in prose. Specifically: Metrical composition; verse; rhyme; poems collectively; as, heroic poetry; dramatic poetry; lyric or Pindaric poetry.
Psak ::: Decision, verdict. ::: Psalm(s) ::: The English word for the Book of Tehillim: A collection of Biblical hymns, i.e. sacred songs or poems used in worship and non-canonical passages.
Pulcho chikchi simch'e yojol. (佛組直指心體要節). In Korean, "Essential Excerpts of the Buddhas and Patriarchs Pointing Directly to the Essence of Mind," also known by the abbreviated titles Chikchi simch'e yojol, or simply Chikchi; the earliest surviving example from anywhere in the world of a text printed using movable metal type, predating Gutenberg's 1455 printing of the Bible by seventy-eight years. The two-roll lineage anthology of the CHAN school was compiled in 1372 by PAEGUN KYoNGHAN (1299-1374), one of the three great Son masters of the late-Koryo dynasty. This anthology was first printed in 1377 at Hŭngdoksa (the ruins of which were located in 1985 in Unch'ondong, near the city of Ch'ongju in South Korea) using movable cast-metal type. This printing technology was known to have been in use in Koryo-period Korea prior to the Mongol invasions of 1231-1232, but no examples survive. The metal-type printing of the Chikchi is held in the collection of the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, and its existence was first noted by Maurice Courant in 1901. The first roll of the anthology includes the enlightenment poems of the seven buddhas of antiquity (SAPTATATHĀGATA), the twenty-eight Indian patriarchs of the Son school (starting with MAHĀKĀsYAPA and ending with BODHIDHARMA), the six Chinese patriarchs (ZUSHI) of Chan, and several later Son masters. The second roll is a collection of the poetry, epitaphs, discourse records, and seminal teachings of eminent masters of the Son school, such as the fourteen "nondualities" (ADVAYA) of Kyonghan's Indian teacher ZHIKONG CHANXIAN (K. Chigong Sonhyon; S. *Dhyānabhadra). Like many of these lineage anthologies, the text is derivative, drawing on such earlier genealogical collections as the JINGDE CHUANDENG LU and the SoNMUN YoMSONG CHIP of CHIN'GAK HYESIM (1178-1234). Although the entire first roll and the first page of the second roll of the metal-type recension are lost, a complete xylographic edition of the anthology survives, which dates to 1378, one year later than the metal-type recension.
ramayana ::: n. --> The more ancient of the two great epic poems in Sanskrit. The hero and heroine are Rama and his wife Sita.
rhapsodist ::: n. --> Anciently, one who recited or composed a rhapsody; especially, one whose profession was to recite the verses of Hormer and other epic poets.
Hence, one who recites or sings poems for a livelihood; one who makes and repeats verses extempore.
One who writes or speaks disconnectedly and with great excitement or affectation of feeling.
Ryokan. (良寛) (1758-1831). In Japanese, "Virtuous Liberality"; Edo-period ZEN monk in the SoToSHu, often known as Ryokan Taigu (lit. Ryokan, the Great Fool). Ryokan was associated with a reformist group within the contemporary Soto monastic community that sought to restore formal meditative practice and the study of the writings of DoGEN KIGEN. Ryokan grew up in Echigo province (present-day Niigata prefecture), the son of a SHINTo priest. He became a novice monk at age seventeen at the nearby Soto monastery of Koshoji and was ordained when he turned twenty-one under a Soto monk named Kokusen (d. 1791). He left for Kokusen's monastery in the Bitchu province (present-day Okayama prefecture) and subsequently inherited the temple after Kokusen died. Soon afterward, however, he departed from the monastery, choosing instead to follow an itinerant lifestyle for the next several years. In 1804, he settled down for twelve years in a hut on Mt. Kugami, situated near his hometown. In 1826 Ryokan met Teishin (d. 1872), a young nun who had been previously widowed, and the two remained close companions until Ryokan's death. Ryokan eventually chose for himself a radically simple existence, living much of his life as a hermit, owning few possessions and begging for alms. He was well regarded for his love of children and his compassion for people from all social strata, including prostitutes. His expression of compassion was so extreme that he is even said to have placed lice inside his robes so they would not get cold and to have exposed his legs to mosquitoes while he slept. Ryokan was a renowned calligrapher and poet (in both Chinese and vernacular Japanese). Most of his verses are written as thirty-one-syllable tanka, although he also wrote ninety choka (long poems) and at least twenty other verses in nonstandard form. Ryokan's poetry addressed his common everyday experiences in the world in direct, humble terms. Ryokan did not publish during his lifetime; rather, his verses were collected and published posthumously by his companion Teishin.
Saigyo. (西行) (1118-1190). A Japanese Buddhist poet of the late Heian and early Kamakura periods, especially famous for his many waka poems, a traditional style of Japanese poetry; his dharma name literally means "Traveling West," presumably referring to the direction of the PURE LAND of AMITĀBHA. Born as Sato Norikiyo into a family of the warrior class, he served during his youth as a guard for the retired emperor Toba (r. 1107-1123) before becoming a monk at the age of twenty-two. Although relatively little is known about his life, Saigyo seems to have traveled around the country on pilgrimage before eventually settling in relative seclusion on KoYASAN, the headquarters of the SHINGONSHu. Virtually all of his poems are written in the thirty-one-syllable waka form favored at court and cover most of the traditional topics addressed in such poems, including travel, reclusion, cherry blossoms, and the beauty of the moon in the night sky. His poetry also reflects the desolation and despondency that Japanese of his time may have felt was inevitable during the degenerate age of the dharma (J. mappo; C. MOFA). Saigyo's Sankashu ("Mountain Home Collection") includes some fifteen hundred poems written in the course of his career; ninety-four of these poems were included in the imperially sponsored waka collection, the Shinkokinshu ("New Collection of Ancient and Modern Times"), compiled in 1205, making him one of Japan's most renowned and influential poets.
Sargent, Elizabeth. Love Poems. New York: New
sataka ::: a century [of poems, etc.].
Seventy-seven poems attributed to Taliesin come down, supposedly from the 6th century, though critics maintain that they are forgeries of the 12th or 13th. But the poetry of the later centuries is exceedingly different from the poetry of the Cynfeirdd — Talesin, Myrddin Gwyllt, Llywarch Hen, and Aneurin — said to have lived in the 6th century. Of these four, the first two are mystical and Druidical. The verse forms are simple, the rhythm is lofty: the thought, when it is apparent — for the language is exceedingly archaic and difficult — is in the grand manner. Twelfth and 13th century poetry on the other hand is ultra-tortuous in form — the extreme old age of a literature, when thought and inspiration are gone, and only delight in curious form remains — while the subject matter is practically always the Bard’s praise of his chieftain. Purely literary criticism would most certainly place the Cynfeirdd many centuries earlier than the 12th century poets.
song, by Hugo Steiner-Prag. From The Poems of
sonneteer ::: n. --> A composer of sonnets, or small poems; a small poet; -- usually in contempt. ::: v. i. --> To compose sonnets.
sort ::: n. --> Chance; lot; destiny.
A kind or species; any number or collection of individual persons or things characterized by the same or like qualities; a class or order; as, a sort of men; a sort of horses; a sort of trees; a sort of poems.
Manner; form of being or acting.
Condition above the vulgar; rank.
A chance group; a company of persons who happen to be
“The kabalist is a student of ‘secret science,’ one who interprets the hidden meaning of the Scriptures with the help of the symbolical Kabalah, and explains the real one by these means. The Tanaim were the first kabalists among the Jews; they appeared at Jerusalem about the beginning of the third century before the Christian era. The books of Ezekiel, Daniel, Henoch, and the Revelation of St. John, are purely kabalistical. This secret doctrine is identical with that of the Chaldeans, and includes at the same time much of the Persian wisdom, or ‘magic.’ History catches glimpses of famous kabalists ever since the eleventh century. The Mediaeval ages, and even our own times, have had an enormous number of the most learned and intellectual men who were students of the Kabala . . . The most famous among the former were Paracelsus, Henry Khunrath, Jacob Bohmen, Robert Fludd, the two Van Helmonts, the Abbot John Trithemius, Cornelius Agrippa, Cardinal Nicolao Cusani, Jerome Carden, Pope Sixtus IV., and such Christian scholars as Raymond Lully, Giovanni Pico de la Mirandola, Guillaume Postel, the great John Reuchlin, Dr. Henry More, Eugenius Philalethes (Thomas Vaughan), the erudite Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, Christian Knorr (Baron) von Rosenroth; then Sir Isaac Newton, Leibniz, Lord Bacon, Spinosa, etc., etc., the list being almost inexhaustible. As remarked by Mr. Isaac Myer, in his Qabbalah [p. 170], the ideas of the Kabalists have largely influenced European literature. ‘Upon the practical Qabbalah, the Abbe de Villars (nephew of de Montfaucon) in 1670, published his celebrated satirical novel, “The Count de Gabalis,” upon which Pope based his “Rape of the Lock.” Qabbalism ran through the Mediaeval poems, the “Romance of the Rose,” and permeates the writings of Dante.’ No two of them, however, agreed upon the origin of the Kabala, the Zohar, Sepher Yetzirah, etc. Some show it as coming from the Biblical Patriarchs, Abraham, and even Seth; others from Egypt, others again from Chaldea. The system is certainly very old; but like all the rest of systems, whether religious or philosophical, the Kabala is derived directly from the primeval Secret Doctrine of the East; through the Vedas, the Upanishads, Orpheus and Thales, Pythagoras and the Egyptians. Whatever its source, its substratum is at any rate identical with that of all the other systems from the Book of the Dead down to the later Gnostics” (TG 167-8).
There is and has been a great deal of confusion, not only at present but throughout the ages, about these matters, and several mystical schools have even chosen the language of the tavern and drinking house as the cloak for conveying occult or semi-occult teaching. A noted example is the Sufi school with its poems lauding the flowing bowl and the joys of the tavern and the bosom friends therein, and the beloved’s breast. Here the tavern was the universe, the flowing cup or wine was the wine of the spirit bringing inner ecstasy, the bosom of the beloved was the raising oneself into inner communion with the god within, of which the Jewish bosom of Abraham is a feeble correspondence. The friends of the tavern are those perfect human relations brought about by a community of spiritual and intellectual interests, and the associations of the tavern are the mysteries of the world around us with their marvels and arcana. Nevertheless in various countries as the fourth root-race ran toward its evil culmination, the mystic became translated into the material, the spiritual degenerated into the teaching of matter, so that indeed in later Atlantean times the drugging of initiates was common, and the results always disastrous, this being one of the sorceries for which the Atlanteans in occult history have remained infamous. Yet even in the fifth root-race, due to the heavy Atlantean karma still weighing on us, many nations as late as historic times employed more or less harmless potations to bring about a temporary dulling or stupefying of the brain and nervous system — a procedure always vigorously opposed by the theosophic occult school which has never at any time allowed it.
Therīgāthā. In Pāli, "Verses of the [Female] Elders"; the ninth book of the KHUDDAKANIKĀYA of the Pāli SUTTAPItAKA. It contains 522 verses in seventy-three poems, organized according to the number of verses in each poem, composed by approximately one hundred female elders (although one poem is said to have been uttered by thirty therīs, another by five hundred). It said to have been composed by enlightened therīs, or elder nuns, during the lifetime of the Buddha, including many of his most famous female disciples, such as his stepmother MAHĀPRAJĀPATĪ. According to tradition, the collection was recited at the first Buddhist council (SAMGĪTI; see COUNCIL, FIRST) held shortly after the death of the Buddha, although some verses are clearly added later. In any case, it represents one of, if not the earliest record of women's religious experience. It corresponds to the THERAGĀTHĀ in content. The precise date and authorship of the verses is difficult to determine, although many of the poems are written from the women's points of view, describing the sufferings of childbirth, marriage, and the loss of a child, a husband, and physical beauty, experiences that lead the author to enter the SAMGHA. The spontaneous ecstatic utterances that are said to have accompanied these women's experiences of enlightenment belie the common Western scholarly portrayal of the ARHAT as apathetic, cool, and aloof.
These are perhaps the most salient definitions along with relevant poems by two great poets, Walt Whitman and William Wordsworth.
"The Veda is a book of esoteric symbols, almost of spiritual formulae, which masks itself as a collection of ritual poems.” The Secret of the Veda
“The Veda is a book of esoteric symbols, almost of spiritual formulae, which masks itself as a collection of ritual poems.” The Secret of the Veda
Trần Nhan Tông. (陳仁宗) (1258-1308). The third king of the Vietnamese Trần dynasty (1225-1400) and the founding patriarch of the TRÚC LM (Bamboo Grove) school, the first authentic Vietnamese Thiền (CHAN) school. He was also the national hero who led Vietnam to victory over the Mongols in 1285 and 1288. In 1293, he abdicated, after being on the throne for fifteen years, to become thượng hoàng (retired emperor). When he was crown prince, he revered Buddhism and received instructions from eminent monks, including his uncle Huẹ Trung Thượng Sĩ, an eminent Chan master of the time. In 1299 he went to Mount Yen Tửto become a monk and took the sobriquet Trúc Lam Đại Sĩ. He was reverentially referred to as Trúc Lam Điều Ngự or simply Điều Ngự. Even after taking residence in Yen Tử, he continued to travel to various temples to give instructions to monks, devoting himself to establishing a unified saMgha. The Tam Tổ Thực Lục ("True Records on the Three Patriarchs") relates that he traveled extensively to shut down "depraved temples" and to encourage people to receive the ten precepts. Many eminent monks of the Trần were his disciples. According to historical records, Trần Nhan Tông left behind several treatises on Chan and a few collections of poems in both classical Chinese and Nôm (demotic script). Unfortunately, none of his writing are extant apart from a few poems collected in the Viẹt m Thi Tạp in Chinese and two long poems in Nôm.
Welsh, Robert Gilbert. Azracl and Other Poems. New
KEYS (10k)
426 Sri Aurobindo
4 Douglas King
2 Kobayashi Issa
2 Jalaluddin Rumi
1 Velimir Khlebnikov
1 Taigu Ryokan
1 Satprem
1 Saint John of the Cross
1 Robert Ardrey
1 Red Hawk
1 Louis C K
1 Kahlil Gibran
1 Emily Dickinson
1 e. e. cummings
1 E. E. Cummings
1 Divani Shamsi Tabriz
1 The Mother
1 Ogawa
1 Aleister Crowley
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
379 Sri Aurobindo
19 Matthea Harvey
15 Mary Oliver
13 Rumi
13 James Arthur
12 Walt Whitman
12 Charles Bukowski
11 Sanober Khan
10 Denise Duhamel
9 Edward Hirsch
8 Cate Marvin
8 Anonymous
7 Shirley Geok lin Lim
7 Anne Sexton
7 Ally Condie
6 Trista Mateer
6 Stanley Kunitz
6 Philip Larkin
6 Pattiann Rogers
6 Nikki Giovanni
1:I wish my life had a reset button." ~ Douglas King, quote from "poems in a minor chord,", (2017)., #KEYS
2:the surface" ~ Douglas King, from his book "poems in a minor cord: including strange,", (2017) p. 170, #KEYS
3:By men is mightiness achieved ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Baji Prabhou, #KEYS
4:All that we meet is a symbol and gateway ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana, #KEYS
5:instead of what I don't have the things I have would be much more cared for." ~ Douglas King, quote from "poems in a minor chord,", (2017), #KEYS
6:Charm is the seal of the gods upon woman. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #KEYS
7:After 'tis cold, none heeds, none hinders. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #KEYS
8:leaves with
poems on them
are falling
~ Ogawa, @BashoSociety#KEYS
9:No one I am, I who am all that is. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Liberation - I, #KEYS
10:IT was for delight
He sought existence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,#KEYS
11:My life is a throb of Thy eternity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Bliss of Identity, #KEYS
12:Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky,
We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness.
~ Kahlil Gibran,#KEYS
13:Beauty of our dim soul is amorous. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Our godhead calls us, #KEYS
14:Necessity rules all the infinite world, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Birth of Sin, #KEYS
15:Man's mind is the dupe of his animal self. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A God's Labour, #KEYS
16:If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain." ~ Emily Dickinson, (1830 -1886), American poet, wrote nearly 1,800 poems, Wikipedia., #KEYS
17:I am an epitome of opposites. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man, the Despot of Contraries, #KEYS
18:They can be like the sun, words.
They can do for the heart what light can for a field. ~ Saint John of the Cross, The Poems of St. John of the Cross,#KEYS
19:And all grows beautiful because Thou art. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Divine Hearing, #KEYS
20:All is a wager and danger, all is a chase and a battle. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana, #KEYS
21:My body a dot in the soul's vast expanse. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Self's Infinity, #KEYS
22:In my heart's chamber lives the unworshipped God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Omnipresence, #KEYS
23:Masked the high gods act; the doer is hid by his working. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #KEYS
24:Necessity fashions
All that the unseen eye has beheld. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
25:The golden virgin, Usha, mother of life,
Yet virgin. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Urvasie,#KEYS
26:Who says my poems are poems?
My poems are not poems.
After you know my poems are not poems,
Then we can begin to discuss poetry! ~ Taigu Ryokan,#KEYS
27:Deep in our being inhabits the voiceless invisible Teacher; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana, #KEYS
28:Thought the great-winged wanderer paraclete ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Thought the Paraclete, #KEYS
29:To our gaze God's light is a darkness, His plan is a chaos. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #KEYS
30:A Calm that cradles Fate upon its knees. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Universal Incarnation, #KEYS
31:Alone the wise Can walk through fire with unblinking eyes. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Epigram, #KEYS
32:Eviller fate there is none than life too long among mortals. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #KEYS
33:Mind hushes stilled in eternity; waves of the Infinite wander ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana, #KEYS
34:My life is a silence grasped by timeless hands; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Self's Infinity, #KEYS
35:We are the heirs of infinite widenesses. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Call of the Impossible, #KEYS
36:Heavy is godhead to bear with its mighty sun-burden of lustre. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana, #KEYS
37:Heavenly voices to us are a silence, those colours a whiteness. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #KEYS
38:Each is a mass of forces thrown in shape. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Discoveries of Science - III, #KEYS
39:Even an hour of the soul can unveil the Unborn, the Everlasting, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana, #KEYS
40:God still keeps
Near to a paler world the hour ere dawn ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Chitrangada,#KEYS
41:Life's whole
Tremendous theorem is Thou complete. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Divine Worker,#KEYS
42:There is an hour for knowledge, an hour to forget and to labour. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #KEYS
43:Always the blood is wiser and knows what is hid from the thinker. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #KEYS
44:And all the while within us works His love. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya, #KEYS
45:Hard are God's terms and few can meet them of men who are mortal. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #KEYS
46:Is here and in the pleasant house He chose
To harbour God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,#KEYS
47:Mind is His wax to write and, written, rase
Form and name. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,#KEYS
48:The sweet vast centre and the cave divine
Called Paradise, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,#KEYS
49:And in the heart of the worst the best shall be born by my wisdom. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #KEYS
50:Even in the worm is a god and it writhes for a form and an outlet. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #KEYS
51:He who to some gives victory, joy and good,
To some gives rest. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, To R.,#KEYS
52:His good and evil, sin and virtue, till
He bids thee leave. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,#KEYS
53:Mire is the man who hears not the gods when they cry to his bosom. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #KEYS
54:Powers of his godhead we live; the Creator dwells in the creature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana, #KEYS
55:Clouds from Zeus come and pass; his sunshine eternal survives them. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #KEYS
56:Two are the angels of God whom men worship, strength and enjoyment. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #KEYS
57:All things embrace in death and the strife and the hatred are ended. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #KEYS
58:A wide Compassion leans to embrace earth's pain; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Universal Incarnation, #KEYS
59:But there is never any end when one has loved. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya, #KEYS
60:Man his passion prefers to the voice that guides from the immortals. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #KEYS
61:You cannot utterly die while the Power lives untired in your bosoms; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #KEYS
62:In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest, where no one sees you. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, #KEYS
63:Surely the steel grows dear in the land when a traitor can flourish." ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #KEYS
64:Love the sign
Of one outblaze of godhead that two share. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Life Heavens,#KEYS
65:Fearless of death they must walk who would live and be mighty for ever. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #KEYS
66:Nobler must kings be than natures of earth on whom Zeus lays no burden. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #KEYS
67:Through glorious things and base the wheel of God
For ever runs. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,#KEYS
68:Each through his nature He leads and the world by the lure of His wisdom. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #KEYS
69:Alike 'tis heaven,
Rule or obedience to the one heart given. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Khaled of the Sea,#KEYS
70:Yea, the soul of a man too is mighty
More than the stone and the mortar! ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
71:All the gods in a mortal body dwelt, bore a single name. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A Strong Son of Lightning, #KEYS
72:The abode
Of rapturous Love,
The bright epiphany whom we name God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,#KEYS
73:Thought for a godlike birth
Broadens the mould of our mortality. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Evolution - II,#KEYS
74:Credence, when mediocrity multiplied
Equals itself with genius. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Lines on Ireland,#KEYS
75:The Self of things is not their outward view,
A Force within decides. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Parabrahman,#KEYS
76:Each finite is that deep Infinity
Enshrining His veiled soul of pure delight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Form,#KEYS
77:Helped are the souls that wait more than strengths soon fulfilled and exhausted. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #KEYS
78:young portress bright
Who opens to our souls the worlds of light. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Fear of Death,#KEYS
79:Easy are mortal
Hearts to be bent by Fate and soon we consent to our fortunes. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
80:I move in an ocean of stupendous Light
Joining my depths to His eternal height. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Light,#KEYS
81:This body which was once my universe,
Is now a pittance carried by the soul. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Body,#KEYS
82:All forms are Thy dream-dialect of delight,
O Absolute, O vivid Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Divine Sight,#KEYS
83:Fate,
The dim great presence, is but nature made
Irrevocable in its fruits. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Urvasie,#KEYS
84:Good we have made by our thoughts and sin by our fear and recoiling; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Descent of Ahana, #KEYS
85:If you make friends with your problems you may have a lot of company but at least you're not alone." ~ Douglas King, quote from "Poems in a Minor Chord: Including Strange,", (2017)., #KEYS
86:Only the past fulfilled can conjure room to the future that presses. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Descent of Ahana, #KEYS
87:Transmuted is ravishment's minister,
A high note and a fiery refrain. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Life Heavens,#KEYS
88:A perfect face amid barbarian faces,
A perfect voice of sweet and serious rhyme, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Goethe,#KEYS
89:Bliss is her goal, but her road is through whirlwind and death-blast and storm-race. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana, #KEYS
90:Nor punishes. Impartially he deals
To every strenuous spirit its chosen reward. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Urvasie,#KEYS
91:A Silence that was Being's only word,
The unknown beginning and the voiceless end ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Adwaita,#KEYS
92:In us the secret Spirit can indite
A page and summary of the Infinite, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Hill-top Temple,#KEYS
93:One who has made in sport the suns and seas
Mirrors in our being his immense caprice. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Lila,#KEYS
94:Rules us, who in the Brahmin and the dog
Can, if He will, show equal godhead. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Baji Prabhou,#KEYS
95:Keep only my soul to adore eternally
And meet Thee in each form and soul of Thee. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Surrender,#KEYS
96:The God of Force, the God of Love are one;
Not least He loves whom most He smites. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Epiphany,#KEYS
97:The world's deep contrasts are but figures spun
Draping the unanimity of the One. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Contrasts,#KEYS
98:A deep spiritual calm no touch can sway
Upholds the mystery of this Passion-play. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Life-Unity,#KEYS
99:Alone of gods Death loves not gifts: he visits
The pure heart as the stained. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Love and Death,#KEYS
100:It is the Infinite's blind minute abode.
In that small flaming chariot Shiva rides. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Electron,#KEYS
101:Men are fathers of their fate;
They dig the prison, they the crown command. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Lines on Ireland,#KEYS
102:Poems in largeness cast like moving worlds
And metres surging with the ocean's voice ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Growth of the Flame,#KEYS
103:All in thyself and thyself in all dwelling,
Act in the world with thy being beyond it. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ascent,#KEYS
104:Our consciousness a torch that plays Between the Abyss and a supernal Light. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man of the Mediator, #KEYS
105:A World-adventurer borne on Destiny's wing
Gambles with death and triumph, joy and grief. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Lila,#KEYS
106:No power can slay my soul; it lives in Thee.
Thy presence is my immortality. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Divine Worker,#KEYS
107:The Master of man and his infinite Lover,
He is close to our hearts, had we vision to see. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Who,#KEYS
108:To whatsoever living form I turn
I see my own body with another face. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Indwelling Universal,#KEYS
109:As with the figure of a symbol dance
The screened Omniscient plays at Ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Dual Being,#KEYS
110:Hidden in an earthly garment that survives,
I am the worldless being vast and free. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Immortality,#KEYS
111:Behind all eyes I meet Thy secret gaze
And in each voice I hear Thy magic tune: ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Because Thou Art,#KEYS
112:Each finite thing I see is a façade;
From its windows looks at me the Illimitable. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Omnipresence,#KEYS
113:Kali (Iron Lords of Time)
Am love, am passion; I create the world.
I am the only Brahma. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Kama,#KEYS
114:The wife unsung remains
Sharing his pleasures, taking half his pains
While to dream faces mounts the poet's song. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems: Euphrosyne#KEYS
115:Vainly man, crouched in his corner of safety, shrinks from the fatal
Lure of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#KEYS
116:It is He in the sun who is ageless and deathless,
And into the midnight His shadow is thrown. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Who,#KEYS
117:Out, out with the mind and its candle flares,
Light, light the suns that never die. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Musa Spiritus,#KEYS
118:O worshipper of the formless Infinite,
Reject not form, what dwells in it is He. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Form,#KEYS
119:The hand that sent Jupiter spinning through heaven,
Spends all its cunning to fashion a curl. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Who,#KEYS
120:The impossible is the hint of what shall be,
Mortal the door to immortality. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Our godhead calls us,#KEYS
121:In vain was my prison of separate body made;
His occult presence burns in every cell. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Omnipresence,#KEYS
122:The darkness was the Omnipotent's abode,
Hood of omniscience, a blind mask of God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Inconscient,#KEYS
123:A spark of the eternal Fire, it came
To build a house in Matter for the Unborn. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Miracle of Birth,#KEYS
124:He wades through mud to reach the Wonderful,
And does what Matter must or Spirit can. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man the Enigma,#KEYS
125:Mystic daughter of Delight,
Life, thou ecstasy,
Let the radius of thy flight
Be eternity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Life,#KEYS
126:Naked my spirit from its vestures stands;
I am alone with my own self for space. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Self's Infinity,#KEYS
127:When darkness was blind and engulfed within darkness,
He was seated within it immense and alone. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Who,#KEYS
128:Chaff are men's armies
Threshed by the flails of Fate; 'tis the soul of the hero that conquers. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
129:I, Earth, have a deeper power than Heaven;
My lonely sorrow surpasses its rose-joys. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Life Heavens,#KEYS
130:In the inconscient dreadful dumb Abyss
Are heard the heart-beats of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Unseen Infinite,#KEYS
131:In the night a million stars arise
To watch us with their ancient friendly eyes. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Perigone Prologuises,#KEYS
132:Poet, who first with skill inspired did teach
Greatness to our divine Bengali speech. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Madhusudan Dutt,#KEYS
133:The blue sea dances like a girl
With sapphire and with pearl
Crowning her locks. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Songs to Myrtilla,#KEYS
134:Thy golden Light came down into my feet;
My earth is now Thy playfield and Thy seat. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Golden Light,#KEYS
135:Immeasurable ecstasy where Time
And Space have fainted in a swoon sublime! ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya,#KEYS
136:Death is but changing of our robes to wait
In wedding garments at the Eternal's gate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Fear of Death,#KEYS
137:Impassive, I bear each act and thought and mood:
Time traverses my hushed infinitude. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Cosmic Spirit,#KEYS
138:Not alone the mind in its trouble
God beholds, but the spirit behind that has joy of the torture. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
139:Time voyages with Thee upon its prow,—
And all the future's passionate hope is Thou. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Because Thou Art,#KEYS
140:Strength men desire in their masters;
All men worship success and in failure and weakness abandon. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
141:An animal creature wonderfully human,
A charm and miracle of fur-footed Brahman, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Despair on the Staircase,#KEYS
142:Unborn I sit, timeless, intangible:
All things are shadows in my tranquil glass. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Indwelling Universal,#KEYS
143:As rain-thrashed mire the marvel of the rose,
Earth waits that distant marvel to disclose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Silver Call,#KEYS
144:A Witness dwells within our secrecies,
The incarnate Godhead in the body of man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Universal Incarnation,#KEYS
145:Space is a bar twixt our ankles,
Time is a weight that we drag and the scar of the centuries rankles ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#KEYS
146:Forewilled by the gods, Alexander,
All things happen on earth and yet we must strive who are mortals, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
147:In this rude combat with the fate of man
Thy smile within my heart makes all my strength; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Divine Worker,#KEYS
148:O Thou who climb'dst to mind from the dull stone,
Face now the miracled summits still unwon. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Evolution - II,#KEYS
149:A death that eats and eating is devoured,
This is the brutal image of the world. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya,#KEYS
150:At the Guru's death, either the Body awakens or His Work in the world is forsaken and His light grows dim. In every breath, remember Him." ~ Red Hawk, (b. 1943) "Mother Guru: Savitri Love Poems,", (2014), #KEYS
151:Kama (Desire)
My desire
Takes many forms; I change and wheel and race,
And with Me runs creation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Kama,#KEYS
152:Like common men he lived to whom the ray
Of a new sun but brings another day
Unmeaning. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Khaled of the Sea,#KEYS
153:My mind has left its prison-camp of brain;
It pours, a luminous sea from spirit heights. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Inner Sovereign,#KEYS
154:My vast transcendence holds the cosmic whirl;
I am hid in it as in the sea a pearl. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Indwelling Universal,#KEYS
155:To perish is better for man or for nation
Nobly in battle, nor end disgraced by disease or subjection. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
156:Our body is an epitome of some Vast
That masks its presence by our humanness. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Hill-top Temple,#KEYS
157:There is a need within the soul of man
The splendours of the surface never sate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Greater Plan,#KEYS
158:Life only is, or death is life disguised,—
Life a short death until by life we are surprised. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Life and Death,#KEYS
159:Still by slow steps the miracle goes on,
The Immortal's gradual birth mid mire and stone. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Miracle of Birth,#KEYS
160:Yet is the dark Inconscient whence came all
The self-same Power that shines on high unwon. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man of the Mediator,#KEYS
161:I am the light in stars, of flowers
The bloom, the nameless fragrance that pervades
Creation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Love and Death,#KEYS
162:Aspiring to godhead from insensible clay
He travels slow-footed towards the eternal day. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man the Thinking Animal,#KEYS
163:Busy our hearts are weaving thoughts and images always:
After their kind they see what here we call truth. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
164:Morning has pleasure, noon has golden peace
And afternoon repose and eve the heart's increase. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Songs to Myrtilla,#KEYS
165:Not in this living net
Of flesh and nerve, nor in the flickering mind
Is a man's manhood seated. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Baji Prabhou,#KEYS
166:Light, burning Light from the Infinite's diamond heart
Quivers in my heart where blooms the deathless rose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Light,#KEYS
167:He sowed the desert with ruddy-hearted rose,
The sweetest voice that ever spoke in prose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Bankim Chandra Chatterji,#KEYS
168:The high gods watch in their silence,
Mute they endure for a while that the doom may be swifter and greater. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
169:I pass beyond Time and life on measureless wings,
Yet still am one with born and unborn things. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Cosmic Consciousness,#KEYS
170:Action Human and Divine
Keep only my soul to adore eternally
And meet Thee in each form and soul of Thee. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Surrender,#KEYS
171:Gesture (Mudra)
I have drunk the Infinite like a giant's wine.
Time is my drama or my pageant dream. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Transformation,#KEYS
172:Not by a little pain and not by a temperate labour
Trained is the nation chosen by Zeus for a dateless dominion. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
173:Summer has pleasant comrades, happy meetings
Of lily and rose and from the trees divinest greetings. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Songs to Myrtilla,#KEYS
174:This is our human destiny; every moment of living
Toil and loss have gained in the constant siege of our bodies. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
175:All things yield to a man and Zeus is himself his accomplice
When like a god he wills without remorse or longing. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
176:Only on the heart's veiled door the word of flame
Is written, the secret and tremendous Name. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Universal Incarnation,#KEYS
177:When youth has quenched its soft and magic light,
Delightful things remain but dead is their delight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Songs to Myrtilla,#KEYS
178:Count not life nor death, defeat nor triumph, Pyrrhus.
Only thy soul regard and the gods in thy joy or thy labour. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
179:The One devised innumerably to be;
His oneness in invisible forms he hides,
Time's tiny temples to eternity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Electron,#KEYS
180:O Life, thy breath is but a cry to the Light
Immortal, whence has come thy swift delight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, O Life, thy Breath is but a Cry,#KEYS
181:Always our voices are prompted to speech for an end that we know not,
Always we think that we drive, but are driven. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
182:No thought is vain; our very dreams
Substantial are;
The light we see in fancy, yonder gleams
In the star. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,#KEYS
183:A sole thing the Gods
Demand from all men living, sacrifice:
Nor without this shall any crown be grasped. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Love and Death,#KEYS
184:Conscious dimly of births unfinished hid in our being
Rest we cannot; a world cries in us for space and for fullness. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
185:Earth cannot long resist the man whom Heaven has chosen;
Gods with him walk; his chariot is led; his arm is assisted. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
186:For in selfhood and existence I have felt only fatigue." ~ Divani Shamsi Tabriz, xxxii, collection of lyric poems, contains more than 40,000 verses, considered one of the greatest works of Persian literature, Wikipedia, #KEYS
187:Power is divine; divinest of all is power over mortals.
Power then the conqueror seeks and power the imperial nation, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
188:In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, #KEYS
189:Leave to the night its phantoms, leave to the future its curtain!
Only today Heaven gave to mortal man for his labour. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
190:Life and treasure and fame to cast on the wings of a moment,
Fiercer joy than this the gods have not given to mortals. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
191:Son of man, thou hast crowned thy life with flowers that are scentless,
Chased the delights that wound. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Descent of Ahana,#KEYS
192:The thoughts of unknown minds exalt me with their thrill;
I carry the sorrow of millions in my lonely breast. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Cosmic Man,#KEYS
193:He who is blind revolts and he who is limited struggles:
Strife is not for the infinite; wisdom observes to accomplish. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
194:I would hear, in my spirit's wideness solitary,
The Voice that speaks when mortal lips are mute: ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Greater Plan,#KEYS
195:Thou who pervadest all the worlds below,
Yet sitst above,
Master of all who work and rule and know,
Servant of Love! ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, God,#KEYS
196:Blinded are human hearts by desire and fear and possession,
Darkened is knowledge on earth by hope the helper of mortals. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
197:All things are by Time and the Will eternal that moves us,
And for each birth its hour is set in the night or the dawning. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
198:Man over woman, woman o'er man, over lover and foeman
Wrestling we strive to expand in our souls, to be wide, to be happy. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
199:Something watches behind, Spirit or Self or Soul,
Viewing Space and its toil, waiting the end of Time. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Witness and the Wheel,#KEYS
200:The vault of heaven
Is not a true similitude for man
Whose space outgyres thought's last horizon. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya,#KEYS
201:This world behind is made of truer stuff
Than the manufactured tissue of earth's grace. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Inner Fields,#KEYS
202:World-rhythms
Through glimmering veils of wonder and delight
World after world bursts on the awakened sight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Other Earths,#KEYS
203:Even as death shall gather us all for memory's clusters,
All in their day who were great or were little, heroes or cowards. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
204:Led or misled we are mortals and walk by a light that is given;
Most they err who deem themselves most from error excluded. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
205:Man on whom the World-Unity shall seize,
Widening his soul-spark to an epiphany
Of the timeless vastness of Infinity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Electron,#KEYS
206:Men live like stars that see each other in heaven,
But one knows not the pleasure and the grief
The others feel ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Love and Death,#KEYS
207:Easily nations bow to a yoke when their virtue relaxes;
Hard is the breaking fetters once worn, for the virtue has perished. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
208:Ever we hear in the heart of the peril a flute go before us,
Luminous beckoning hands in the distance invite and implore us. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#KEYS
209:Not of the fire am I terrified, not of the sword and its slaying;
Vileness of men appals me, baseness I fear and its voices. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
210:This observe, thy task in thy destiny noble or fallen;
Time and result are the gods'; with these things be not thou troubled. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
211:What we call sin,
Is but man's leavings as from deep within
The Pilot guides him in his pilgrimage. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, In the Moonlight,#KEYS
212:While thou livest, perfectly fulfil
Thy part, conceive
Earth as thy stage, thyself the actor strong,
The drama His. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,#KEYS
213:For grief and pain
Are errors of the clouded soul; behind
They do not stain
The living spirit who to these is blind. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,#KEYS
214:Non-Violence
Deem nothing vain: through many veils
This Spirit gleams.
The dreams of God are truths and He prevails. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,#KEYS
215:Occult masters of destiny,
They who sit in the Secrecy
And watch unmoved ever
Unto the end of all. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Winged with Dangerous Deity,#KEYS
216:In the hard reckoning made by the grey-robed accountant at even
Pain is the ransom we pay for the smallest foretaste of heaven. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#KEYS
217:Light, brooding Light! each smitten passionate cell
In a mute blaze of ecstasy preserves
A living sense of the Imperishable. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Light,#KEYS
218:Always a few will be left whom the threatenings of Fate cannot conquer,
Always souls are born whose courage waits not on fortune ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
219:Great men and death
Such puissance great well-poisèd natures prove
To mould to their own likeness all they love. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Khaled of the Sea,#KEYS
220:Hear its cry when God's moment changing our fate comes visored
Silently into our lives and the spirit too knows, for it watches. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
221:Not as the ways of other mortals are theirs who are guided,
They whose eyes are the gods and they walk by a light that is secret. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
222:Thought could not think in him, flesh could not quiver;
The feet of Time could not adventure here ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Yogi on the Whirlpool,#KEYS
223:Life with her wine-cup of longing under the purple of her tenture,
Death as her gate of escape and rebirth and renewal of venture. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#KEYS
224:Souls that are true to themselves are immortal; the soulless for ever
Lingers helpless in Hades a shade among shades disappointed. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
225:Atom and molecule in their unseen plan
Buttress an edifice of strange onenesses,
Crystal and plant, insect and beast and man, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Electron,#KEYS
226:One sole oracle helps, still armoured in courage and prudence
Patient and heedful to toil at the work that is near in the daylight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
227:Only of one thing
Man can be sure, the will in his heart and his strength in his purpose:
This too is Fate and this too the gods ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
228:with a radish." ~ Kobayashi Issa, (1763 - 1828) Japanese poet and lay Buddhist priest, known for his haiku poems and journals. He is better known as simply Issa, a pen name meaning Cup-of-Tea, Wikipedia., #KEYS
229:Destiny's lasso, its slip-knot tied by delight and repining,
Draws us through tangles of failure and victory's inextricable twining. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#KEYS
230:Earth has beatitudes warmer than heaven's that are bare and undying,
Marvels of Time on the crest of the moments to Infinity flying. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#KEYS
231:Of rapturous Love,
The bright epiphany whom we name God,
Towards whom we drove
In spite of weakness, evil, grief and pain. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,#KEYS
232:Yet was the battle decreed for the means supreme of the mortal
Placed in a world where all things strive from the worm to the Titan. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
233:Life in my limbs shall grow deathless, flesh with the God-glory tingle,
Lustre of Paradise, light of the earth-ways marry and mingle. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#KEYS
234:We must pass through the aeons; Space is a bar twixt our ankles,
Time is a weight that we drag and the scar of the centuries rankles: ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#KEYS
235:Charmed men applaud the skilful purpose, the dexterous speaker;
This they forget that a Force decides, not the wiles of the statesman. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
236:Only the illimitable Permanent
Is here. A Peace stupendous, featureless, still,
Replaces all. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Nirvana,#KEYS
237:Dear are the halls of our childhood, dear are the fields of our fathers,
Yet to the soul that is free no spot on the earth is an exile. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
238:This is the nature of earth that to blows she responds and by scourgings
Travails excited; pain is the bed of her blossoms of pleasure. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
239:Hard is the way to the Eternal for the mind-born will of the mortal
Bound by the body and life to the gait of the house-burdened turtle. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#KEYS
240:Hid in our hearts is his glory; the Spirit works in our members.
Silence is he, with our voices he speaks, in our thoughts he remembers. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#KEYS
241:Blood and grief are the ransom of men for the joys of their transience,
For we are mortals bound in our strength and beset in our labour. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
242:Strange, remote and splendid
Childhood's fancy pure
Thrills to thoughts we cannot fathom,
Quick felicities obscure. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A Child's Imagination,#KEYS
243:I am that Madan who inform the stars
With lustre and on life's wide canvas fill
Pictures of light and shade, of joy and tears. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Love and Death,#KEYS
244:None has been able to hold all the gods in his bosom unstaggered,
All have grown drunken with force and have gone down to Hell and to Ate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
245:One is there only, apart in his greatness, the End and Beginning,—
He who has sent through his soul's wide spaces the universe spinning. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#KEYS
246:Life, the river of the Spirit, consenting to anguish and sorrow
If by her heart's toil a loan-light of joy from the heavens she can borrow. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#KEYS
247:There our sun cannot shine and our moon has no place for her lustres,
There our lightnings flash not, nor fire of these spaces is suffered. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
248:Dread not the ruin, fear not the storm-blast, yield not, O Trojans.
Zeus shall rebuild. Death ends not our days, the fire shall not triumph. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
249:Not on the tramp of the multitudes, not on the cry of the legions
Founds the strong man his strength but the god that he carries within him. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
250:On the safe land
To linger is to lose what God has planned
For man's wide soul,
Who set eternal godhead for its goal. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, To the Sea,#KEYS
251:And this the reason of his high unease,
Because he came from the infinities
To build immortally with mortal things; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, In the Moonlight,#KEYS
252:Gods change not their strength, but are of old
And as of old, and man, though less than these,
May yet proceed to greater, self-evolved. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Urvasie,#KEYS
253:Knowing all vain, yet we strive; for our nature seizing us always
Drives like the flock that is herded and urged towards shambles or pasture. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
254:Life that pursuing her boundless march to a goal which we know not,
Ever her own law obeys, not our hopes, who are slaves of her heart-beats. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
255:O Life, thy breath is but a cry to the Light
Immortal, whence has come thy swift delight,
Thy grasp. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, O Life, thy Breath is but a Cry,#KEYS
256:Easy is the love that lasts
Only with favours in the shopman heart!
Who, smitten, takes and gives the kiss, he loves. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya,#KEYS
257:This grey hour was born
For the ascetic in his silent cave
And for the dying man whose heart released
Loosens its vibrant strings. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Chitrangada,#KEYS
258:Man, by experience of passion purged,
His myriad faculty perfecting, widens
His nature as it rises till it grows
With God conterminous. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Urvasie,#KEYS
259:Unless you love someone, nothing else makes any sense." ~ e. e. cummings, (1894 - 1962), American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright, wrote approx. 2,900 poems, two autobiographical novels, four plays, and several essays, Wikipedia., #KEYS
260:Always man's Fate hangs poised on the flitting breath of a moment;
Called by some word, by some gesture it leaps, then 'tis graven, 'tis granite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
261:We, too, by the Eternal Might are led
To whatsoever goal He wills.
Our helm He grasps, our generous sail outspread
His strong breath fills. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, To R.,#KEYS
262:Drowned in the Absolute, found in the Godhead,
Swan of the supreme and spaceless ether wandering winged through the universe,
Spirit immortal. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ascent,#KEYS
263:Everybody is different. Some comedy is more musical like Steven Wright. His is a pillar of comedy to me. He invented a whole form and all his jokes are poems. So it's different. I wanted to do it like George Carlin. Now I do it like me. ~ Louis C K, #KEYS
264:He who would bring the heavens here
Must descend himself into clay
And the burden of earthly nature bear
And tread the dolorous way. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A God's Labour,#KEYS
265:Sin exalted
Seizes secure on the thrones of the world for her glorious portion,
Down to the bottomless pit the good man is thrust in his virtue. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
266:And all man's ghastly company of fears
Are born of folly that believes this span
Of brittle life can limit immortal man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, To Weep because a Glorious Sun,#KEYS
267:The Truth of truths men fear and deny,
The Light of lights they refuse;
To ignorant gods they lift their cry
Or a demon altar choose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A God's Labour,#KEYS
268:A tree beside the sandy river-beach
Holds up its topmost boughs
Like fingers towards the skies they cannot reach,
Earth-bound, heaven-amorous. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A Tree,#KEYS
269:Is not the world his disguise? when that cloak is tossed back from his shoulders,
Beauty looks out like a sun on the hearts of the ravished beholders. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#KEYS
270:Vain, they have said, is the anguish of man and his labour diurnal,
Vainly his caravans cross through the desert of Time to the Eternal. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Vain, they have Said,#KEYS
271:Thick and persistent the night confronts all his luminous longings;
Dire death's sickle mows like a harvest his hosts and his throngings. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Vain, they have Said,#KEYS
272:Wilt thou not perfect this rather that sprang too from Wisdom and Power?
Taking the earthly rose canst thou image not Heaven in a flower? ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Descent of Ahana,#KEYS
273:My mind is awake in stirless trance,
Hushed my heart, a burden of delight;
Dispelled is the senses' flicker-dance,
Mute the body aureate with light. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Trance,#KEYS
274:Around me was a formless solitude:
All had become one strange Unnameable,
An unborn sole Reality world-nude,
Topless and fathomless, for ever still. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Adwaita,#KEYS
275:Confident of His grace, expect His will;
Let Him lead; though hidden be the bourne,
See Him in all that happens; that fulfil
For which thou wert born. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, To R.,#KEYS
276:fools! whose pride
Absurd the gods permit a little space
To please their souls with laughter, then replace
In the loud limbo of futilities. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Lines on Ireland,#KEYS
277:Rejoice and fear not for the waves that swell,
The storms that thunder, winds that sweep;
Always our Captain holds the rudder well,
He does not sleep. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, To R.,#KEYS
278:Time is a strong convention; future and present
Were living in the past;
They are one image that our wills complaisant
Into three schemes have cast. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Rebirth,#KEYS
279:Lo, all these peoples and who was it fashioned them? Who is unwilling
Still to have done with it? laughs beyond pain and saves in the killing? ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Descent of Ahana,#KEYS
280:Our souls and heaven are of an equal stature
And have a dateless birth;
The unending seed, the infinite mould of Nature,
They were not made on earth, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Rebirth,#KEYS
281:Summer is dead and rich repose
And springtide and the rose,
And woods and all sweet things make moan;
The weeping earth is turned to stone. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Songs to Myrtilla,#KEYS
282:Man worships the ungrasped. His vagrant thought
Still busy with the illimitable void
Lives all the time by little things upbuoyed
Which he contemns ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Euphrosyne,#KEYS
283:Noble be in peace, invincible, brave in the battle,
Stern and calm to thy foe, to the suppliant merciful. Mortal
Favour and wrath as thou walkst heed never ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
284:I have laboured and suffered in Matter's night
To bring the fire to man;
But the hate of hell and human spite
Are my meed since the world began. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A God's Labour,#KEYS
285:Still, still we can hear them
Now, if we listen long in our souls, the bygone voices.
Earth in her fibres remembers, the breezes are stored with our echoes. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
286:Therefore is the woman's part
Nearest divine, who to one motion keeps
And like the fixed immortal planets' round
Is constant to herself in him she loves. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Uloupie,#KEYS
287:Flying out from the Great Buddha's nose: a swallow." ~ Kobayashi Issa, (1763 - 1828) Japanese poet and lay Buddhist priest, known for his haiku poems and journals, better known as simply Issa, a pen name meaning Cup-of-tea, Wikipedia., #KEYS
288:Yama, the strong pure Hades sad and subtle,
Dharma, who keeps the laws of old untouched,
Critanta, who ends all things and at last
Himself shall end. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Love and Death,#KEYS
289:Temple-ground
Man, shun the impulses dire that spring armed from thy nature's abysms!
Dread the dusk rose of the gods, flee the honey that tempts from its petals! ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
290:Even in the worm is a god and it writhes for a form and an outlet.
Workings immortal obscurely struggling, hints of a godhead
Labour to form in this clay a divinity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
291:In some faint dawn,
In some dim eve,
Like a gesture of Light,
Like a dream of delight
Thou com'st nearer and nearer to me. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, In Some Faint Dawn,#KEYS
292:All is not finished in the unseen decree;
A Mind beyond our mind demands our ken,
A life of unimagined harmony
Awaits, concealed, the grasp of unborn men. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Evolution - II,#KEYS
293:He is in me, round me, facing everywhere.
Self-walled in ego to exclude His right,
I stand upon its boundaries and stare
Into the frontiers of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Omnipresence,#KEYS
294:Let the little troubled life-god within
Cast his veils from the still soul,
His tiger-stripes of virtue and sin,
His clamour and glamour and thole and dole ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Musa Spiritus,#KEYS
295:Wise are the gods in their silence,
Wise when they speak; but their speech is other than ours and their wisdom
Hard for a mortal mind to hold and not madden or wander. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
296:My soul unhorizoned widens to measureless sight,
My body is God's happy living tool,
My spirit a vast sun of deathless light. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Transformation,#KEYS
297:Fate severe like a mother
Teaches our wills by disaster and strikes down the props that would weaken,
Fate and the Thought on high that is wiser than yearnings of mortals. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
298:I have broken the limits of embodied mind
And am no more the figure of a soul.
The burning galaxies are in me outlined;
The universe is my stupendous whole. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Cosmic Spirit,#KEYS
299:I have escaped and the small self is dead;
I am immortal, alone, ineffable;
I have gone out from the universe I made,
And have grown nameless and immeasurable. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Liberation - I,#KEYS
300:I have given my mind to be dug Thy channel mind,
I have offered up my will to be Thy will:
Let nothing of myself be left behind
In our union mystic and unutterable. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Surrender,#KEYS
301:Lure of the Infinite
With a hundred marvellous faces
Always he lures us to love him, always he draws us to pleasure
Leaving remembrance and anguish behind for our only treasure. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems: Ahana, Lure of the Infinite#KEYS
302:We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch." ~ E. E. Cummings, (1894 -1962), American poet, painter, author, and playwright, wrote approx. 2,900 poems, Wikipedia., #KEYS
303:Fools or hypocrites! Meanest falsehood is this among mortals,
Veils of purity weaving, names misplacing ideal
When our desires we disguise and paint the lusts of our nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
304:He is not anything, yet all is He;
He is not all but far exceeds that scope.
Both Time and Timelessness sink in that sea:
Time is a wave and Space a wandering drop. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Parabrahman,#KEYS
305:Wast thou not made in the shape of a woman? Sweetness and beauty
Move like a song of the gods in thy limbs and to love is thy duty
Graved in thy heart as on tablets of fate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#KEYS
306:And high Delight, a spirit infinite,
That is the fountain of this glorious world,
Delight that labours in its opposite,
Faints in the rose and on the rack is curled. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Parabrahman,#KEYS
307:On the white summit of eternity
A single Soul of bare infinities,
Guarded he keeps by a fire-screen of peace
His mystic loneliness of nude ecstasy. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Shiva,#KEYS
308:There are two beings in my single self.
A Godhead watches Nature from behind
At play in front with a brilliant surface elf,
A time-born creature with a human mind. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Dual Being,#KEYS
309:Form in its heart of silence recondite
Hides the significance of His mystery,
Form is the wonder-house of eternity,
A cavern of the deathless Eremite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Form,#KEYS
310:A life of intensities wide, immune
Floats behind the earth and her life-fret,
A magic of realms mastered by spell and rune,
Grandiose, blissful, coloured, increate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Life Heavens,#KEYS
311:It is Thy rapture flaming through my nerves
And all my cells and atoms thrill with Thee;
My body Thy vessel is and only serves
As a living wine-cup of Thy ecstasy. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Bliss of Identity,#KEYS
312:He must stride on conquering all,
Threatening and clamouring, brutal, invincible,
Until he meets upon his storm-swept road
A greater devil—or thunderstroke of God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Dwarf Napoleon,#KEYS
313:Some huge somnambulist Intelligence
Devising without thought process and plan
Arrayed the burning stars' magnificence,
The living bodies of beasts and the brain of man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Inconscient,#KEYS
314:I housed within my heart the life of things,
All hearts athrob in the world I felt as mine;
I shared the joy that in creation sings
And drank its sorrow like a poignant wine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Life-Unity,#KEYS
315:now I listen to a greater Word
Born from the mute unseen omniscient Ray:
The Voice that only Silence' ear has heard
Leaps missioned from an eternal glory of Day. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Word of the Silence,#KEYS
316:My mind is hushed in wide and endless light,
My heart a solitude of delight and peace,
My sense unsnared by touch and sound and sight,
My body a point in white infinities. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Liberation - I,#KEYS
317:The Friend of Man helps him with life and death
Until he knows. Then, freed from mortal breath,
Grief, pain, resentment, terror pass away.
He feels the joy of the immortal play; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Epiphany,#KEYS
318:Who art thou in the heart comrade of man who sitst
August, watching his works, watching his joys and griefs,
Unmoved, careless of pain, careless of death and fate? ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Witness and the Wheel,#KEYS
319:A bare impersonal hush is now my mind,
A world of sight clear and inimitable,
A volume of silence by a Godhead signed,
A greatness pure of thought, virgin of will. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Word of the Silence,#KEYS
320:I shall not die.
Although this body, when the spirit tires
Of its cramped residence, shall feed the fires,
My house consumes, not I. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Triumph-Song of Trishuncou,#KEYS
321:One on another we prey and one by another are mighty.
This is the world and we have not made it; if it is evil,
Blame first the gods; but for us, we must live by its laws or we perish. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
322:Yearning that claimed all time for its date and all life for its fuel,
All that we wonder at gazing back when the passion has fallen,
Labour blind and vain expense and sacrifice wasted ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
323:I saw my soul a traveller through Time;
From life to life the cosmic ways it trod,
Obscure in the depths and on the heights sublime,
Evolving from the worm into the god. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Miracle of Birth,#KEYS
324:Love and the need of mastery, joy and the longing for greatness
Rage like a fire unquenchable burning the world and creating,
Nor till humanity dies will they sink in the ashes of Nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
325:One, universal, ensphering creation,
Wheeling no more with inconscient Nature,
Feel thyself God-born, know thyself deathless.
Timeless return to thy immortal existence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Soul in the Ignorance,#KEYS
326:The crude beginnings of the lifeless earth,
The mindless stirrings of the plant and tree
Prepared our thought; thought for a godlike birth
Broadens the mould of our mortality. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Evolution - II,#KEYS
327:This mute stupendous Energy that whirls
The stars and nebulae in its long train,
Like a huge Serpent through my being curls
With its diamond hood of joy and fangs of pain. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Witness Spirit,#KEYS
328:We are but sparks of that most perfect fire,
Waves of that sea:
From Him we come, to Him we go, desire
Eternally,
And so long as He wills, our separate birth
Is and shall be. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,#KEYS
329:All sounds, all voices have become Thy voice,
Music and thunder and the cry of birds,
Life's babble of her sorrows and her joys,
Cadence of human speech and murmured words, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Divine Hearing,#KEYS
330:In the sweep of the worlds, in the surge of the ages,
Ineffable, mighty, majestic and pure,
Beyond the last pinnacle seized by the thinker
He is throned in His seats that for ever endure. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Who,#KEYS
331:That is our home and that the secret hope
Our hearts explore.
To bring those heavens down upon the earth
We all descend,
And fragments of it in the human birth
We can command. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,#KEYS
332:Now from his cycle sleepless and vast round the dance of the earth-globe
Gold Hyperion rose in the wake of the dawn like the eyeball
Flaming of God revealed by his uplifted luminous eyelid. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
333:I have wrapped the wide world in my wider self
And Time and Space my spirit's seeing are.
I am the god and demon, ghost and elf,
I am the wind's speed and the blazing star. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Cosmic Consciousness,#KEYS
334:The Master who bends o'er His creatures,
Suffers their sins and their errors and guides them screening the guidance;
Each through his nature He leads and the world by the lure of His wisdom. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
335:All music is only the sound of His laughter,
All beauty the smile of His passionate bliss;
Our lives are His heart-beats, our rapture the bridal
Of Radha and Krishna, our love is their kiss. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Who,#KEYS
336:My life is the life of village and continent,
I am earth's agony and her throbs of bliss;
I share all creatures' sorrow and content
And feel the passage of every stab and kiss. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Cosmic Spirit,#KEYS
337:No danger can perturb my spirit's calm:
My acts are Thine; I do Thy works and pass;
Failure is cradled on Thy deathless arm,
Victory is Thy passage mirrored in Fortune's glass. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Divine Worker,#KEYS
338:Soul in the Ignorance, wake from its stupor.
Flake of the world-fire, spark of Divinity,
Lift up thy mind and thy heart into glory.
Sun in the darkness, recover thy lustre. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Soul in the Ignorance,#KEYS
339:A king of greatness and a slave of love,
Host of the stars and guest in Nature's inn,
A high spectator spirit throned above,
A pawn of passion in the game divine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Lila,#KEYS
340:Love men, love God. Fear not to love, O King,
Fear not to enjoy;
For Death's a passage, grief a fancied thing
Fools to annoy.
From self escape and find in love alone
A higher joy. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,#KEYS
341:All is abolished but the mute Alone.
The mind from thought released, the heart from grief
Grow inexistent now beyond belief;
There is no I, no Nature, known-unknown. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Nirvana,#KEYS
342:I know, O God, the day shall dawn at last
When man shall rise from playing with the mud
And taking in his hands the sun and stars
Remould appearance, law and process old. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya,#KEYS
343:Our mind is a glimmering curtain of that Ray,
Our strength a parody of the Immortal's power,
Our joy a dreamer on the Eternal's way
Hunting the unseizable beauty of an hour. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Universal Incarnation,#KEYS
344:There is a joy behind suffering; pain digs our road to his pleasance.
All things have bliss for their secret; only our consciousness falters
Fearing to offer itself as a victim on ecstasy's altars. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#KEYS
345:Two are the ends of existence, two are the dreams of the Mother:
Heaven unchanging, earth with her time-beats yearn to each other,—
Earth-souls needing the touch of the heavens peace to recapture ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#KEYS
346:Who shall foretell the event of a battle, the fall of a footstep?
Oracles, visions and prophecies voice but the dreams of the mortal,
And 'tis our spirit within is the Pythoness tortured in Delphi. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
347:Over all earthly things the soul that is fearless is master,
Only on death he can reckon not whether it comes in the midnight
Treading the couch of Kings in their pride or speeds in the spear-shaft. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
348:There is a wisdom like a brooding Sun,
A Bliss in the heart's crypt grown fiery white,
The heart of a world in which all hearts are one,
A Silence on the mountains of delight, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Universal Incarnation,#KEYS
349:Life renewed its ways which death and sleep cannot alter,
Life that pursuing her boundless march to a goal which we know not,
Ever her own law obeys, not our hopes, who are slaves of her heart-beats. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
350:Mortals, your end is beatitude, rapture eternal his meaning:
Joy, which he most now denies, is his purpose: the hedges, the screening
Were but the rules of his play; his denials came to lure farther. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#KEYS
351:I dwell in the spirit's calm nothing can move
And watch the actions of Thy vast world-force,
Its mighty wings that through infinity move
And the Time-gallopings of the deathless Horse. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Witness Spirit,#KEYS
352:Yet in the midst of our labour and weeping not utterly lonely
Wander our steps, nor are terror and grief our portion only.
Do we not hear in the heart of the peril a flute go before us? ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Descent of Ahana,#KEYS
353:A creature of his own grey ignorance,
A mind half shadow and half gleam, a breath
That wrestles, captive in a world of death,
To live some lame brief years. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man the Thinking Animal,#KEYS
354:Back from his nature he drew to the passionless peaks of the spirit,
Throned where it dwells for ever uplifted and silent and changeless
Far beyond living and death, beyond Nature and ending of Nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
355:How shall they prosper who haste after auguries, oracles, whispers,
Dreams that walk in the night and voices obscure of the silence?
Touches are these from the gods that bewilder the brain to its ruin. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
356:Our souls travelling different paths have met in the ages
Each for its work and they cling for an hour to the names of affection,
Then Time's long waves bear them apart for new forms we shall know not, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
357:Self-Giving
Hateful I hold him who sworn to a cause that is holy and common
Broods upon private wrongs or serving his lonely ambition
Studies to reap his gain from the labour and woe of his fellows. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
358:Dead is the past; the void has possessed it; its drama is ended,
Finished its music. The future is dim and remote from our knowledge;
Silent it lies on the knees of the gods in their luminous stillness. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
359:Two genii in the dubious heart of man,
Two great unhappy foes together bound
Wrestle and strive to win unhampered ground;
They strive for ever since the race began. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, In the Moonlight,#KEYS
360:All eyes that look on me are my sole eyes;
The one heart that beats within all breasts is mine.
The world's happiness flows through me like wine,
Its million sorrows are my agonies. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Indwelling Universal,#KEYS
361:Each of us bears his punishment, fruit of a seed that's forgotten;
Each of us curses his neighbour protecting his heart with illusions:
Therefore like children we blame each other and hate and are angry. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
362:Identified with silence and boundlessness
My spirit widens clasping the universe
Till all that seemed becomes the Real,
One in a mighty and single vastness. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ocean Oneness,#KEYS
363:Moved man's tongue in its wrath looses speech that is hard to be pardoned,
Afterwards stilled we regret, we forgive. If all were resented,
None could live on this earth that is thick with our stumblings. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
364:Pride is not for our clay; the earth, not heaven was our mother
And we are even as the ant in our toil and the beast in our dying;
Only who cling to the hands of the gods can rise up from the earth-mire. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
365:Life and mind and their glory and debate
Are the slow prelude of a vaster theme,
A sketch confused of a supernal plan,
A preface to the epic of the Supreme. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Greater Plan,#KEYS
366:There is a silence greater than any known
To earth's dumb spirit, motionless in the soul
That has become Eternity's foothold,
Touched by the infinitudes for ever. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Jivanmukta,#KEYS
367:He is lost in the heart, in the cavern of Nature,
He is found in the brain where He builds up the thought:
In the pattern and bloom of the flowers He is woven,
In the luminous net of the stars He is caught. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Who,#KEYS
368:Oneness unknown to us dwells in these millions of figures and faces,
Wars with itself in our battles, loves in our clinging embraces,
Inly the self and the substance of things and their cause and their mover ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#KEYS
369:Silence is round me, wideness ineffable;
White birds on the ocean diving and wandering;
A soundless sea on a voiceless heaven,
Azure on azure, is mutely gazing. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ocean Oneness,#KEYS
370:This iron, brute, gigantic helpless toy
They call a world, this thing that turns and turns
And shrieks and bleeds and cannot stop, this victim
Broken and living yet on its own wheel, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya,#KEYS
371:But for the god in their breasts unsatisfied, but for his spurrings
Soon would the hero turn beast and the sage reel back to the savage;
Man from his difficult heights would recoil and be mud in the earth-mud. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
372:Into this life which the sunlight bounds and the greenness has cradled,
Armed with strength we have come; as our strength is, so is our joyance.
What but for joyance is birth and what but for joyance is living? ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
373:Leave to the gods their godhead and, mortal, turn to thy labour;
Take what thou canst from the hour that is thine and be fearless in spirit;
This is the greatness of man and the joy of his stay in the sunlight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
374:Near to the quiet truth of things we stand
In this grey moment. Neither happy light
Nor joyful sound deceives the listening heart,
Nor Night inarms, the Mother brooding vast,
To comfort us with sleep. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Chitrangada,#KEYS
375:The gods have invented
Only one way for a man through the world, O my slavegirl Briseis,
Valiant to be and noble and truthful and just to the humble,
Only one way for a woman, to love and serve and be faithful. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
376:Although consenting here to a mortal body,
He is the Undying; limit and bond he knows not;
For him the aeons are a playground,
Life and its deeds are his splendid shadow. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Jivanmukta,#KEYS
377:Yet his advance,
Attempt of a divinity within,
A consciousness in the inconscient Night,
To realise its own supernal Light,
Confronts the ruthless forces of the Unseen. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man the Thinking Animal,#KEYS
378:Has put the stars out ere the light,
And from their dewy cushions rise
Sweet flowers half-opening their eyes.
O pleasant then to feel as if new-born
The sweet, unripe and virgin air, the air of morn. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Songs to Myrtilla,#KEYS
379:What though 'tis true that the river of Life through the Valley of Peril
Flows! But the diamond shines on the cliffside, jacinth and beryl
Gleam in the crannies, sapphire, smaragdus the roadway bejewel, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Descent of Ahana,#KEYS
380:My soul's wide self of living infinite Space
Outlines its body luminous and unborn
Behind the earth-robe; under the earth-mask grows clear
The mould of an imperishable face. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Immortality,#KEYS
381:Out and alas! earth's greatest are earth and they fail in the testing,
Conquered by sorrow and doubt, fate's hammerers, fires of her furnace.
God in their souls they renounce and submit to their clay and its promptings. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
382:My heart shall throb with the world-beats of Thy love,
My body become Thy engine for earth-use;
In my nerves and veins Thy rapture's streams shall move;
My thoughts shall be hounds of Light for Thy power to loose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Surrender,#KEYS
383:To heal the evils and mistakes of Space
And change the tragedy of the ignorant world
Into a Divine Comedy of joy
And the laughter and the rapture of God's bliss.
The Mother of God is mother of our souls ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Mother of God,#KEYS
384:Transient, we made not ourselves, but at birth from the first we were fashioned
Valiant or fearful and as was our birth by the gods and their thinkings
Formed, so already enacted and fixed by their wills are our fortunes. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
385:Who can point out the way of the gods and the path of their travel,
Who shall impose on them bounds and an orbit? The winds have their treading,-
They can be followed and seized, not the gods when they move towards their purpose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
386:Perhaps the heart of God for ever sings
And worlds come throbbing out from every note;
Perhaps His soul sits ever calm and still
And listens to the music rapturously,
Himself adoring, by Himself adored. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya,#KEYS
387:Soul, my soul
Soul, my soul, yet ascend crossing the marge of life:
Mount out far above Time, reach to the golden end
... Live there lost in God space, rapturous, vacant, mute,
Sun-bright, timeless, immense, single and absolute.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,#KEYS
388:Then as now men walked in the round which the gods have decreed them
Eagerly turning their eyes to the lure and the tool and the labour.
Chained is their gaze to the span in front, to the gulfs they are blinded
Meant for their steps. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
389:Greater it seems to my mind to be king over men than their slayer,
Nobler to build and to govern than what the ages have laboured
Putting their godhead forth to create or the high gods have fashioned,
That to destroy in our wrath of a moment. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
390:Such were a dream of some sage at night when he muses in fancy,
Imaging freely a flawless world where none were afflicted,
No man inferior, all could sublimely equal and brothers
Live in a peace divine like the gods in their luminous regions. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
391:All things are subject to sweet pleasure,
But three things keep her richest measure,
The breeze that visits heaven
And knows the planets seven,
The green spring with its flowery truth
Creative and the luminous heart of youth. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Songs to Myrtilla,#KEYS
392:The knowledge of mortals is bound unto blindness.
Either only they walk mid the coloured dreams of the senses
Treading the greenness of earth and deeming the touch of things real,
Or if they see, by the curse of the gods their sight into falsehood ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
393:All over earth men wept and bled and laboured, world-wide
Sowing Fate with their deeds and had other fruit than they hoped for,
Out of desires and their passionate griefs and fleeting enjoyments
Weaving a tapestry fit for the gods to admire, who in ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
394:But for the god in their breasts unsatisfied, but for his spurrings
Soon would the hero turn beast and the sage reel back to the savage;
Man from his difficult heights would recoil and be mud in the earth-mud.
This by pain we prevent; we compel his ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
395:Men must sow earth with their hearts and their tears that their country may prosper;
Earth who bore and devours us that life may be born from our remnants.
Then shall the Sacrifice gather its fruits when the war-shout is silent,
Nor shall the blood ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
396:Only one doom irreparable treads down the soul of a nation,
Only one downfall endures; 'tis the ruin of greatness and virtue,
Mourning when Freedom departs from the life and the heart of a people,
Into her room comes creeping the mind of the slave. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
397:Then if the tempest be loud and the thunderbolt leaping incessant
Shatters the roof, if the lintels flame at last and each cornice
Shrieks with the pain of the blast, if the very pillars totter,
Keep yet your faith in Zeus, hold fast to the word of ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
398:All whose eyes can pierce that curtain, gaze into dimness;
This they have glimpsed and that they imagine deceived by their natures
Seeing the forms in their hearts of dreadful things and of joyous;
As in the darkness our eyes are deceived by shadows ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
399:Earth that was wakened by pain to life and by hunger to thinking
Left to her joys rests inert and content with her gains and her station.
But for the unbearable whips of the gods back soon to her matter
She would go glad and the goal would be missed ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
400:Hopes that were confident, fates that sprang dire from the seed of a moment,
Yearning that claimed all time for its date and all life for its fuel,
All that we wonder at gazing back when the passion has fallen,
Labour blind and vain expense and sacr ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
401:This is the burden of man that he acts from his heart and his passions,
Stung by the goads of the gods he hews at the ties that are dearest.
Lust was the guide they sent us, wrath was a whip for his coursers,
Madness they made the heart's comrade, r ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
402:This is the greatness of gods that they know and can put back the knowledge;
Doing the work they have chosen they turn not for fruit nor for failure,
Griefless they walk to their goal and strain not their eyes towards the ending.
Light that they hav ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
403:What can man suffer direr or worse than enslaved from a victor
Boons to accept, to take safety and ease from the foe and the stranger,
Fallen from the virtue stern that heaven permits to a mortal?
Death is not keener than this nor the slaughter of f ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
404:Who among men has not thoughts that he holds for the wisest, though foolish?
Who, though feeble and nought, esteems not his strength o'er his fellow's?
Therefore the wisest and strongest choose out a king and a leader,
Not as a perfect arbiter armed ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
405:Children of Immortality, gods who are joyous for ever,
Rapture is ours and eternity measures our lives by his aeons.
For we desireless toil who have joy in the fall as the triumph,
Knowledge eternal possessing we work for an end that is destined
L ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
406:He who a god for his kindred,
Lives for the rest without bowels of pity or fellowship, lone-souled,
Scorning the world that he rules, who untamed by the weight of an empire
Holds allies as subjects, subjects as slaves and drives to the battle
Care ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
407:His flute with its sweetness ensnaring
Sounds in our ears in the night and our souls of their teguments baring
Hales us out naked and absolute, out to his woodlands eternal,
Out to his moonlit dances, his dalliance sweet and supernal,
And we go st ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#KEYS
408:In earth's rhythm of shadow and sunlight
Storm is the dance of the locks of the God assenting to greatness,
Zeus who with secret compulsion orders the ways of our nature;
Veiled in events he lives and working disguised in the mortal
Builds our str ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
409:Man who has towered
Out of the plasm and struggled by thought to Divinity's level,
Man, this miniature second creator of good and of evil,
He too was only a compost of Matter made living, organic,
Forged as her thinking tool by an Energy blind and ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#KEYS
410:Surely the gods protect, yet is Death too always mighty.
Most in his shadowy envy he strikes at the brave and the lovely,
Grudging works to abridge their days and to widow the sunlight.
Most, disappointed, he rages against the beloved of Heaven;
S ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
411:Though the people hear us not, yet are we bound to our nation:
Over the people the gods are; over a man is his country;
This is the deity first adored by the hearths of the noble.
For by our nation's will we are ruled in the home and the battle
An ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
412:Evil is worked, not justice, when into the mould of our thinkings
God we would force and enchain to the throb of our hearts the immortals,—
Justice and Virtue, her sister,—for where is justice mid creatures
Perfectly? Even the gods are betrayed by o ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
413:God:::
Thou who pervadest all the worlds below,
Yet sitst above,
Master of all who work and rule and know,
Servant of Love!
Thou who disdainest not the worm to be
Nor even the clod,
Therefore we know by that humility
That thou art God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,#KEYS
414:Kama (Desire)
Delight and laughter walking hand in hand
Go with Me, and I play with grief and pain. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems: Kama
Kama (Desire)
All energies put into activity—thought, speech, feeling, act—go to constitute Karma. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - I, Karma and Heredity,#KEYS
415:Stood visible, Titanic, scarlet-clad,
Dark as a thunder-cloud, with streaming hair
Obscuring heaven, and in her sovran grasp
The sword, the flower, the boon, the bleeding head,—
Bhavani. Then she vanished; the daylight
Was ordinary in a common w ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Baji Prabhou,#KEYS
416:God's Tread
Once we have chosen to be as the gods, we must follow that motion.
Knowledge must grow in us, might like a Titan's, bliss like an ocean,
Calmness and purity born of the spirit's gaze on the Real,
Rapture of his oneness embracing the soul in a clasp ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#KEYS
417:Time in its cycles waited for man. Though his kingdom is ended,
Here in a speck mid the suns and his life is a throb in the aeons,
Yet, O you Titans and Gods, O Rudras, O strong Aditeians,
Man is the centre and knot; he is first, though the last in ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Descent of Ahana,#KEYS
418:World-destiny waits upon that foaming lip.
A Titan Power upholds this pigmy man,
The crude dwarf instrument of a mighty Force.
Hater of the free spirit's joy and light,
Made only of strength and skill and giant might,
A Will to trample humanity ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Dwarf Napoleon,#KEYS
419:Always the wide-pacing river of Life from its far-off fountains
Flows down mighty and broad, like a warhorse brought from its manger
Arching its neck as it paces grand to the gorges of danger.
Sometimes we hesitate, often start and would turn from t ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Descent of Ahana,#KEYS
420:Napoleon's mind was swift and bold and vast,
His heart was calm and stormy like the sea,
His will dynamic in its grip and clasp.
His eye could hold a world within its grasp
And see the great and small things sovereignly.
A movement of gigantic d ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Dwarf Napoleon,#KEYS
421:Now I have done with space and my soul is released from the hours.
Saved is my heart from the need of joy, the attraction to sorrow,
Who have escaped from my past and forgotten today and tomorrow;
I have grown vacant and mighty, naked and wide as th ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Descent of Ahana,#KEYS
422:Mother-Earth
Who but the fool and improvident, who but the dreamer and madman
Leaves for the far and ungrasped earth's close and provident labour?
Children of earth, our mother gives tokens, she lays down her signposts,
Step by step to advance on her bosom, to g ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
423:Suffering is the food of our strength and torture the bliss of our entrails.
We are pitiless, mighty and glad, the gods fear our laughter inhuman.
Our hearts are heroic and hard; we wear the belt of Orion:
Our will has the edge of the thunderbolt, o ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Children of Wotan,#KEYS
424:Vainly the divine whispers seek us; the heights are rejected.
Man to his earth drawn always prefers his nethermost promptings,
Man, devouring, devoured who is slayer and slain through the ages
Since by the beast he soars held and exceeds not that pedestals measure. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
425:We are the javelins of Destiny, we are the children of Wotan,
We are the human Titans, the supermen dreamed by the sage.
A cross of the beast and demoniac with the godhead of power and will,
We were born in humanity's sunset, to the Night is our pil ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Children of Wotan,#KEYS
426:Earth-Memory
The earth is safer, warmer its sunbeams;
Death and limits are known; so he clings to them hating the summons.
So might one dwell who has come to take joy in a fair-lighted prison;
Amorous grown of its marble walls and its noble adornments,
Lost to ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
427:I walk by the chill wave through the dull slime
And still that weary journeying knows no end;
Lost is the lustrous godhead beyond Time,
There comes no voice of the celestial Friend.
And yet I know my footprints' track shall be
A pathway towards I ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Pilgrim of the Night,#KEYS
428:A Tree :::
A tree beside the sandy river-beach
Holds up its topmost boughs
Like fingers towards the skies they cannot reach,
Earth-bound, heaven amorous.
This is the soul of man. Body and brain
Hungry for earth our heavenly flight detain.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,#KEYS
429:All opposition seems and strife and chance,
An aimless labour with but scanty sense,
To eyes that see a part and miss the whole; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real
Part-Experience
When youth has quenched its soft and magic light,
Delightful things remain but dead is their delight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Songs to Myrtilla,#KEYS
430:A might no human will nor force can gain,
A knowledge seated in eternity,
A bliss beyond our struggle and our pain
Are the high pinnacles of our destiny. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems: Evolution - II
Man's destiny
The Mantra is born through the heart and shaped or massed by the thinking mind into a chariot of that godhead of the Eternal of whom the truth seen is a face or a form. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, The Ideal Spirit of Poetry,#KEYS
431:But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses. ~ Robert Ardrey, #KEYS
432:Bride of the Fire :::
Bride of the Fire, clasp me now close, -
Bride of the Fire!
I have shed the bloom of the earthly rose,
I have slain desire.
Beauty of the Light, surround my life, -
Beauty of the Light!
I have sacrificed longing and parted from grief,
I can bear thy delight.
Image of Ecstasy, thrill and enlace, -
Image of Bliss!
I would see only thy marvellous face,
Feel only thy kiss.
Voice of Infinity, sound in my heart, -
Call of the One!
Stamp there thy radiance, never to part,
O living sun. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,#KEYS
433:Vainly the sands of Time have been strewn with the ruins of empires,
Signs that the gods had left, but in vain. For they look for a nation,
One that can conquer itself having conquered the world, but they find none. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems: Ilion
Self-conquest
When one conquers a difficulty or goes forward, it creates a right current in the atmosphere. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV: The Right Attitude towards Difficulties
Self-Conquest
Self-denial is a necessary discipline for the soul of man, because his heart is ignorantly attached. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Renunciation,#KEYS
434:Krishna:::
At last I find a meaning of soul's birth
Into this universe terrible and sweet,
I who have felt the hungry heart of earth
Aspiring beyond heaven to Krishna's feet.
I have seen the beauty of immortal eyes,
And heard the passion of the Lover's flute,
And known a deathless ecstasy's surprise
And sorrow in my heart for ever mute.
Nearer and nearer now the music draws,
Life shudders with a strange felicity;
All Nature is a wide enamoured pause
Hoping her lord to touch, to clasp, to be.
For this one moment lived the ages past;
The world now throbs fulfilled in me at last. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,#KEYS
435:The Golden Light :::
Thy golden Light came down into my brain
And the grey rooms of mind sun-touched became
A bright reply to Wisdom's occult plane,
A calm illumination and a flame.
Thy golden Light came down into my throat,
And all my speech is now a tune divine,
A paean-song of Thee my single note;
My words are drunk with the Immortal's wine.
Thy golden Light came down into my heart
Smiting my life with Thy eternity;
Now has it grown a temple where Thou art
And all its passions point towards only Thee.
Thy golden Light came down into my feet,
My earth is now Thy playfield and Thy seat. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,#KEYS
436:The Silver Call
There is a godhead of unrealised things
To which Time's splendid gains are hoarded dross;
A cry seems near, a rustle of silver wings
Calling to heavenly joy by earthly loss.
All eye has seen and all the ear has heard
Is a pale illusion by some greater voice
And mightier vision; no sweet sound or word,
No passion of hues that make the heart rejoice
Can equal those diviner ecstasies.
A Mind beyond our mind has sole the ken
Of those yet unimagined harmonies,
The fate and privilege of unborn men.
As rain-thrashed mire the marvel of the rose,
Earth waits that distant marvel to disclose.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, 594,#KEYS
437:I Have A Hundred Lives:::
I have a hundred lives before me yet
To grasp thee in, O spirit ethereal,
Be sure I will with heart insatiate
Pursue thee like a hunter through them all.
Thou yet shalt turn back on the eternal way
And with awakened vision watch me come
Smiling a little at errors past, and lay
Thy eager hand in mine, its proper home.
Meanwhile made happy by thy happiness
I shall approach thee in things and people dear
And in thy spirit's motions half-possess
Loving what thou hast loved, shall feel thee near,
Until I lay my hands on thee indeed
Somewhere among the stars, as 'twas decreed. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, 180,#KEYS
438:The Divine Worker
I face earth's happenings with an equal soul;
In all are heard Thy steps: Thy unseen feet
Tread Destiny's pathways in my front. Life's whole
Tremendous theorem is Thou complete.
No danger can perturb my spirit's calm:
My acts are Thine; I do Thy works and pass;
Failure is cradled on Thy deathless arm,
Victory is Thy passage mirrored in Fortune's glass.
In this rude combat with the fate of man
Thy smile within my heart makes all my strength;
Thy Force in me labours at its grandiose plan,
Indifferent to the Time-snake's crawling length.
No power can slay my soul; it lives in Thee.
Thy presence is my immortality. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,#KEYS
439:Cosmic Consciousness :::
I have wrapped the wide world in my wider self
And Time and Space my spirit's seeing are.
I am the god and demon, ghost and elf,
I am the wind's speed and the blazing star.
All Nature is the nursling of my care,
I am its struggle and the eternal rest;
The world's joy thrilling runs through me, I bear
The sorrow of millions in my lonely breast.
I have learned a close identity with all,
Yet am by nothing bound that I become;
Carrying in me the universe's call
I mount to my imperishable home.
I pass beyond Time and life on measureless wings,
Yet still am one with born and unborn things.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,#KEYS
440:Because Thou Art :::
Because Thou art All-beauty and All-bliss,
My soul blind and enamoured yearns for Thee;
It bears thy mystic touch in all that is
And thrills with the burden of that ecstasy.
Behind all eyes I meet Thy secret gaze
And in each voice I hear Thy magic tune:
Thy sweetness haunts my heart through Nature's ways
Nowhere it beats now from Thy snare immune.
It loves Thy body in all living things;
Thy joy is there in every leaf and stone:
The moments bring thee on their fiery wings;
Sight's endless artistry is Thou alone.
Time voyages with Thee upon its prow
And all the futures passionate hope is Thou.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,#KEYS
441:Invitation:::
With wind and the weather beating round me
Up to the hill and the moorland I go.
Who will come with me? Who will climb with me?
Wade through the brook and tramp through the snow?
Not in the petty circle of cities
Cramped by your doors and your walls I dwell;
Over me God is blue in the welkin,
Against me the wind and the storm rebel.
I sport with solitude here in my regions,
Of misadventure have made me a friend.
Who would live largely? Who would live freely?
Here to the wind-swept uplands ascend.
I am the Lord of tempest and mountain,
I am the Spirit of freedom and pride.
Stark must he be and a kinsman to danger
Who shares my kingdom and walks at my side. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,#KEYS
442:A talisman is a storehouse of some particular kind of energy, the kind that is needed to accomplish the task for which you have constructed it...The decisive advantage of this system is not that its variety makes it so adaptable to our needs, but that we already posses the Invocations necessary to call forth the Energies required...You must lay most closely to your heart the theory of the Magical Link and see well to it that it rings true; for without this your talisman is worse than useless. It is dangerous; for all that Energy is bound to expend itself somehow; it will make its own links with anything handy that takes its fancy; and you can get into any sort of the most serious kind of trouble...Most of my Talismans, like my Invocations, have been poems. ~ Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears, #KEYS
443:The magic in a word remains magic even if it is not understood, and loses none of its power. Poems may be understandable or they may not, but they must be good, and they must be real.
From the examples of the algebraic signs on the walls of Kovalevskaia's nursery that had such a decisive influence on the child's fate, and from the example of spells, it is clear we cannot demand of all language: "be easy to understand, like the sign in the street." The speech of higher intelligence, even when it is not understandable, falls like seed into the fertile soil of the soul and only much later, in mysterious ways, does it bring forth its shoots. Does the earth understand the writing of the seeds a farmer scatters on its surface? No. But the grain still ripens in autumn, in response to those seeds. In any case, I certainly do not maintain that every incomprehensible piece of writing is beautiful. I mean only that we must not reject a piece of writing simply because it is incomprehensible to a particular group of readers. ~ Velimir Khlebnikov,#KEYS
444:Yet not for tyrant wrong nor to serve as a sword for our passions
Zeus created our strength, but that earth might have help from her children.
Not of our moulding its gifts to our soul nor were formed by our labour!
When did we make them, where were ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems: Ilion
Mother-Earth
So when the Eye supreme perceives that we rise up too swiftly,
Drawn towards height but fullness contemning, called by the azure,
Life when we fail in, poor in our base and forgetting our mother,
Back we are hurled to our roots; we recover our sap f ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems: Ilion
Mother-Earth
Man, repelled by the gulfs within him and shrinking from vastness,
Form of the earth accepts and is glad of the lap of his mother. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems: Ilion
Mother-Earth
Man does not act, even most primitively, from fear alone, but from twin motives, fear and desire, fear of things unpleasant and maleficent and desire of things pleasant and beneficent. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Motives of Devotion,#KEYS
445:If we are religious-minded, perhaps we will see the gods who inhabit this world. Beings, forces, sounds, lights, and rhythms are just so many true forms of the same indefinable, but not unknowable, Essence we call God; we have spoken of God, and made temples, laws or poems to try to capture the one little pulsation filling us with sunshine, but it is free as the wind on foam-flecked shores. We may also enter the world of music, which in fact is not different from the others but a special extension of this same, great inexpressible Vibration. If once, only once, even for a few moments in a lifetime, we can hear that Music, that Joy singing above, we will know what Beethoven and Bach heard; we will know what God is because we will have heard God. We will probably not say anything grandiose; we will just know that That exists, whereupon all the suffering in the world will seem redeemed.
At the extreme summit of the overmind, there only remain great waves of multi-hued light, says the Mother, the play of spiritual forces, which later translate - sometimes much later - into new ideas, social changes, or earthly events, after crossing one by one all the layers of consciousness and suffering a considerable distortion and loss of light...
~ Satprem, Sri Aurobindo Or The Adventure Of Consciousness,#KEYS
446:Musa Spiritus :::
O Word concealed in the upper fire,
Thou who hast lingered through centuries,
Descend from thy rapt white desire,
Plunging through gold eternities.
Into the gulfs of our nature leap,
Voice of the spaces, call of the Light!
Break the seals of Matter's sleep,
Break the trance of the unseen height.
In the uncertain glow of human mind,
Its waste of unharmonied thronging thoughts,
Carve thy epic mountain-lined
Crowded with deep prophetic grots.
Let thy hue-winged lyrics hover like birds
Over the swirl of the heart's sea.
Touch into sight with thy fire-words
The blind indwelling deity.
O Muse of the Silence, the wideness make
In the unplumbed stillness that hears thy voice,
In the vast mute heavens of the spirit awake
Where thy eagles of Power flame and rejoice.
Out, out with the mind and its candles flares,
Light, light the suns that never die.
For my ear the cry of the seraph stars
And the forms of the Gods for my naked eye!
Let the little troubled life-god within
Cast his veils from the still soul,
His tiger-stripes of virtue and sin,
His clamour and glamour and thole and dole;
All make tranquil, all make free.
Let my heart-beats measure the footsteps of God
As He comes from His timeless infinity
To build in their rapture His burning abode.
Weave from my life His poem of days,
His calm pure dawns and His noons of force.
My acts for the grooves of His chariot-race,
My thoughts for the tramp of His great steeds' course! ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,#KEYS
447:Many men think and write through inspiration. From where does it come?
Many! That is indeed a wonderful thing. I did not think there have been so many.... So?
Poets, when they write poems...
Ah! Inspirations come from very many different places. There are inspirations that may be very material, there are inspirations that may be vital, there are inspirations that come from all kinds of mental planes, and there are very, very rare inspirations that come from the higher mind or from a still higher region. All inspirations do not come from the same place. Hence, to be inspired does not necessarily mean that one is a higher be- ing.... One may be inspired also to do and say many stupid things!
What does "inspired" mean?
It means receiving something which is beyond you, which was not within you; to open yourself to an influence which is outside your individual conscious being.
Indeed, one can have also an inspiration to commit a murder! In countries where they decapitate murderers, cut off their heads, this causes a very brutal death which throws out the vital being, not allowing it the time to decompose for coming out of the body; the vital being is violently thrown out of the body, with all its impulses; and generally it goes and lodges itself in one of those present there, men half horrified, half with a kind of unhealthy curiosity. That makes the opening and it enters within. Statistics have proved that most young murderers admit that the impulse came to them when they were present at the death of another murderer. It was an "inspiration", but of a detestable kind.
Fundamentally it is a moment of openness to something which was not within your personal consciousness, which comes from outside and rushes into you and makes you do something. This is the widest formula that can be given.
Now, generally, when people say: "Oh! he is an inspired poet", it means he has received something from high above and expressed it in a remarkable manneR But one should rather say that his inspiration is of a high quality. ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1953,#KEYS
448:Mother of Dreams :::
Goddess supreme, Mother of Dream, by thy ivory doors when thou standest,
Who are they then that come down unto men in thy visions that troop, group upon group, down the path of the shadows slanting?
Dream after dream, they flash and they gleam with the flame of the stars still around them;
Shadows at thy side in a darkness ride where the wild fires dance, stars glow and glance and the random meteor glistens;
There are voices that cry to their kin who reply; voices sweet, at the heart they beat and ravish the soul as it listens.
What then are these lands and these golden sands and these seas more radiant than earth can imagine?
Who are those that pace by the purple waves that race to the cliff-bound floor of thy jasper shore under skies in which mystery muses,
Lapped in moonlight not of our night or plunged in sunshine that is not diurnal?
Who are they coming thy Oceans roaming with sails whose strands are not made by hands, an unearthly wind advances?
Why do they join in a mystic line with those on the sands linking hands in strange and stately dances?
Thou in the air, with a flame in thy hair, the whirl of thy wonders watching,
Holdest the night in thy ancient right, Mother divine, hyacinthine, with a girdle of beauty defended.
Sworded with fire, attracting desire, thy tenebrous kingdom thou keepest,
Starry-sweet, with the moon at thy feet, now hidden now seen the clouds between in the gloom and the drift of thy tresses.
Only to those whom thy fancy chose, O thou heart-free, is it given to see thy witchcraft and feel thy caresses.
Open the gate where thy children wait in their world of a beauty undarkened.
High-throned on a cloud, victorious, proud I have espied Maghavan ride when the armies of wind are behind him;
Food has been given for my tasting from heaven and fruit of immortal sweetness;
I have drunk wine of the kingdoms divine and have healed the change of music strange from a lyre which our hands cannot master,
Doors have swung wide in the chambers of pride where the Gods reside and the Apsaras dance in their circles faster and faster.
For thou art she whom we first can see when we pass the bounds of the mortal;
There at the gates of the heavenly states thou hast planted thy wand enchanted over the head of the Yogin waving.
From thee are the dream and the shadows that seem and the fugitive lights that delude us;
Thine is the shade in which visions are made; sped by thy hands from celestial lands come the souls that rejoice for ever.
Into thy dream-worlds we pass or look in thy magic glass, then beyond thee we climb out of Space and Time to the peak of divine endeavour. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,#KEYS
449:A God's Labour
I have gathered my dreams in a silver air
Between the gold and the blue
And wrapped them softly and left them there,
My jewelled dreams of you.
I had hoped to build a rainbow bridge
Marrying the soil to the sky
And sow in this dancing planet midge
The moods of infinity.
But too bright were our heavens, too far away,
Too frail their ethereal stuff;
Too splendid and sudden our light could not stay;
The roots were not deep enough.
He who would bring the heavens here
Must descend himself into clay
And the burden of earthly nature bear
And tread the dolorous way.
Coercing my godhead I have come down
Here on the sordid earth,
Ignorant, labouring, human grown
Twixt the gates of death and birth.
I have been digging deep and long
Mid a horror of filth and mire
A bed for the golden river's song,
A home for the deathless fire.
I have laboured and suffered in Matter's night
To bring the fire to man;
But the hate of hell and human spite
Are my meed since the world began.
For man's mind is the dupe of his animal self;
Hoping its lusts to win,
He harbours within him a grisly Elf
Enamoured of sorrow and sin.
The grey Elf shudders from heaven's flame
And from all things glad and pure;
Only by pleasure and passion and pain
His drama can endure.
All around is darkness and strife;
For the lamps that men call suns
Are but halfway gleams on this stumbling life
Cast by the Undying Ones.
Man lights his little torches of hope
That lead to a failing edge;
A fragment of Truth is his widest scope,
An inn his pilgrimage.
The Truth of truths men fear and deny,
The Light of lights they refuse;
To ignorant gods they lift their cry
Or a demon altar choose.
All that was found must again be sought,
Each enemy slain revives,
Each battle for ever is fought and refought
Through vistas of fruitless lives.
My gaping wounds are a thousand and one
And the Titan kings assail,
But I dare not rest till my task is done
And wrought the eternal will.
How they mock and sneer, both devils and men!
"Thy hope is Chimera's head
Painting the sky with its fiery stain;
Thou shalt fall and thy work lie dead.
"Who art thou that babblest of heavenly ease
And joy and golden room
To us who are waifs on inconscient seas
And bound to life's iron doom?
"This earth is ours, a field of Night
For our petty flickering fires.
How shall it brook the sacred Light
Or suffer a god's desires?
"Come, let us slay him and end his course!
Then shall our hearts have release
From the burden and call of his glory and force
And the curb of his wide white peace."
But the god is there in my mortal breast
Who wrestles with error and fate
And tramples a road through mire and waste
For the nameless Immaculate.
A voice cried, "Go where none have gone!
Dig deeper, deeper yet
Till thou reach the grim foundation stone
And knock at the keyless gate."
I saw that a falsehood was planted deep
At the very root of things
Where the grey Sphinx guards God's riddle sleep
On the Dragon's outspread wings.
I left the surface gauds of mind
And life's unsatisfied seas
And plunged through the body's alleys blind
To the nether mysteries.
I have delved through the dumb Earth's dreadful heart
And heard her black mass' bell.
I have seen the source whence her agonies part
And the inner reason of hell.
Above me the dragon murmurs moan
And the goblin voices flit;
I have pierced the Void where Thought was born,
I have walked in the bottomless pit.
On a desperate stair my feet have trod
Armoured with boundless peace,
Bringing the fires of the splendour of God
Into the human abyss.
He who I am was with me still;
All veils are breaking now.
I have heard His voice and borne His will
On my vast untroubled brow.
The gulf twixt the depths and the heights is bridged
And the golden waters pour
Down the sapphire mountain rainbow-ridged
And glimmer from shore to shore.
Heaven's fire is lit in the breast of the earth
And the undying suns here burn;
Through a wonder cleft in the bounds of birth
The incarnate spirits yearn
Like flames to the kingdoms of Truth and Bliss:
Down a gold-red stairway wend
The radiant children of Paradise
Clarioning darkness' end.
A little more and the new life's doors
Shall be carved in silver light
With its aureate roof and mosaic floors
In a great world bare and bright.
I shall leave my dreams in their argent air,
For in a raiment of gold and blue
There shall move on the earth embodied and fair
The living truth of you.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A God's Labour, 534,#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else. ~ mary-oliver, @wisdomtrove 2:in the street of the sky night walks scattering poems ~ e-e-cummings, @wisdomtrove 3:No poems can please long or live that are written by water drinkers. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 4:I hope to leave behind a few poems it will be hard to get rid of. ~ robert-frost, @wisdomtrove 5:No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 6:I am not a nature poet. There is almost always a person in my poems. ~ robert-frost, @wisdomtrove 7:Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems. ~ rainer-maria-rilke, @wisdomtrove 8:He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 9:To see the Summer Sky Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie— True Poems flee— ~ emily-dickinson, @wisdomtrove 10:It is not enough for poems to be fine; they must charm, and draw the mind of the listener at will. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 11:How are his poems?" "He's not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove 12:Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 13:You may repeat the most marvelous poems. And that is not worth a cent if you don't live it. ~ jiddu-krishnamurti, @wisdomtrove 14:You'll be a poorer person all your life if you don't know some of the great stories and great poems. ~ walt-disney, @wisdomtrove 15:One of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove 16:I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 17:... to write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers. ~ mary-oliver, @wisdomtrove 18:Out of pain and problems have come the sweetest songs, the most poignant poems, the most gripping stories. ~ billy-graham, @wisdomtrove 19:The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 20:I can explain all the poems that were ever invented - and a good many that haven't been invented just yet. ~ lewis-carroll, @wisdomtrove 21:Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before. ~ alice-walker, @wisdomtrove 22:For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)-they are experiences. ~ rainer-maria-rilke, @wisdomtrove 23:Some poems are like the Centaurs& 24:Far off in the red mangroves an alligator has heaved himself onto a hummock of grass and lies there, studying his poems. ~ mary-oliver, @wisdomtrove 25:the poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople... you and i are human beings; most people are snobs. ~ e-e-cummings, @wisdomtrove 26:Poverty is very good in poems but very bad in the house; very good in maxims and sermons but very bad in practical life. ~ henry-ward-beecher, @wisdomtrove 27:Ye are better than all the ballads That ever were sung or said; For ye are living poems, And all the rest are dead. ~ henry-wadsworth-longfellow, @wisdomtrove 28:My songs were influenced not so much by poetry on the page but by poetry being recited by the poets who recited poems with jazz bands. ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 29:My verses, I cannot say poems. . . . I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers. ~ dorothy-parker, @wisdomtrove 30:In the Book of Poetry there are three hundred poems, but the meaning of all of them may be put in a single sentence: Have no debasing thoughts. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 31:Essentially, mythologies are enormous poems that are renditions of insights, giving some sense of the marvel, the miracle and wonder of life. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove 32:For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. ~ mary-oliver, @wisdomtrove 33:He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 34:Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past. ~ g-k-chesterton, @wisdomtrove 35:Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together. ~ mary-oliver, @wisdomtrove 36:One of these poems I wrote after having been here only a month. The other, I wrote this morning. In the space between the two poems, I have found acres of grace ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove 37:As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other. ~ mary-oliver, @wisdomtrove 38:It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge. ~ alain-de-botton, @wisdomtrove 39:It is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls) that my poems are competing. ~ e-e-cummings, @wisdomtrove 40:In one of his poems Walt Whitman announces: It is time to explain myself Рlet us stand up. What is known I strip away, I launch all men and women forward with me into the Unknown. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove 41:May Moorland weavers boast Pindaric skill, And tailors' lays be longer than their bill! While punctual beaux reward the grateful notes, And pay for poems& 42:One of Walt Whitman's best-known poems is this one: When I heard the learn'd astronomer,... . The trouble is, Whitman is talking through his hat, but the poor soul didn't know any better ~ isaac-asimov, @wisdomtrove 43:Some of my poems indicate that I am writing while living alone after a split with a woman, and I've had many splits with women. I need solitude more often when I'm not writing than when I am. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove 44:The critics could never mortify me out of heart - because I love poetry for its own sake, - and, tho' with no stoicism and some ambition, care more for my poems than for my poetic reputation. ~ elizabeth-barrett-browning, @wisdomtrove 45:One of my favorite Sufi poems... says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen. ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove 46:Do you know, Considering the market, there are more Poems produced than any other thing? No wonder poets sometimes have to seem So much more businesslike than businessmen. Their wares are so much harder to get rid of. ~ robert-frost, @wisdomtrove 47:Humanity i love you because you are perpetually putting the secret of life in your pants and forgetting it's there and sitting down on it and because you are forever making poems in the lap of death Humanity i hate you ~ e-e-cummings, @wisdomtrove 48:I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen. ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove 49:I held her wrists and then I got it through the eyes: hatred, centuries deep and true. I was wrong and graceless and sick. all the things I had learned had been wasted. there was no creature living as foul as I and all my poems were false. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove 50:You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life. ~ jiddu-krishnamurti, @wisdomtrove 51:I have seen too many men wilt and go silly under a little light, and then they continue to write and get published, turning out pure crap under a name that has become a bad habit. The next poem is all that counts. You can't stand on past poems. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove 52:& 53:Poems On Time The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough. Time is a wealth of change, but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth. Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 54:Poems On Love Love adorns itself; it seeks to prove inward joy by outward beauty. Love does not claim possession, but gives freedom. Love is an endless mystery, for it has nothing else to explain it. Love's gift cannot be given, it waits to be accepted. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 55:If you have no love, do what you will - go after all the gods on earth, do all the social activities, try to reform the poor, the politics, write books, write poems - you are a dead human being. Without love your problems will increase, multiply endlessly. ~ jiddu-krishnamurti, @wisdomtrove 56:All the books of the world full of thoughts and poems are nothing in comparison to a minute of sobbing, when feeling surges in waves, the soul feels itself profoundly and finds itself. Tears are the melting ice of snow. All angels are close to the crying person. ~ hermann-hesse, @wisdomtrove 57:A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 58:We want to be famous as a writer, as a poet, as a painter, as a politician, as a singer, or what you will. Why? Because we really don't love what we are doing. If you loved to sing, or to paint, or to write poems, if you really loved it you would not be concerned with whether you are famous or not. ~ jiddu-krishnamurti, @wisdomtrove 59:Poems On Life: Life is given to us, we earn it by giving it. Let the dead have the immortality of fame, but the living the immortality of love. Life's errors cry for the merciful beauty that can modulate their isolation into a harmony with the whole. Life, like a child, laughs, shaking its rattle of death as it runs. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 60:Of course there is matter for remark in poems. Nobody denies that. But it must be solemnly laid on everybody in this world to make his own observations and remarks. That's what we mean by thinking, and that's about all we mean. A teacher says to a pupil "Watch me notice a few things in the next few months: let's see you notice a few things too." ~ robert-frost, @wisdomtrove 61:When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet. . . indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 62:Christmas poem to a man in jail hello Bill Abbott: I appreciate your passing around my books in jail there, my poems and stories. if I can lighten the load for some of those guys with my books, fine. but literature, you know, is difficult for the average man to assimilate (and for the unaverage man too); I don't like most poetry, for example, so I write mine the way I like to read it. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove 63:It is no use thinking that writing of poems - the actual writing - can accommodate itself to a social setting, even the most sympathetic social setting of a workshop composed of friends. It cannot. The work improves there and often the will to work gets valuable nourishment and ideas. But, for good reasons, the poem requires of the writer not society or instruction, but a patch of profound and unbroken solitude. ~ mary-oliver, @wisdomtrove 64:I remember, when I was a child and wrote poems in little clasped books, I used to kiss the books and put them away tenderly because I had been happy near them, and take them out by turns when I was going from home, to cheer them by the change of air and the pleasure of the new place. This, not for the sake of the verses written in them, and not for the sake of writing more verses in them, but from pure gratitude. ~ elizabeth-barrett-browning, @wisdomtrove 65:We are about to part," said Neville. "Here are the boxes; here are the cabs. There is Percival in his billycock hat. He will forget me. He will leave my letters lying about among guns and dogs unaswered. I shall send him poems and he will perhaps reply with a picture post card. But it is for that that I love him. I shall propose a meeting - under a clock, by some Cross; and shall wait and he will not come. It is for that that I love him. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 66:Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence? I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds. Open your doors and look abroad. From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before. In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across a hundred years. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 67:Your poems are rather hard to understand, whereas your paintings are so easy. Easy? Of course - you paint flowers and girls and sunsets; things that everybody understands. I never met him. Who? Everybody. Did you ever hear of nonrepresentational painting? I am. Pardon me? I am a painter, and painting is nonrepresentational. Not all painting. No: housepainting is representational. And what does a housepainter represent? Ten dollars an hour. In other words, you don't want to be serious - It takes two to be serious. ~ e-e-cummings, @wisdomtrove 68:Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint... They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 69:My own personal task is not simply that of poet and writer (still less commentator, pseudo-prophet); it is basically to praise God out of an inner center of silence, gratitude, and & 70:And now my old dog is dead, and another I had after him, and my parents are dead, and that first world, that old house, is sold and lost, and the books I gathered there lost, or sold- but more books bought, and in another place, board by board and stone by stone, like a house, a true life built, and all because I was steadfast about one or two things: loving foxes, and poems, the blank piece of paper, and my own energy- and mostly the shimmering shoulders of the world that shrug carelessly over the fate of any individual that they may, the better, keep the Niles and Amazons flowing. ~ mary-oliver, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:WINGS LOVE: POEMS ~ Danielle Steel, #NFDB
2:Lies belong in poems ~ Kenneth Koch, #NFDB
3:This is what poems are: ~ Anne Sexton, #NFDB
4:...hatching his poems.. ~ Susanna Clarke, #NFDB
5:Listen to presences inside poems. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
6:My poems are like a dagger ~ Jose Marti, #NFDB
7:My poems please the brave: ~ Jose Marti, #NFDB
8:101 Greatest Romantic Poems ~ Bill Farrel, #NFDB
9:In your beauty, how to make poems. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
10:Listen to presences inside poems, ~ Rumi, #NFDB
11:That's what poems are for, ~ Tess Gallagher, #NFDB
12:Many of my poems are not sexual. ~ Thom Gunn, #NFDB
13:If you like my poems let them ~ e e cummings, #NFDB
14:I write poems to figure things out ~ Sarah Kay, #NFDB
15:I do not know how to make poems ~ Henri Michaux, #NFDB
16:Poems are made by fools like me, ~ Joyce Kilmer, #NFDB
17:Will slams poems; I slam doors. ~ Colleen Hoover, #NFDB
18:Leaving Verses Poems Quotes ~ John Walter Bratton, #NFDB
19:Each man has his own batch of poems. ~ Saul Bellow, #NFDB
20:Poems aren't postcards to send home. ~ Anne Sexton, #NFDB
21:The fatal problem with poetry: poems. ~ Ben Lerner, #NFDB
22:Will slam poems and I slam doors. ~ Colleen Hoover, #NFDB
23:Birds are poems I haven't caught yet ~ Jim Harrison, #NFDB
24:They compose poems to their knives. ~ Frank Herbert, #NFDB
25:Title deeds generally outlast poems. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
26:Have you sipped your poems today? ~ Helvy Tiana Rosa, #NFDB
27:My poems are naughty, but my life is pure. ~ Martial, #NFDB
28:Poems are difficult to silence. ~ Stephen Greenblatt, #NFDB
29:Truly great poems never do, somehow. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
30:I have seen the universe! It is made of poems! ~ Sj n, #NFDB
31:I like Beethoven, especially the poems. ~ Ringo Starr, #NFDB
32:Poems are the 'daredevil' of writing ~ Ralph Fletcher, #NFDB
33:Poems come from incomplete knowledge. ~ Diane Wakoski, #NFDB
34:I will fill the poems with great pain ~ Dorothea Lasky, #NFDB
35:Poems are invisible flowers on my skin. ~ Sanober Khan, #NFDB
36:Poems are rough notations for the music we are. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
37:Poems are never finished - just abandoned ~ Paul Val ry, #NFDB
38:The ear writes my poems, not the mind. ~ Stanley Kunitz, #NFDB
39:There are no honest poems about dead women. ~ Audre Lorde, #NFDB
40:No, I don't know any Emily Dickinson poems! ~ Andy Richter, #NFDB
41:Poets don't finish poems, they abandon them. ~ Patti Smith, #NFDB
42:All good poems are victories over something. ~ Stephen Dunn, #NFDB
43:I like poems that are daggers that sing. ~ Frederick Seidel, #NFDB
44:I write poems to find out why I write them ~ Stephen Dobyns, #NFDB
45:poems are small moments of enlightenment ~ Natalie Goldberg, #NFDB
46:Some poems are art because of their passion. ~ Gerald Stern, #NFDB
47:There are either poems about sex/love or God. ~ Robert Hass, #NFDB
48:I know wherever you are, there are poems. ~ Marina Tsvetaeva, #NFDB
49:It is difficult to get the news from poems ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
50:Poets don't finish poems, they abandon them. ~ Gregory Corso, #NFDB
51:If these poems repeat themselves, then so does Spring. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
52:you and the poems have a lot to talk about. ~ Nayyirah Waheed, #NFDB
53:All the poems of our lives are not yet made. ~ Muriel Rukeyser, #NFDB
54:For you
i have saved poems
under my skin. ~ Sanober Khan,#NFDB
55:I carry my unwritten poems in cipher on my face! ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
56:Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing. ~ Lucille Clifton, #NFDB
57:Poems reach me, and hold me, and give me pleasure. ~ Anne Sexton, #NFDB
58:Poets don't finish poems, they abandon them. ~ Stephane Mallarme, #NFDB
59:I still read Donne, particularly his love poems ~ Carol Ann Duffy, #NFDB
60:I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else. ~ Mary Oliver, #NFDB
61:No indeed, poems were not made out of intentions. ~ Kingsley Amis, #NFDB
62:I write poems like some people sing in the bathroom. ~ Amit Bhatia, #NFDB
63:No, I don't think poems will save us. And yet, and yet ~ Sarah Kay, #NFDB
64:He does not write at all whose poems no man reads ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
65:I am welcome in the world of words, stories, poems. ~ Hannah Howard, #NFDB
66:"Poems are rough notations for the music we are." ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, #NFDB
67:Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky. ~ Khalil Gibran, #NFDB
68:Half-closes her eyes — eyelids heavy with
poems. ~ Anna Akhmatova,#NFDB
69:in the street of the sky night walks scattering poems ~ E E Cummings, #NFDB
70:in the street of the sky night walks scattering poems ~ e e cummings, #NFDB
71:Lineation can make your break your poems. ~ Katerina Stoykova Klemer, #NFDB
72:I found the poems in the fields And only wrote them down ~ John Clare, #NFDB
73:And if I die, then who
Will write my poems to you? ~ Anna Akhmatova,#NFDB
74:Early poems are a thing it takes years to live down. ~ Angela Thirkell, #NFDB
75:Poems were never meant to be forced into commands. ~ Rachel Held Evans, #NFDB
76:For poems are like rainbows; they escape you quickly. ~ Langston Hughes, #NFDB
77:My ideal reader is somebody who reads my poems out loud. ~ James Arthur, #NFDB
78:My picture-poems are linguistic margins on visual atolls. ~ Gunter Brus, #NFDB
79:Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know. ~ Muriel Rukeyser, #NFDB
80:My heart is in my/ pocket. It is poems by Pierre Reverdy. ~ Frank O Hara, #NFDB
81:When the poems don’t come, don’t open the vodka. ~ Clementine von Radics, #NFDB
82:I only submit the poems I think are the strongest. ~ Shirley Geok lin Lim, #NFDB
83:I think it's better if you write poems that look like you. ~ Richard Hugo, #NFDB
84:There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists. ~ Roberto Bolano, #NFDB
85:There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists. ~ Roberto Bola o, #NFDB
86:But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good. ~ Sylvia Plath, #NFDB
87:I found the poems in the fields,
And only wrote them down. ~ John Clare,#NFDB
88:It's good to have poems that begin with tea and end with God. ~ Robert Bly, #NFDB
89:I've always wanted editors that actually edited my poems. ~ Victoria Chang, #NFDB
90:We write poems / as leaves give oxygen - / so we can breathe. ~ Erica Jong, #NFDB
91:all my life
i have looked for poems
to elope with. ~ Sanober Khan,#NFDB
92:He kisses like a poet. Like he's writing poems on my lips. ~ Veronica Rossi, #NFDB
93:Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself. ~ Philip Larkin, #NFDB
94:Try to write poems at least one person in the room will hate. ~ Marvin Bell, #NFDB
95:Girls like poems better than dead dragons and magic swords, ~ Peter S Beagle, #NFDB
96:Having examined three thousand haiku poems - two persimmons. ~ Masaoka Shiki, #NFDB
97:I thought poems were songs for people with bad voices. ~ Lorna Dee Cervantes, #NFDB
98:No poems can please long or live that are written by water drinkers ~ Horace, #NFDB
99:Women are not supposed to have uteruses, especially in poems. ~ Maxine Kumin, #NFDB
100:By men is mightiness achieved ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Baji Prabhou, #NFDB
101:No poems can please long or live that are written by water drinkers. ~ Horace, #NFDB
102:We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading. ~ Thom Gunn, #NFDB
103:Am I going to die and all I will have are these fucking poems ~ Dorothea Lasky, #NFDB
104:Bill Knott's poems are . . . rhetorical fluff . . . and fake. ~ Ron Loewinsohn, #NFDB
105:By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
106:Goethe's poems are like tiny paintings in beautiful frames. ~ Bernhard Schlink, #NFDB
107:I don't write poems and put them to music. Just let things flow. ~ Martin Gore, #NFDB
108:That's what poems are for, so you don't understand a thing. ~ Tatyana Tolstaya, #NFDB
109:all the words
all the poems
know
my warm, soft spots. ~ Sanober Khan,#NFDB
110:in you
are poems
that aren't meant
to be read by everyone ~ R H Sin,#NFDB
111:listen to my poems
but do not look for me
look for you. ~ Nayyirah Waheed,#NFDB
112:If I wasn't writing poems I'd be washing my hands all the time. ~ Sherman Alexie, #NFDB
113:I hope to leave behind a few poems it will be hard to get rid of. ~ Robert Frost, #NFDB
114:I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word accessible. ~ Billy Collins, #NFDB
115:Poems arrive ready to begin.
Poets are only the transportation. ~ Mary Oliver,#NFDB
116:whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best. ~ Randall Jarrell, #NFDB
117:All that we meet is a symbol and gateway ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana, #NFDB
118:Are not our noblest feelings as it were the poems of our will. ~ Honore de Balzac, #NFDB
119:I'd like to think...that people in pubs would talk about my poems ~ Philip Larkin, #NFDB
120:Charm is the seal of the gods upon woman. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #NFDB
121:Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us we find poems. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye, #NFDB
122:Poems are my link with the times, with the new life of my people. ~ Anna Akhmatova, #NFDB
123:The words of true poems are the tuft and final applause of science. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
124:When fiction writers like my poems I feel like I've hit the jackpot. ~ Cate Marvin, #NFDB
125:After ‘tis cold, none heeds, none hinders. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #NFDB
126:I am not a nature poet. There is almost always a person in my poems. ~ Robert Frost, #NFDB
127:I don’t know if you or I exist, but somewhere there are poems about us. ~ Linh Dinh, #NFDB
128:I let my narrative embroidering impulses take over in prose poems. ~ Matthea Harvey, #NFDB
129:...some of the best love poems have been written by monks and nuns... ~ John Geddes, #NFDB
130:Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is. ~ Robert Bly, #NFDB
131:I'm sorry for the poems.
All the shouting I did about your mouth. ~ Trista Mateer,#NFDB
132:I wish I could write lyrical poems, but I just write the way they come. ~ Tom Paulin, #NFDB
133:No one I am, I who am all that is. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Liberation - I, #NFDB
134:Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know. ~ Adrienne Rich, #NFDB
135:I've burnt all the holy pages I used to carry
but poems flare in my heart ~ Ikkyu,#NFDB
136:I would fave preferred the happy man to the unhappy poems he's left us ~ Jack Kerouac, #NFDB
137:I wrote too many poems in a language I did not yet know how to speak. ~ Andrea Gibson, #NFDB
138:my poems are only bits of scratching
on the floor of a
cage. ~ Charles Bukowski,#NFDB
139:Poems are soft kitten furs. smoothing out the rough edges of my world. ~ Sanober Khan, #NFDB
140:Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, #NFDB
141:There was no text. “Real” poems do not “really” require words. I ~ Layli Long Soldier, #NFDB
142:One cannot write poems about trees when the forest is full of police. ~ Bertolt Brecht, #NFDB
143:The finest poems of the world have been expedients to get bread. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
144:Warriors are poets and poems and all the loveliness here in the worlds. ~ Amiri Baraka, #NFDB
145:Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. ~ Virginia Woolf, #NFDB
146:Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly. ~ Anne Stevenson, #NFDB
147:Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel. ~ Marilyn Hacker, #NFDB
148:I believe that poems die the moment they are outwardly expressed. ~ Maurice Maeterlinck, #NFDB
149:I don't like poems that invent memories, I have enough of my own. ~ Andre Naffis Sahely, #NFDB
150:IT was for delight
He sought existence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,#NFDB
151:Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels. ~ Northrop Frye, #NFDB
152:some bodies can't be touched/some poems
cannot be written/just felt ~ Kai Cheng Thom,#NFDB
153:For me poems are acts re-done, and that can vibrate well into the future. ~ Anne Waldman, #NFDB
154:My life is a throb of Thy eternity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Bliss of Identity, #NFDB
155:Poems are like people' I said 'There are not many authentic ones around. ~ Robert Graves, #NFDB
156:You can't write poems about trees when the woods are full of policemen. ~ Bertolt Brecht, #NFDB
157:My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself. ~ Philip Levine, #NFDB
158:The grand style is available now only in old poems, museums, and parodies. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
159:Beauty of our dim soul is amorous. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Our godhead calls us, #NFDB
160:Be silent now. Say fewer and fewer praise poems. Let yourself become living poetry. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
161:He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem. ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
162:I have also written some poems which have not been collected in a volume. ~ Grazia Deledda, #NFDB
163:They’re called poems but in reality they’re lines given to me to hang on to ~ John Trudell, #NFDB
164:We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words. ~ John Fowles, #NFDB
165:I like short poems with weird rhyme schemes, because that's what life is like. ~ John Green, #NFDB
166:I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music. ~ Joan Miro, #NFDB
167:Necessity rules all the infinite world, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Birth of Sin, #NFDB
168:Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems. ~ Philip Larkin, #NFDB
169:Poems seem to have a life of their own. They tell you when enough is enough. ~ Thomas Lynch, #NFDB
170:Poetry seldom occurs in poems. Poetry only occurs when words cause action. ~ Raoul Vaneigem, #NFDB
171:You’re speaking volumes, my friend, and tonight we’re doing short poems only. ~ Andr Aciman, #NFDB
172:I really just love reading. It's my favorite thing, performing my poems live. ~ Eileen Myles, #NFDB
173:Man’s mind is the dupe of his animal self. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A God’s Labour, #NFDB
174:Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
175:I always did poetry, and [rap music is] pretty much hip-hop melody with poems. ~ Tiffany Foxx, #NFDB
176:if you memorize three hundred Tang poems, you might be able to write a little. ~ Qiu Xiaolong, #NFDB
177:I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems. ~ Jim Harrison, #NFDB
178:It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, #NFDB
179:Leo Connellan has retained his soul and voice in Provincetown and Other Poems. ~ Karl Shapiro, #NFDB
180:People are born with the knack to write poems and songs. I'm not a poet at all. ~ Petra Haden, #NFDB
181:Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke #poetry, #NFDB
182:The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems. ~ Stanley Kunitz, #NFDB
183:The great philosophers are poets who believe in the reality of their poems. ~ Antonio Machado, #NFDB
184:Don't write love poems when you're in love. Write them when you're not in love. ~ Richard Hugo, #NFDB
185:Having my poems set to music by Eric Moe has completely knocked my socks off. ~ Matthea Harvey, #NFDB
186:I am an epitome of opposites. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man, the Despot of Contraries, #NFDB
187:I sit in my tree I sing like the birds My beak is my pen My songs are my poems. ~ David Almond, #NFDB
188:I still write poems for you the same way other people bring flowers to graves. ~ Trista Mateer, #NFDB
189:Poems give you the lives of others and then circle in on your own inner world. ~ Frances Mayes, #NFDB
190:The machines are too dull when we
are lion-poems that move & breathe. ~ Michael McClure,#NFDB
191:There isn't enough paper in the world to write all the poems you inspire in me. ~ Rae D Magdon, #NFDB
192:Would I that cowlèd churchman be. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Problem", Poems (1847), Stanza 1, #NFDB
193:You write poems
because you need
a place
where what isn’t may be ~ Alejandra Pizarnik,#NFDB
194:All pasts are like poems; one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them. ~ John Fowles, #NFDB
195:And all grows beautiful because Thou art. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Divine Hearing, #NFDB
196:I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places. ~ John Ashbery, #NFDB
197:Louise Glück’s Ararat dissects family relationships in starkly beautiful poems. ~ Kim Addonizio, #NFDB
198:Poetry is a useful place for lamentation...poems are a place where we can cry out. ~ bell hooks, #NFDB
199:The dark night was the first book of poetry and the constellations were the poems. ~ Chet Raymo, #NFDB
200:There's two kinds of women--those you write poems about and those you don't. ~ Jeffrey McDaniel, #NFDB
201:All is a wager and danger, all is a chase and a battle. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana, #NFDB
202:I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. ~ Seamus Heaney, #NFDB
203:I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box. ~ Anne Sexton, #NFDB
204:Let there be no love poems written
Until love can exist freely and
Cleanly. ~ Amiri Baraka,#NFDB
205:My body a dot in the soul’s vast expanse. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Self’s Infinity, #NFDB
206:The poet can only write the poems; it takes the reader to complete the meaning. ~ Nikki Giovanni, #NFDB
207:I believe that poets have to be inside their poems somewhere, or the poem won't work. ~ Joy Harjo, #NFDB
208:I have no talent. I write poems for myself, to think things through, that’s all. ~ Anna Kamienska, #NFDB
209:In my heart’s chamber lives the unworshipped God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Omnipresence, #NFDB
210:Our histories, our novels, our poems, our plays—they are all in this one book. ~ Simon Winchester, #NFDB
211:Poems tend to have instructions for how to read them embedded in their language. ~ Matthea Harvey, #NFDB
212:even the small poems mean something. they are often whales in the bodies of tiny fish. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
213:I didn't sit down then and start writing poems, but it was in the back of my mind. ~ Edward Hirsch, #NFDB
214:I had always written. I had written stories and poems. Then I started writing plays. ~ Lena Dunham, #NFDB
215:Many of the poems weave autobiographical elements with fabular or mythic materials. ~ Anna Journey, #NFDB
216:Masked the high gods act; the doer is hid by his working. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #NFDB
217:Necessity fashions
All that the unseen eye has beheld. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
218:That’s what poems are for,
unlivable love."
epigraph to “In Lilac-Light ~ Tess Gallagher,#NFDB
219:The golden virgin, Usha, mother of life,
Yet virgin. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Urvasie,#NFDB
220:The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends. ~ Robert Bly, #NFDB
221:To see the Summer Sky Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie— True Poems flee— ~ Emily Dickinson, #NFDB
222:Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady. ~ Thom Gunn, #NFDB
223:I think of my best poems as vessels that I can or hope to fill with everything I have. ~ Alex Lemon, #NFDB
224:Nature composes some of her loveliest poems for the microscope and the telescope. ~ Theodore Roszak, #NFDB
225:Some good, some so-so, and lots plain bad: that's how a book of poems is made, my Friend. ~ Martial, #NFDB
226:The only happy people in the world
are those who do not have to write long poems ~ John Berryman,#NFDB
227:The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet. ~ Yehuda Amichai, #NFDB
228:An odd phrase, "by heart," he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream. ~ A S Byatt, #NFDB
229:Deep in our being inhabits the voiceless invisible Teacher; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana, #NFDB
230:I don’t know,” Oskar said. “I found it in a book of Annieran poems. Very valuable. ~ Andrew Peterson, #NFDB
231:Poems have their own fates, like children. You have only to give birth to them. ~ Andrei Voznesensky, #NFDB
232:Sandra Kasturi's magical poems transform the ordinary into the surreal and exotic. ~ Phyllis Gotlieb, #NFDB
233:Thought the great-winged wanderer paraclete ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Thought the Paraclete, #NFDB
234:To our gaze God’s light is a darkness, His plan is a chaos. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #NFDB
235:A Calm that cradles Fate upon its knees. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Universal Incarnation, #NFDB
236:Alone the wise Can walk through fire with unblinking eyes. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Epigram, #NFDB
237:collected minerals and at ten years of age wrote poems but still played with blocks. ~ Richard Rhodes, #NFDB
238:Eviller fate there is none than life too long among mortals. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #NFDB
239:For a poet, making poems is a way of viewing the world, being in the world, breathing. ~ Robin Morgan, #NFDB
240:Humor is essential to survival. Funny poems are vastly underrated. Very underwritten. ~ Rachel Zucker, #NFDB
241:she's got
oceans
tucked away
in her hair
poems swim
under her skin. ~ Sanober Khan,#NFDB
242:Creations, whether they are children, poems, or organizations, take on a life of their own. ~ Starhawk, #NFDB
243:I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems. ~ Wis awa Szymborska,#NFDB
244:Mind hushes stilled in eternity; waves of the Infinite wander ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana, #NFDB
245:Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca. ~ W S Merwin, #NFDB
246:My life is a silence grasped by timeless hands; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Self’s Infinity, #NFDB
247:Plus, dreams don't have to be logical, do they? Dreams are poems from the subconscious. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
248:The poems are part of my attempt to understand being in the world in an honest way. ~ Dan Beachy Quick, #NFDB
249:We are the heirs of infinite widenesses. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Call of the Impossible, #NFDB
250:We have always made mistakes, but the greatest mistakes are the poems we have written. ~ Tristan Tzara, #NFDB
251:Heavy is godhead to bear with its mighty sun-burden of lustre. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana, #NFDB
252:I keep all my poems in my journals and lock them away. They are the start of everything. ~ Stevie Nicks, #NFDB
253:I sit in my tree
I sing like the birds
My beak is my pen
My songs are my poems. ~ David Almond,#NFDB
254:Like all art, poems are only hints and guesses that draw our attention to something larger. ~ Luci Shaw, #NFDB
255:Sometimes,' she said, remembering that morning, 'I write poems that are taller than I am ~ Rumer Godden, #NFDB
256:Dreams are debris from bad day. Dreams are poems by bad poets that never got written. ~ Tadeusz Konwicki, #NFDB
257:even the small poems mean something. they are often whales in the bodies of tiny fish. ~ Nayyirah Waheed, #NFDB
258:Heavenly voices to us are a silence, those colours a whiteness. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #NFDB
259:I don’t know why I didn’t carry around pictures and poems all the time before I came here. ~ Ally Condie, #NFDB
260:I'm a great poet. I don't put my poems on paper: they consist of actions and feelings. ~ Honor de Balzac, #NFDB
261:I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals. ~ Philip Larkin, #NFDB
262:In truth, I'm still slightly embarrassed to say, I am a poet. I'd rather say, I make poems. ~ Henri Cole, #NFDB
263:I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems. ~ Donald Hall, #NFDB
264:I was born doing reference work in sin, and born
confessing it. This is what poems are. ~ Anne Sexton,#NFDB
265:To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie—
True Poems flee— ~ Emily Dickinson,#NFDB
266:Each is a mass of forces thrown in shape. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Discoveries of Science - III, #NFDB
267:Even an hour of the soul can unveil the Unborn, the Everlasting, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana, #NFDB
268:God still keeps
Near to a paler world the hour ere dawn ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Chitrangada,#NFDB
269:I didn't write my poems because I wanted to, they were wrung from me. I had to write them. ~ Maxine Kumin, #NFDB
270:I'm a great poet. I don't put my poems on paper: they consist of actions and feelings. ~ Honore de Balzac, #NFDB
271:Life’s whole
Tremendous theorem is Thou complete. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Divine Worker,#NFDB
272:Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.
("Writing," New Poems Book Three) ~ Charles Bukowski,#NFDB
273:The language with which I make my poems has nothing to do with one spoken here, or anywhere. ~ Paul Celan, #NFDB
274:There is an hour for knowledge, an hour to forget and to labour. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #NFDB
275:This is what the poems are for: telling other people the things I can no longer tell you. ~ Trista Mateer, #NFDB
276:Time slips by; our sorrows do not turn into poems,
And what is invisible stays that way. ~ Mark Strand,#NFDB
277:Always the blood is wiser and knows what is hid from the thinker. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #NFDB
278:And all the while within us works His love. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya, #NFDB
279:By reason of weird translation, many such sets of instructions read like poems anyhow. ~ Brian Ferneyhough, #NFDB
280:Hard are God’s terms and few can meet them of men who are mortal. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #NFDB
281:If the poems
please you more than my lips,
I will never give you another kiss. ~ Juan Ram n Jim nez,#NFDB
282:Is here and in the pleasant house He chose
To harbour God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,#NFDB
283:I wish all difficult poems were profound. Honk if you wish all difficult poems were profound. ~ Ben Lerner, #NFDB
284:I write small poems—
the kind that fit on a postcard…
and still can break your heart ~ John Geddes,#NFDB
285:Mind is His wax to write and, written, rase
Form and name. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,#NFDB
286:The sweet vast centre and the cave divine
Called Paradise, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,#NFDB
287:And in the heart of the worst the best shall be born by my wisdom. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #NFDB
288:Early on, if I was alone two three nights in a row, I'd start writing poems about suicide. ~ Jack Nicholson, #NFDB
289:Even in the worm is a god and it writhes for a form and an outlet. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #NFDB
290:He who to some gives victory, joy and good,
To some gives rest. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, To R.,#NFDB
291:His good and evil, sin and virtue, till
He bids thee leave. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,#NFDB
292:His poems have no capital letters in them, which is, I believe, the essence of modernity. ~ Agatha Christie, #NFDB
293:It is not enough for poems to be fine; they must charm, and draw the mind of the listener at will. ~ Horace, #NFDB
294:Mire is the man who hears not the gods when they cry to his bosom. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #NFDB
295:Powers of his godhead we live; the Creator dwells in the creature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana, #NFDB
296:When I am asked
how I began writing poems,
I talk about the indifference of nature. ~ Lisel Mueller,#NFDB
297:Clouds from Zeus come and pass; his sunshine eternal survives them. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #NFDB
298:I'm always doing poems from a place of not-knowing, a place of ignorance in a way. ~ Alison Hawthorne Deming, #NFDB
299:The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest. ~ Wilhelm Reich, #NFDB
300:Two are the angels of God whom men worship, strength and enjoyment. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #NFDB
301:- Why are your poems so different from one another?
- Because the years are different. ~ Marina Tsvetaeva,#NFDB
302:Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions. ~ Anne Stevenson, #NFDB
303:All things embrace in death and the strife and the hatred are ended. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #NFDB
304:A wide Compassion leans to embrace earth’s pain; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Universal Incarnation, #NFDB
305:But there is never any end when one has loved. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya, #NFDB
306:I'm much more capable of cutting back than of expanding. I've gotten very surgical about poems. ~ Joan Larkin, #NFDB
307:Man his passion prefers to the voice that guides from the immortals. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #NFDB
308:The Hollywood movies are more like novels, and the kinds of films I make are more like poems. ~ Stan Brakhage, #NFDB
309:You cannot utterly die while the Power lives untired in your bosoms; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #NFDB
310:If you read Keats's poems, they're often full of doubts and anxieties. They can be quite tough. ~ Jane Campion, #NFDB
311:In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said. ~ Mary Karr, #NFDB
312:Later on I published these poems as Sappho’s Boat to make damn sure everyone knew what I meant. ~ Eileen Myles, #NFDB
313:Poems can get
sleepless too
and become
the loneliest thing
in the universe. ~ Sanober Khan,#NFDB
314:Surely the steel grows dear in the land when a traitor can flourish.” ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #NFDB
315:Epics are narrative poems that recount the story of a hero who represents a particular culture. ~ DK Publishing, #NFDB
316:How are his poems?" "He's not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way. ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
317:I'm all over my poems, even if their relation to my everyday life is that of dream to reality. ~ Matthea Harvey, #NFDB
318:Love the sign
Of one outblaze of godhead that two share. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Life Heavens,#NFDB
319:My favorite poets may not be your bread and butter. I have more favorite poems than favorite poets. ~ Rita Dove, #NFDB
320:The esoteric finds the Absolute within the traditions, as poets find poetry within the poems. ~ Frithjof Schuon, #NFDB
321:Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder ~ Bob Dylan, #NFDB
322:Fearless of death they must walk who would live and be mighty for ever. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #NFDB
323:My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint. ~ Helen Dunmore, #NFDB
324:Nobler must kings be than natures of earth on whom Zeus lays no burden. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #NFDB
325:One of Milton’s poems contains the well-known line “Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
326:The one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge, with hulk and dynamic chunks of words. ~ Sylvia Plath, #NFDB
327:Through glorious things and base the wheel of God
For ever runs. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,#NFDB
328:You may repeat the most marvelous poems. And that is not worth a cent if you don't live it. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti, #NFDB
329:I write almost everything, actually. Songs, poems, stories. And stories out of every genre, too. ~ Jackie Evancho, #NFDB
330:Remember that good poets too can write bad poems! Talent has also a talent to be untalented! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
331:some poems froth
and foam and rise...
out of my morning cup of
mist-sweetened coffee. ~ Sanober Khan,#NFDB
332:Today we should make poems including iron and steel And the poet should know how to lead an attack. ~ Ho Chi Minh, #NFDB
333:Each through his nature He leads and the world by the lure of His wisdom. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #NFDB
334:How are his poems?"
"He's not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way. ~ Charles Bukowski,#NFDB
335:Place is extremely important to my work because I am always pulling landscape imagery into my poems. ~ Cate Marvin, #NFDB
336:Well, yes: people write poems when they are in love, but a wise man will not print them. ~ Hans Christian Andersen, #NFDB
337:You'll be a poorer person all your life if you don't know some of the great stories and great poems. ~ Walt Disney, #NFDB
338:I like it when poems are challenging, when they concern matters important and personal to the author. ~ Cate Marvin, #NFDB
339:One of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced. ~ John Dryden, #NFDB
340:Remember,
a stranger once told you that the breeze
here is something worth writing poems about. ~ Shinji Moon,#NFDB
341:The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's poems, but her family denied both stories. ~ Saki, #NFDB
342:There IS a difference between poetry and prose! Poems should be sonically charged and new to the ear. ~ Cate Marvin, #NFDB
343:Alike ‘tis heaven,
Rule or obedience to the one heart given. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Khaled of the Sea,#NFDB
344:Keetje Kuipers' poems are daring, formally beautiful and driven by rich imagery and startling ideas. ~ Tracy K Smith, #NFDB
345:Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem. ~ Paul Celan, #NFDB
346:The harpy’s eyes were wide with wonder. “So that’s Adriyel. No wonder it’s famous in poems and shit. ~ Thea Harrison, #NFDB
347:Yea, the soul of a man too is mighty
More than the stone and the mortar! ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
348:You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble ~ Charles Olson, #NFDB
349:All the gods in a mortal body dwelt, bore a single name. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A Strong Son of Lightning, #NFDB
350:I learned to play guitar at a young age and converted poems and stuff that I had written to songs. ~ Gregory Harrison, #NFDB
351:I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. ~ Virginia Woolf, #NFDB
352:The abode
Of rapturous Love,
The bright epiphany whom we name God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,#NFDB
353:There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory. ~ Philip Levine, #NFDB
354:Thought for a godlike birth
Broadens the mould of our mortality. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Evolution - II,#NFDB
355:Credence, when mediocrity multiplied
Equals itself with genius. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Lines on Ireland,#NFDB
356:For my best poems were all written when I felt the worst. When I was happy, I didn't write anything. ~ Langston Hughes, #NFDB
357:... to write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers. ~ Mary Oliver, #NFDB
358:What have we here, laddie? Mysterious scribblings? A secret code? Oh, poems, no less! Poems, everybody! ~ Roger Waters, #NFDB
359:your smile.
is the ultimate
golden dream.
all the poems
in the world
are waking up from. ~ Sanober Khan,#NFDB
360:He hoped she would not provide his family with any of her poems, which tended to use words like nipple. ~ Jean Thompson, #NFDB
361:I tell my students to think of poems as language plus, language with value added beyond its everyday use. ~ Monica Youn, #NFDB
362:Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems. ~ Donald Hall, #NFDB
363:The Self of things is not their outward view,
A Force within decides. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Parabrahman,#NFDB
364:While war for love is inspiring in legends and epic poems, we must be governed by cynical pragmatism. ~ James L Cambias, #NFDB
365:Each finite is that deep Infinity
Enshrining His veiled soul of pure delight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Form,#NFDB
366:Good acts are like good poems. One may easily get their drift, but they are not rationally understood. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
367:I guess my poems feel to me a bit like they are doing something in relation to experience, i.e. time. ~ Matthew Zapruder, #NFDB
368:I have found the title of the book as impossible to forget as the poems in it were impossible to remember. ~ Clive James, #NFDB
369:I started out wanting to write great poems, then wanting to discover true poems. Now, I want to be the poem. ~ Mark Nepo, #NFDB
370:I've written poems about gifts. Life is inspirational; sometimes it comes from the most unlikely places. ~ Ama Ata Aidoo, #NFDB
371:Poems have ideas. The ideas of poems come out of their emotions and their emotions are carried on images. ~ E L Doctorow, #NFDB
372:There's a time for reciting poems and a time for fists. As far as I was concerned, this was the latter. ~ Roberto Bola o, #NFDB
373:Helped are the souls that wait more than strengths soon fulfilled and exhausted. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #NFDB
374:I am a performing artist; I perfomr admiration.
'Come with me', I want my poems to say. 'And do the same ~ Mary Oliver,#NFDB
375:I am a performing artist; I perform admiration.
'Come with me', I want my poems to say. 'And do the same ~ Mary Oliver,#NFDB
376:It made me happy that poems are referred to in the present tense even when the poet is in the past tense. ~ David Benioff, #NFDB
377:Love and memory and thought and dream ~ Kij Johnson
My favorite poems have never been written in words. ~ Kij Johnson,#NFDB
378:Out of pain and problems have come the sweetest songs, the most poignant poems, the most gripping stories. ~ Billy Graham, #NFDB
379:The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written. ~ Wallace Stevens, #NFDB
380:The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions. ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
381:young portress bright
Who opens to our souls the worlds of light. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Fear of Death,#NFDB
382:Easy are mortal
Hearts to be bent by Fate and soon we consent to our fortunes. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
383:I can explain all the poems that were ever invented - and a good many that haven't been invented just yet. ~ Lewis Carroll, #NFDB
384:I'm interested in concrete poems - anything that complicates the line between the written and the visual. ~ Matthea Harvey, #NFDB
385:In our time, they say there is no penalty for writing poems.
They say this.
This is the penalty. ~ Muriel Rukeyser,#NFDB
386:Poems don't have to rhyme... Poems are about beauty and emotion; in other words poems are about feelings. ~ Nikki Giovanni, #NFDB
387:She loved to read her old poems. They are like photographs, she thought. There’s so much evidence of me. ~ Leopoldine Core, #NFDB
388:The poems are all wrong.
It's a bang, a really big bang. Not a whimper.
And sometimes gold can stay. ~ Kami Garcia,#NFDB
389:There are poems about the internet and about the shipping forecast but very few by women celebrating men. ~ Germaine Greer, #NFDB
390:Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before. ~ Alice Walker, #NFDB
391:I move in an ocean of stupendous Light
Joining my depths to His eternal height. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Light,#NFDB
392:More or Less Love Poems #11: No babe We'd never Swing together but the syncopation would be something wild ~ Diane di Prima, #NFDB
393:This body which was once my universe,
Is now a pittance carried by the soul. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Body,#NFDB
394:Why does one always ask a writer why they stopped? I am sure everyone finds in any drawer a few dear poems. ~ Peter Bichsel, #NFDB
395:All forms are Thy dream-dialect of delight,
O Absolute, O vivid Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Divine Sight,#NFDB
396:Fate,
The dim great presence, is but nature made
Irrevocable in its fruits. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Urvasie,#NFDB
397:Good we have made by our thoughts and sin by our fear and recoiling; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Descent of Ahana, #NFDB
398:If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer? ~ Jennifer Weiner, #NFDB
399:I was a pretty happy kid, I had to fake it. I had to get into this miserable character before I wrote poems. ~ Billy Collins, #NFDB
400:Literary' feelings are responses to poems, not just states of emotion which occur in their presence. ~ Terry Eagleton, #NFDB
401:Only the past fulfilled can conjure room to the future that presses. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Descent of Ahana, #NFDB
402:There are a couple of poems I've written with masculine muses, very often the muse to me is a female. ~ Shirley Geok lin Lim, #NFDB
403:Transmuted is ravishment’s minister,
A high note and a fiery refrain. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Life Heavens,#NFDB
404:A perfect face amid barbarian faces,
A perfect voice of sweet and serious rhyme, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Goethe,#NFDB
405:Bliss is her goal, but her road is through whirlwind and death-blast and storm-race. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana, #NFDB
406:I think it's true to say that in 1973 I could read every book of poems that was published in a year, and I did. ~ Robert Hass, #NFDB
407:I write the poems first, with only a few exceptions for odd reasons, where I'm given the illustration first. ~ Jack Prelutsky, #NFDB
408:My poems only come when I have almost lost the ability to utter a word. To speak, in a way, of the unspeakable. ~ Anne Sexton, #NFDB
409:Nor punishes. Impartially he deals
To every strenuous spirit its chosen reward. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Urvasie,#NFDB
410:Some poems are like the Centaurs--a mingling of man and beast, and begotten of Ixion on a cloud. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, #NFDB
411:The trauma said, ‘Don’t write these poems.
Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones. ~ Andrea Gibson,#NFDB
412:We read poems from the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse. Neil insisted on spilling wine over my carpet. ~ Michael Palin, #NFDB
413:For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)-they are experiences. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, #NFDB
414:I think I've been writing black poems all along, wearing my white mask. I'm always the victim ... but no longer! ~ Anne Sexton, #NFDB
415:I will always try to turn sights and sounds into words. I will always try to shape words into my singing poems. ~ Arnold Adoff, #NFDB
416:My stories are sometimes closer to poems or meditations, but often there is at least a little narrative in them. ~ Lydia Davis, #NFDB
417:To my mind, most prose poems are more prose than poetry. They don't possess most of the qualities of a poem. ~ Pattiann Rogers, #NFDB
418:You too?" She asked Ruth. "How do your poems start out?"
"They start as a lump in the throat," she said. ~ Louise Penny,#NFDB
419:A Silence that was Being’s only word,
The unknown beginning and the voiceless end ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Adwaita,#NFDB
420:O worshipper of the formless Infinite,
Reject not form, what dwells in it is He. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Form,#NFDB
421:When I hear Khmer poets, when they recite their poems, I know what they're talking about, I get it right away. ~ Chath Piersath, #NFDB
422:I have some weak poems in that new collection, which is why I'm not ready to send the collection out yet. ~ Shirley Geok lin Lim, #NFDB
423:In his former life though, as the cool guy, he would never have picked up a book, especially one with poems in it. ~ Shaun Meeks, #NFDB
424:In us the secret Spirit can indite
A page and summary of the Infinite, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Hill-top Temple,#NFDB
425:It is not enough for poems to be beautiful; they must be affecting, and must lead the heart of the hearer as they will. ~ Horace, #NFDB
426:One who has made in sport the suns and seas
Mirrors in our being his immense caprice. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Lila,#NFDB
427:Poems ancient and modern prowled the ice floes in bear form, filled with words that could wound with their beauty. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
428:Rules us, who in the Brahmin and the dog
Can, if He will, show equal godhead. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Baji Prabhou,#NFDB
429:The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's poems, but her family denied both stories. ~ Hector Hugh Munro, #NFDB
430:The words of the letter had long since been whisked away by time, but the poems he kept prisoner in his heart. ~ Felix Alexander, #NFDB
431:Decide for yourself what kind of works you want to create... facts, essays, poems - do you want to speak or to sing? ~ Ernst Haas, #NFDB
432:Keep only my soul to adore eternally
And meet Thee in each form and soul of Thee. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Surrender,#NFDB
433:Poems, like dreams, are a sort of royal road to the unconscious. They tell you what your secret self cannot express. ~ Erica Jong, #NFDB
434:The God of Force, the God of Love are one;
Not least He loves whom most He smites. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Epiphany,#NFDB
435:The world’s deep contrasts are but figures spun
Draping the unanimity of the One. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Contrasts,#NFDB
436:They're just people that write poems that get published and anthologized all over the place but they're not poets. ~ J D Salinger, #NFDB
437:This must be what feelings are. This is why people write poems! I get it now.
I get it, and I want more. ~ Laini Taylor,#NFDB
438:A deep spiritual calm no touch can sway
Upholds the mystery of this Passion-play. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Life-Unity,#NFDB
439:Alone of gods Death loves not gifts: he visits
The pure heart as the stained. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Love and Death,#NFDB
440:April
It's impossible
To write poems
If you're in love
And not to
If the month is April ~ Orhan Veli Kan k,#NFDB
441:It is the Infinite’s blind minute abode.
In that small flaming chariot Shiva rides. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Electron,#NFDB
442:It was a page he had Found in the handbook Of heartbreak. Wallace Stevens, “Madame la Fleurie,” Collected Poems I ~ Cornelia Funke, #NFDB
443:Men are fathers of their fate;
They dig the prison, they the crown command. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Lines on Ireland,#NFDB
444:The only thing I remember writing in prison is a couple of poems for an inmate magazine they did once a year. ~ Patricia McConnell, #NFDB
445:We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough. ~ Carl Sandburg, #NFDB
446:All in thyself and thyself in all dwelling,
Act in the world with thy being beyond it. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ascent,#NFDB
447:A painter can turn pennies into gold, for all subjects are capable of being transformed into poems. ~ Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, #NFDB
448:How many poems must you write to convince yourself you have a family? Everyone leaves and you end up the stranger. ~ Fatimah Asghar, #NFDB
449:I have no precise idea of who makes up my readership. I'm surprised when I discover people have read my poems at all. ~ Cate Marvin, #NFDB
450:My readers at that time were still men of letters; but there had to be other people waiting to read my poems. ~ Salvatore Quasimodo, #NFDB
451:Our consciousness a torch that plays Between the Abyss and a supernal Light. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man of the Mediator, #NFDB
452:Poems in a way are spells against death. They are milestones, to see where you were then from where you are now. ~ Richard Eberhart, #NFDB
453:A World-adventurer borne on Destiny’s wing
Gambles with death and triumph, joy and grief. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Lila,#NFDB
454:No power can slay my soul; it lives in Thee.
Thy presence is my immortality. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Divine Worker,#NFDB
455:The Master of man and his infinite Lover,
He is close to our hearts, had we vision to see. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Who,#NFDB
456:To whatsoever living form I turn
I see my own body with another face. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Indwelling Universal,#NFDB
457:WANT TO DO WITH YOU WHAT SPRING DOES WITH THE CHERRY TREES.” Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair * ~ Chance Carter, #NFDB
458:While you’ve been away, I’ve been copying poems out in a book so that I could whisper them to you as you fell asleep. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
459:As with the figure of a symbol dance
The screened Omniscient plays at Ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Dual Being,#NFDB
460:Babies are like poems. They're beautiful to their creator, but to other people, they're silly and they're irritating. ~ Doug Stanhope, #NFDB
461:Each finite thing I see is a façade;
From its windows looks at me the Illimitable. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Omnipresence,#NFDB
462:Hidden in an earthly garment that survives,
I am the worldless being vast and free. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Immortality,#NFDB
463:Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you. ~ Colson Whitehead, #NFDB
464:Behind all eyes I meet Thy secret gaze
And in each voice I hear Thy magic tune: ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Because Thou Art,#NFDB
465:Far off in the red mangroves an alligator has heaved himself onto a hummock of grass and lies there, studying his poems. ~ Mary Oliver, #NFDB
466:It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. ~ William Carlos Williams, #NFDB
467:Kali (Iron Lords of Time)
Am love, am passion; I create the world.
I am the only Brahma. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Kama,#NFDB
468:The world is so great and rich, and life so full of variety, that you can never lack occasions for poems. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
469:The worst
is when people - knowingly or not -
carry prison inside themselves.
- 9-10 P.M. Poems ~ N z m Hikmet Ran,#NFDB
470:Vainly man, crouched in his corner of safety, shrinks from the fatal
Lure of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#NFDB
471:He's never going to sit at my feet and write me poems, which is good because I hate poetry, except dirty ones that rhyme. ~ Ann Aguirre, #NFDB
472:He who creates three to five haiku poems during a lifetime is a haiku poet. He who attains to completes ten is a master. ~ Matsuo Basho, #NFDB
473:It is He in the sun who is ageless and deathless,
And into the midnight His shadow is thrown. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Who,#NFDB
474:My advice to my younger self would have been, "Chill. Concentrate on the poems. Everything else will work itself out." ~ Denise Duhamel, #NFDB
475:Out, out with the mind and its candle flares,
Light, light the suns that never die. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Musa Spiritus,#NFDB
476:Poems must, of course, be written in emotional freedom. Moreover, poems are not language but the content of the language. ~ Mary Oliver, #NFDB
477:She's the kind of girl that songs should be written about, poems should be composed for, and books should be dedicated to. ~ Kiera Cass, #NFDB
478:The hand that sent Jupiter spinning through heaven,
Spends all its cunning to fashion a curl. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Who,#NFDB
479:The impossible is the hint of what shall be,
Mortal the door to immortality. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Our godhead calls us,#NFDB
480:the poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople... you and i are human beings; mostpeople are snobs. ~ E E Cummings, #NFDB
481:the poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople... you and i are human beings; mostpeople are snobs. ~ e e cummings, #NFDB
482:In vain was my prison of separate body made;
His occult presence burns in every cell. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Omnipresence,#NFDB
483:I've said what I'm prepared to say in my poems, and then journalists think that you're going to tell them a whole lot more. ~ Wendy Cope, #NFDB
484:I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
485:My poems are political in the deeper sense of the word. Political means to live in your time, to be a man of your time. ~ Yehuda Amichai, #NFDB
486:Nothing in all those "O swan" poems had ever mentioned that they hissed. Or resented being mistaken for felines. Or bit. ~ Connie Willis, #NFDB
487:She tells me words give people permission to be their fullest self and aren't these the poems I most needed to hear? ~ Elizabeth Acevedo, #NFDB
488:The bag I wanted was beyond reason - something to hold my poems, twice as big as the universe and it must be androgynous. ~ Eileen Myles, #NFDB
489:The darkness was the Omnipotent’s abode,
Hood of omniscience, a blind mask of God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Inconscient,#NFDB
490:Children are like poems. They're beautiful -- to their creators -- but to others they're just silly and fucking annoying. ~ Doug Stanhope, #NFDB
491:How many poems did I not write?
They hang in the air around me, a weird choir,
And some day
May suffocate me... ~ Anna Akhmatova,#NFDB
492:I'd try to write my poems in a certain rhythm. I had my rock 'n' roll stuff for performing and my denser stuff for writing. ~ Patti Smith, #NFDB
493:The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives. ~ Audre Lorde, #NFDB
494:The words we construct, the poems we write and the songs we sing, become the love story of a stranger we have never seen. ~ M F Moonzajer, #NFDB
495:A spark of the eternal Fire, it came
To build a house in Matter for the Unborn. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Miracle of Birth,#NFDB
496:…girls were like poems: weird, incomprehensible and boring, but those “in the know” assured me that they were beautiful. ~ Jake Vander Ark, #NFDB
497:He wades through mud to reach the Wonderful,
And does what Matter must or Spirit can. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man the Enigma,#NFDB
498:Mystic daughter of Delight,
Life, thou ecstasy,
Let the radius of thy flight
Be eternity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Life,#NFDB
499:Naked my spirit from its vestures stands;
I am alone with my own self for space. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Self’s Infinity,#NFDB
500:poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language, and are performed m ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
501:Poems in largeness cast like moving worlds
And metres surging with the ocean’s voice ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Growth of the Flame,#NFDB
502:When darkness was blind and engulfed within darkness,
He was seated within it immense and alone. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Who,#NFDB
503:Chaff are men’s armies
Threshed by the flails of Fate; ‘tis the soul of the hero that conquers. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
504:I am pretty interested in hybrid forms. I love graphic novels and I think there should be more graphic poems in the world. ~ Matthea Harvey, #NFDB
505:I, Earth, have a deeper power than Heaven;
My lonely sorrow surpasses its rose-joys. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Life Heavens,#NFDB
506:I never deny poems when they come; whatever I am doing, whatever I am writing, I lay it aside and attend to the arriving poem. ~ Amy Lowell, #NFDB
507:In the inconscient dreadful dumb Abyss
Are heard the heart-beats of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Unseen Infinite,#NFDB
508:In the night a million stars arise
To watch us with their ancient friendly eyes. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Perigone Prologuises,#NFDB
509:Our body is an epitome of some Vast
That masks its presence by our humanness. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Hill-top Temple,#NFDB
510:Poet, who first with skill inspired did teach
Greatness to our divine Bengali speech. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Madhusudan Dutt,#NFDB
511:The blue sea dances like a girl
With sapphire and with pearl
Crowning her locks. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Songs to Myrtilla,#NFDB
512:There is a need within the soul of man
The splendours of the surface never sate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Greater Plan,#NFDB
513:Thy golden Light came down into my feet;
My earth is now Thy playfield and Thy seat. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Golden Light,#NFDB
514:Time voyages with Thee upon its prow,—
And all the future’s passionate hope is Thou. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Because Thou Art,#NFDB
515:Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take. ~ A R Ammons, #NFDB
516:Immeasurable ecstasy where Time
And Space have fainted in a swoon sublime! ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya,#NFDB
517:I've written and translated my own poems from English to German. It's basically a summation of my identity as it stands now. ~ Masiela Lusha, #NFDB
518:Ordering is very important with essays, even if a reader doesn't read the essays or the poems in order through the book... ~ Pattiann Rogers, #NFDB
519:Rod McKuen. One of his poems says something
about it not mattering who you love but the important thing is that you love, ~ Carolyn Brown,#NFDB
520:The poems and stories we shared with each other could mean what we wanted them to mean. We could choose our own path together. ~ Ally Condie, #NFDB
521:There's something to walking with autumnal thoughts through the evening fog. One likes to compose poems at a time like that. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
522:they stood together under the dome of the Grand Portico, with the indecipherable art of love poems giving silent testament. • ~ Ren e Ahdieh, #NFDB
523:Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper, That we may record our emptiness. ~ Khalil Gibran, #NFDB
524:Death is but changing of our robes to wait
In wedding garments at the Eternal’s gate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Fear of Death,#NFDB
525:Impassive, I bear each act and thought and mood:
Time traverses my hushed infinitude. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Cosmic Spirit,#NFDB
526:my poems covered the bare places in my childhood like the fine, new skin under a scab that hasn't yet fallen off completely. ~ Tove Ditlevsen, #NFDB
527:Not alone the mind in its trouble
God beholds, but the spirit behind that has joy of the torture. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
528:Poverty is very good in poems but very bad in the house; very good in maxims and sermons but very bad in practical life. ~ Henry Ward Beecher, #NFDB
529:She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides, #NFDB
530:God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
531:Gradually I became aware that professing English because I loved poems was like practicing vivisection because I loved dogs. ~ Michael Donaghy, #NFDB
532:I also like poems that are haunted by a structure or a narrative, or poems that frisk flirtatiously at the boundary of sense. ~ Matthea Harvey, #NFDB
533:In addition to writing in received forms, I have also had fun making up forms - Möbius strips and visual poems, particularly. ~ Denise Duhamel, #NFDB
534:It's not Adventureland, but you write some poems, the leaves move, and you get laid sometimes." Tom Drury's Pierre Hunter on life. ~ Tom Drury, #NFDB
535:Listen to presences inside poems,
Let them take you where they will.
Follow those private hints,
and never leave the premises. ~ Rumi,#NFDB
536:Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started. ~ Seamus Heaney, #NFDB
537:More or Less Love Poems #11:
No babe
We'd never
Swing together but
the syncopation
would be something wild ~ Diane di Prima,#NFDB
538:Nia smiled. “You have no need to apologize, Oskar. Remembering Alma is good for my heart. Do you know any more of her poems? ~ Andrew Peterson, #NFDB
539:some winters
will never melt
some summers
will never freeze
and some things will only
... live in poems. ~ Sanober Khan,#NFDB
540:Strength men desire in their masters;
All men worship success and in failure and weakness abandon. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
541:There's nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German. ~ Paul Celan, #NFDB
542:An animal creature wonderfully human,
A charm and miracle of fur-footed Brahman, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Despair on the Staircase,#NFDB
543:If progress is not the right word for buildings or poems, what is the right way to evaluate cultural change? I suggest integrity. ~ Andy Crouch, #NFDB
544:I wondered if I was just the sum of my brain scan, little dots clustered in my frontal lobe. Is that where the poems came from?. ~ Betsy Lerner, #NFDB
545:OMG! I DESIGNED THIS NEW SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM! IT'S CALLED "POETRY" - YOU HAVE TO READ AMY KING'S POEMS TO GET AN INVITE ~ Amy King ~ Amy King, #NFDB
546:Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness. ~ Kahlil Gibran,#NFDB
547:Unborn I sit, timeless, intangible:
All things are shadows in my tranquil glass. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Indwelling Universal,#NFDB
548:As rain-thrashed mire the marvel of the rose,
Earth waits that distant marvel to disclose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Silver Call,#NFDB
549:A Witness dwells within our secrecies,
The incarnate Godhead in the body of man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Universal Incarnation,#NFDB
550:I don't really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn't create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people. ~ Robert Graves, #NFDB
551:Space is a bar twixt our ankles,
Time is a weight that we drag and the scar of the centuries rankles ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#NFDB
552:What Robert Bly's poetry readings say is: "You must change your life." To hear serious poems and resist all change is dangerous. ~ William Booth, #NFDB
553:Ye are better than all the ballads That ever were sung or said; For ye are living poems, And all the rest are dead. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, #NFDB
554:Forewilled by the gods, Alexander,
All things happen on earth and yet we must strive who are mortals, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
555:In this rude combat with the fate of man
Thy smile within my heart makes all my strength; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Divine Worker,#NFDB
556:I recall that one time he told the people to read the poems out loud because the spoken word was the seed of love in the darkness. ~ Tom s Rivera, #NFDB
557:O Thou who climb’dst to mind from the dull stone,
Face now the miracled summits still unwon. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Evolution - II,#NFDB
558:Words are like breath,” she said. “You say them and they’re gone. But writing traps them. You could write down stories, poems. ~ Bernard Cornwell, #NFDB
559:A death that eats and eating is devoured,
This is the brutal image of the world. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya,#NFDB
560:Chesterton never achieves a great poem because his poems are compilations of statements not intensely felt but only intensely meant. ~ Hugh Kenner, #NFDB
561:Kama (Desire)
My desire
Takes many forms; I change and wheel and race,
And with Me runs creation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Kama,#NFDB
562:Life only is, or death is life disguised,—
Life a short death until by life we are surprised. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Life and Death,#NFDB
563:Like common men he lived to whom the ray
Of a new sun but brings another day
Unmeaning. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Khaled of the Sea,#NFDB
564:My mind has left its prison-camp of brain;
It pours, a luminous sea from spirit heights. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Inner Sovereign,#NFDB
565:My songs were influenced not so much by poetry on the page but by poetry being recited by the poets who recited poems with jazz bands. ~ Bob Dylan, #NFDB
566:My vast transcendence holds the cosmic whirl;
I am hid in it as in the sea a pearl. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Indwelling Universal,#NFDB
567:She pronounced each word carefully, as though she was tasting fruit. The words of her poems were a most private and fragrant orchard. ~ Pat Conroy, #NFDB
568:To perish is better for man or for nation
Nobly in battle, nor end disgraced by disease or subjection. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
569:Why not more poems about the sun? The sun is also a star, and it's our most important one. That alone should be worth a poem or two. ~ Nicola Yoon, #NFDB
570:Favorite poems are like favorite children. We definitely have them but we never tell as the others would have their feelings hurt. ~ Nikki Giovanni, #NFDB
571:for S.— I read somewhere that dedications are like coded love letters, but I always seem to lay us out bare. Sorry for the poems. ~ Trista Mateer, #NFDB
572:Human bodies are words, myriads of words; In the best poems reappears the body, man's or woman's, well-shaped, natural, gay; ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
573:I had never heard of Rumi until Robert Bly handed me this book and he said, ah, “These poems need to be released from their cages.” ~ Coleman Barks, #NFDB
574:It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there. ~ William Carlos Williams,#NFDB
575:I used to write poems more when I was younger, but I haven't in a long time. I just write ideas and paragraphs and go from there. ~ Kacey Musgraves, #NFDB
576:Let the whole world end now, since all for whichIt was created is fulfilled at lastAnd I am swallowed up in thee, O God. ~ Sri AurobindoShort Poems, #NFDB
577:Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky,
We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness.
~ Kahlil Gibran,#NFDB
578:Clarity Cliche--polished package
that wraps the unwrappable
Here it is, your day
from "Nightly News" in The News: Poems ~ Jeffrey Brown,#NFDB
579:Everyone should be able to do one card trick, tell two jokes, and recite three poems, in case they are ever trapped in an elevator. ~ Daniel Handler, #NFDB
580:Everyone should be able to do one card trick, tell two jokes, and recite three poems, in case they are ever trapped in an elevator. ~ Lemony Snicket, #NFDB
581:I didn't think about whether I was writing poems. I was thinking. And the more I was thinking, the more there was I didn't understand. ~ David Antin, #NFDB
582:I have been transcribing those poems and considering how lucky we are to live longer than flowers, even if not much happens to us. ~ Kate Bernheimer, #NFDB
583:I know, basketball is a dance. I didn't understand the significance of that type of training at first. I was supposed to read poems. ~ Dirk Nowitzki, #NFDB
584:In Damascus:
poems become diaphanous
They’re neither sensual
nor intellectual
they are what echo says
to echo . . . ~ Mahmoud Darwish,#NFDB
585:I was writing poems when I was young, you know, because my father was a poet, so it was absolutely normal to follow my father. ~ Bernardo Bertolucci, #NFDB
586:Still by slow steps the miracle goes on,
The Immortal’s gradual birth mid mire and stone. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Miracle of Birth,#NFDB
587:Yet is the dark Inconscient whence came all
The self-same Power that shines on high unwon. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man of the Mediator,#NFDB
588:I am the light in stars, of flowers
The bloom, the nameless fragrance that pervades
Creation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Love and Death,#NFDB
589:If your house has Cold Mountain poems They are better for you than sutras Hang them up where you can see them Read them and read them again ~ Hanshan, #NFDB
590:I would write praise poems that might serve as comforts, reminders, or even cautions if needed, to wayward minds and unawakened hearts. ~ Mary Oliver, #NFDB
591:Most poems I’ve seen are about love or sex or the stars. You poets are obsessed with stars. Falling stars. Shooting stars. Dying stars. ~ Nicola Yoon, #NFDB
592:The poem was called “Goblin Market,” and the book whose proof pages were on the desk was titled Goblin Market and Other Poems. Christina ~ Tim Powers, #NFDB
593:Aspiring to godhead from insensible clay
He travels slow-footed towards the eternal day. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man the Thinking Animal,#NFDB
594:Burn it! Burn it. This is where the poems are,” I say, thumping a fist against my chest. “Will you burn me? Will you burn me, too? ~ Elizabeth Acevedo, #NFDB
595:Busy our hearts are weaving thoughts and images always:
After their kind they see what here we call truth. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
596:I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn’t get—and never would get. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
597:It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad. ~ Randall Jarrell, #NFDB
598:I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy. ~ Nikki Giovanni, #NFDB
599:Morning has pleasure, noon has golden peace
And afternoon repose and eve the heart’s increase. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Songs to Myrtilla,#NFDB
600:Not in this living net
Of flesh and nerve, nor in the flickering mind
Is a man’s manhood seated. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Baji Prabhou,#NFDB
601:This world behind is made of truer stuff
Than the manufactured tissue of earth’s grace. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Inner Fields,#NFDB
602:A book of poems doesn't just come out by chance, an editor has to select it, a publisher has to distribute it or you will never see it. ~ Adrienne Rich, #NFDB
603:I never find words right away. Poems for me always begin with images and rhythms, shapes, feelings, forms, dances in the back of my mind. ~ Gary Snyder, #NFDB
604:I tried to write poems in rhyme. I tried writing songs. Sometimes I jotted down a thought. I would keep a log of spontaneous thoughts. ~ Chath Piersath, #NFDB
605:Light, burning Light from the Infinite’s diamond heart
Quivers in my heart where blooms the deathless rose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Light,#NFDB
606:My verses, I cannot say poems. . . . I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers. ~ Dorothy Parker, #NFDB
607:3/3 #WorldEnvironmentDay2020 Who intimately lives with rain.Poems are made by fools like me,But only God can make a tree.” ~ Joyce Kilmer, “Trees,” 1914, #NFDB
608:All is fish that comes to the literary net. Goethe puts his joys and sorrows into poems, I turn my adventures into bread and butter. ~ Louisa May Alcott, #NFDB
609:He sowed the desert with ruddy-hearted rose,
The sweetest voice that ever spoke in prose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Bankim Chandra Chatterji,#NFDB
610:Human nature is universial, and it endures through all cultures and epochs. This is the secret of perenniality of certain poems and books. ~ Octavio Paz, #NFDB
611:I'm partial to coffee shops, brain work, and poems on the page. I write after midnight. Sometimes, twisty syntax happens, and I surrender. ~ Marvin Bell, #NFDB
612:I think if you put something in a file that says "war poems" or "love poems" that you already restrict the way in which the poem might move. ~ Rita Dove, #NFDB
613:I write poems for myself and I write poetry that gets torn apart and becomes songs. I have a lot of respect for words, the power of words. ~ Kurt Cobain, #NFDB
614:My poems, I think, exist in a state of tension between the love of natural beauty and the fear of natural meaninglessness or absurdity. ~ Hayden Carruth, #NFDB
615:The high gods watch in their silence,
Mute they endure for a while that the doom may be swifter and greater. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
616:There's so much to think about when you're becoming an adult, and there's so many great poems about that apprehension and excitement. ~ Caroline Kennedy, #NFDB
617:They can be like the sun, words.
They can do for the heart what light can for a field. ~ Saint John of the Cross, The Poems of St. John of the Cross,#NFDB
618:Further, I’ve alluded to over thirty Poe stories, poems and essays in the novel, thus creating another puzzle for the reader to solve. ~ Karen Lee Street, #NFDB
619:Poems. I tell ya, there were some great ones. The world, when it was early in the making and easy for the taking, was all poetry, man. ~ Logan Ryan Smith, #NFDB
620:Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their families, their histories too. Talk to them, listen to them. They are alive poems. ~ Joy Harjo, #NFDB
621:Ye are better than all the ballads
That ever were sung or said;
For ye are living poems,
And all the rest are dead. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,#NFDB
622:And I remember this man who never ran out of poems telling me once that knowing a book by heart is like carrying a house inside your chest. ~ Hisham Matar, #NFDB
623:...few young poets [are] testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you, is a cold bed. ~ Stanley Kunitz, #NFDB
624:From: Poems To My Girls
How can Humanity
look the deer
in
the face?
How can Mommy,
having erected
my fence?
~ Alice Walker,#NFDB
625:I pass beyond Time and life on measureless wings,
Yet still am one with born and unborn things. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Cosmic Consciousness,#NFDB
626:One hundred copies? Of these poems you do not even like?” asked the Roman. “They’re nasty bits about famous people; everyone will want them. ~ Karen Essex, #NFDB
627:Only the illimitable Permanent
Is here. A Peace stupendous, featureless, still,
Replaces all. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Nirvana,#NFDB
628:Poems can't help but be personal. Mine are certainly an accurate blueprint of the things I think about, if not a record of my daily life. ~ Matthea Harvey, #NFDB
629:In the Book of Poetry there are three hundred poems, but the meaning of all of them may be put in a single sentence: Have no debasing thoughts. ~ Confucius, #NFDB
630:I would hear, in my spirit’s wideness solitary,
The Voice that speaks when mortal lips are mute: ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Greater Plan,#NFDB
631:Poetic justice, poetic justice.. if I told you that a flower bloom in a dark room would you trust it. I mean I write poems in these songs. ~ Kendrick Lamar, #NFDB
632:Action Human and Divine
Keep only my soul to adore eternally
And meet Thee in each form and soul of Thee. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Surrender,#NFDB
633:Gesture (Mudra)
I have drunk the Infinite like a giant’s wine.
Time is my drama or my pageant dream. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Transformation,#NFDB
634:It is always difficult for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend, but because their poems are bad. ~ Randall Jarrell, #NFDB
635:Not by a little pain and not by a temperate labour
Trained is the nation chosen by Zeus for a dateless dominion. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
636:Summer has pleasant comrades, happy meetings
Of lily and rose and from the trees divinest greetings. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Songs to Myrtilla,#NFDB
637:Sure, but why not more poems about the sun? The sun is also a star, and it’s our most important one. That alone should be worth a poem or two. ~ Nicola Yoon, #NFDB
638:This is our human destiny; every moment of living
Toil and loss have gained in the constant siege of our bodies. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
639:Who says my poems are poems?
My poems are not poems.
After you know my poems are not poems,
Then we can begin to discuss poetry! ~ Taigu Ryokan,#NFDB
640:All things yield to a man and Zeus is himself his accomplice
When like a god he wills without remorse or longing. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
641:If I could rescue one of Li Bai's great poems but 10000000 spiritual slaves had to die in front of me with great violence, I wouldn't even blink. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
642:If poems very different from my own bring pleasure to a group of readers, who am I to say that the poems should have been written differently? ~ James Arthur, #NFDB
643:I like poems that affect me emotionally and also provoke me to further, deeper thought. I enjoy challenge, but not, I think, for its own sake. ~ James Arthur, #NFDB
644:I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world. ~ Stanley Kunitz, #NFDB
645:Only on the heart’s veiled door the word of flame
Is written, the secret and tremendous Name. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Universal Incarnation,#NFDB
646:Poems are taught as though the poet has put a secret key in his words and it is the reader's job to find it. Poems are not mystery novels. ~ Natalie Goldberg, #NFDB
647:When youth has quenched its soft and magic light,
Delightful things remain but dead is their delight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Songs to Myrtilla,#NFDB
648:Count not life nor death, defeat nor triumph, Pyrrhus.
Only thy soul regard and the gods in thy joy or thy labour. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
649:I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world. ~ Seamus Heaney, #NFDB
650:...if you eat my poems while they're still freshYou still have to bring forward many images yourself.These poems are not just old sayings... ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, #NFDB
651:I guess that would have been 1968. I was a freshman in college and I wasn't writing good poems, but I was at least trying to write poems then. ~ Edward Hirsch, #NFDB
652:The notes I have made are not a diary in the ordinary sense, but partly lengthy records of my spiritual experiences, and partly poems in prose. ~ Edvard Munch, #NFDB
653:The One devised innumerably to be;
His oneness in invisible forms he hides,
Time’s tiny temples to eternity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Electron,#NFDB
654:We would compose poems about love and tell stories that have been heard in some form before. But it would be our first time feeling and telling. ~ Ally Condie, #NFDB
655:...you fantasize about me reading my poems to you - it doesn't work that way - I write down everything later - living is not an after-thought... ~ John Geddes, #NFDB
656:You get the best photos, the best literature, the best poems, the best art while working for your own pleasure with your own inner peace! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
657:Essentially, mythologies are enormous poems that are renditions of insights, giving some sense of the marvel, the miracle and wonder of life. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
658:I Can Give Myself To Her
I can give myself to her
In her dreams
Whispering her own poems
In her ear as she sleeps beside me.
~ Akiko Yosano,#NFDB
659:I like to joke that I started writing long poems out the anxiety over ending and starting poems. It just seemed easier to keep going. ~ Alison Hawthorne Deming, #NFDB
660:My poems are more my silence than my speech. Just as music is a kind of quiet. Sounds are needed only to unveil the various layers of silence. ~ Anna Kamienska, #NFDB
661:O Life, thy breath is but a cry to the Light
Immortal, whence has come thy swift delight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, O Life, thy Breath is but a Cry,#NFDB
662:So what
are your poems about? They're about
...
how nothing is about, they're not
about about.
--Heather McHugh, 20-200 on 747 ~ Heather McHugh,#NFDB
663:When I am dead, even then,
I will still love you, I will wait in these poems,
When I am dead, even then
I am still listening to you. ~ Muriel Rukeyser,#NFDB
664:All those years and their moments— Crackling bacon, slamming car doors, Poems tried out on friends, Will be one more archive, One more shaky text. ~ Gary Snyder, #NFDB
665:Always our voices are prompted to speech for an end that we know not,
Always we think that we drive, but are driven. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
666:I see my poems as interlinked. No poem gives an answer. It may offer other questions, it may instigate other questions that then become poems. ~ Pattiann Rogers, #NFDB
667:No thought is vain; our very dreams
Substantial are;
The light we see in fancy, yonder gleams
In the star. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,#NFDB
668:Poems ought to reflect the work the poet does, and his relationships with other people, and family, and institutions, and organization. ~ Wallace Stegner, #NFDB
669:When poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color, color lines and colonies, somebody tells the police. ~ Langston Hughes, #NFDB
670:And so I told him how living in Japan would give him a leisure no mere tourist has, to know the rhythms of the place, a land of tiny poems. ~ Donna George Storey, #NFDB
671:A sole thing the Gods
Demand from all men living, sacrifice:
Nor without this shall any crown be grasped. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Love and Death,#NFDB
672:But love of one kind will never duplicate itself. Love has its variety...which possibly makes it as a great as all the songs and stories and poems. ~ Dan Skinner, #NFDB
673:Conscious dimly of births unfinished hid in our being
Rest we cannot; a world cries in us for space and for fullness. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
674:Don't write poems to make girls like you, because it will not make them like you but it will give them something to quote back at you later in life. ~ Nick Earls, #NFDB
675:Earth cannot long resist the man whom Heaven has chosen;
Gods with him walk; his chariot is led; his arm is assisted. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
676:Ever word collector sure know that feeling, whether you've been catching songs or poems or stories. You've been caught in the magic." -Florentine ~ Natalie Lloyd, #NFDB
677:I always wanted to be some kind of writer - I wrote plays and songs and "books" before I realized living and breathing people still wrote poems. ~ Denise Duhamel, #NFDB
678:I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn’t get—and never would get. ~ Benjamin Alire S enz, #NFDB
679:Power is divine; divinest of all is power over mortals.
Power then the conqueror seeks and power the imperial nation, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
680:the best poems it seems to me are written out of an ultimate need. and once the poem is written, the only need after that is to write another. ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
681:The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor, simply because major poets write a lot. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
682:The more I read my poems, the more I find out about them. I still read them with the same passion I felt when I wrote them as a young man. ~ Linton Kwesi Johnson, #NFDB
683:The music is notated first, the text follows. I might have to wait until the right kind of text or form arises. I often see the poems as “scores.” ~ Anne Waldman, #NFDB
684:What we call sin,
Is but man’s leavings as from deep within
The Pilot guides him in his pilgrimage. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, In the Moonlight,#NFDB
685:For children: I'm writing a picture book about the Big Dipper and a novel about a cricket, a firefly and a vole. For grownups: I'm writing poems. ~ Kate DiCamillo, #NFDB
686:I'd rather call prose poems something else, for clarity - something like "poetic prose," prose that contains a quality of poetry, but not poems. ~ Pattiann Rogers, #NFDB
687:I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn't get--and never would get. ~ Benjamin Alire Saenz, #NFDB
688:I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn't get--and never would get. ~ Benjamin Alire S enz, #NFDB
689:It snowed right before Jack stopped talking to Hazel, fluffy white flakes big enough to show their crystal architecture, like perfect geometric poems. ~ Anne Ursu, #NFDB
690:Leave to the night its phantoms, leave to the future its curtain!
Only today Heaven gave to mortal man for his labour. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
691:Life and treasure and fame to cast on the wings of a moment,
Fiercer joy than this the gods have not given to mortals. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
692:Reading about the response of people in stories, plays, poems, helps us to respond more courageously and openly at our own moments of turning. ~ Madeleine L Engle, #NFDB
693:Son of man, thou hast crowned thy life with flowers that are scentless,
Chased the delights that wound. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Descent of Ahana,#NFDB
694:The thoughts of unknown minds exalt me with their thrill;
I carry the sorrow of millions in my lonely breast. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Cosmic Man,#NFDB
695:AND even if you eat my poems while they're still freshYou still have to bring forward many images yourself.These poems are not just...old sayings ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, #NFDB
696:For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. ~ Mary Oliver, #NFDB
697:He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink. ~ Virginia Woolf, #NFDB
698:He who is blind revolts and he who is limited struggles:
Strife is not for the infinite; wisdom observes to accomplish. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
699:I feel especially drawn to them. He is a writer. He writes, with those hands. They are little gods, aren’t they? They create things, words, poems. ~ Saffron A Kent, #NFDB
700:In all the poems I've written I've not really engaged in politics, and when I've found myself moving in that direction I've always stopped myself. ~ Simon Armitage, #NFDB
701:I was unnerved to learn in my twenties that the poems of Emily Dickinson that I had memorized as a girl were not the poems as she had written them. ~ Helen Vendler, #NFDB
702:He should have told Vlad that in the old days a collection of poems could change your life, but a single poem could also cost the life of its author. ~ Andre Makine, #NFDB
703:Interesting is when one can produce a picture that is pretty, but with undercurrents. The metaphor that comes to mind is in the poems of Robert Frost. ~ Jamie Wyeth, #NFDB
704:The poems
were cool.
The best ones were
like bombs,
and when all the right words
came together
it was like an explosion. ~ Kwame Alexander,#NFDB
705:Thou who pervadest all the worlds below,
Yet sitst above,
Master of all who work and rule and know,
Servant of Love! ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, God,#NFDB
706:All the poems have wolves in them. All but one. The most beautiful one of all. She dances in a ring of fire and throws off the challenge with a shrug. ~ Jim Morrison, #NFDB
707:A lot of people are writing poems and don't realize it. They have this limited idea of how the poem should sound or what subjects it should address. ~ Matthea Harvey, #NFDB
708:...but I spoke passionately at the rallies; inspired by phrases I had read in novels and poems, I would weave words together into sounds of revolution. ~ Azar Nafisi, #NFDB
709:I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle and end. ~ Gilda Radner, #NFDB
710:Poems are not for explaining," she said, her tone as bored and faintly scornful as his. "They are for pretty girls to read aloud. Everyone knows that. ~ Emily Horner, #NFDB
711:There are a handful of poems, which perhaps might need their own warning for the people who are frightened, disturbed, or terminally puzzled by poetry. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
712:Thought could not think in him, flesh could not quiver;
The feet of Time could not adventure here ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Yogi on the Whirlpool,#NFDB
713:Well, hello, darling with the ocean eyes,
How many secrets keep us apart?
A sea of poems, a field of sighs,
Can I cross and return to the start? ~ Amy Zhang,#NFDB
714:All things are by Time and the Will eternal that moves us,
And for each birth its hour is set in the night or the dawning. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
715:As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store. ~ William H Gass, #NFDB
716:I admire the poetic relationship to place as enacted in Wallace Stevens' poems; his poetics strikes me as an argument against the restraints of realism. ~ Cate Marvin, #NFDB
717:I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. ~ Gilda Radner, #NFDB
718:Man over woman, woman o’er man, over lover and foeman
Wrestling we strive to expand in our souls, to be wide, to be happy. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
719:Something watches behind, Spirit or Self or Soul,
Viewing Space and its toil, waiting the end of Time. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Witness and the Wheel,#NFDB
720:The vault of heaven
Is not a true similitude for man
Whose space outgyres thought’s last horizon. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya,#NFDB
721:World-rhythms
Through glimmering veils of wonder and delight
World after world bursts on the awakened sight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Other Earths,#NFDB
722:Even as death shall gather us all for memory’s clusters,
All in their day who were great or were little, heroes or cowards. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
723:Fine.” Desjani sighed. “Admiral, I recommend we get our intelligence officer up here to see if he can craft lovely poems for the singing spider wolves. ~ Jack Campbell, #NFDB
724:I am interested in the movement of my own thoughts and in trying make the poems feel more accurate to experience, including the experience of thinking. ~ Rachel Zucker, #NFDB
725:Led or misled we are mortals and walk by a light that is given;
Most they err who deem themselves most from error excluded. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
726:Macmillan's rejection had left him very downcast... Patrick Swift was invited to peruse the contents and decided that the poems should be published. ~ Patrick Kavanagh, #NFDB
727:Man on whom the World-Unity shall seize,
Widening his soul-spark to an epiphany
Of the timeless vastness of Infinity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Electron,#NFDB
728:Men live like stars that see each other in heaven,
But one knows not the pleasure and the grief
The others feel ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Love and Death,#NFDB
729:The spoken word community was significant in making me want to write accessible and urgent poems. Bob Holman, in particular, was an impressive figure. ~ Denise Duhamel, #NFDB
730:This is why I love poems: they invite me to sit down and listen to a voice speaking thoughtfully and passionately about what it feels like to be alive. ~ Tracy K Smith, #NFDB
731:And if you knew from what scraps
Poems are born — without shame
Like yellow dandelions by a wormy fence,
Like wild spinach or the common burr. ~ Anna Akhmatova,#NFDB
732:Easily nations bow to a yoke when their virtue relaxes;
Hard is the breaking fetters once worn, for the virtue has perished. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
733:Ever we hear in the heart of the peril a flute go before us,
Luminous beckoning hands in the distance invite and implore us. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#NFDB
734:Floribert could neither sing nor recite these poems because they were without words, but he dreamed and felt them sometimes, especially in the evenings. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
735:I'm always talking about how the poems I am most obsessed with are like people: complex and unknowable and with a huge capacity for many different emotions. ~ Ada Limon, #NFDB
736:In my case, performance is part of the medium. Sometimes I feel that it's my main medium, and that the presentation of my poems on the page is secondary. ~ James Arthur, #NFDB
737:My poems are almost all written as Diane. I don't have any problems with that, and if other women choose to identify with this, I think that's terrific. ~ Diane Wakoski, #NFDB
738:Not of the fire am I terrified, not of the sword and its slaying;
Vileness of men appals me, baseness I fear and its voices. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
739:That’s why Lizard cooked. And why her poems never got written down. Food disappeared—and then there was nothing around to remind her she was brilliant. ~ Debora Geary, #NFDB
740:And sometimes you look at the first poems by someone and you go, "They have freshness and a sense of wonder that is never recaptured again by that poet." ~ Edward Hirsch, #NFDB
741:I ask you to come through and show me where you're pouring out the blood of your life. ~ Carl Sandburg, in "To a Contemporary Bunkshooter" in Chicago Poems (1916), p. 63, #NFDB
742:I can already feel some things slipping through my fingers like sand and water, like artifacts and poems, like everything you want to hold on to and can’t. ~ Ally Condie, #NFDB
743:I try to hold both history and wilderness in mind, that my poems may the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times. ~ Gary Snyder, #NFDB
744:I was very committed to the process of composing, working at poems, putting things together and taking them apart like some kind of experimental filmmaker. ~ David Antin, #NFDB
745:Just as a great poet can use one scene to bring another new, unknown vista into view. It should be obvious, but the best metaphors make the best poems. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
746:My poems getting published in Russia doesn't make me feel in any fashion, to tell you the truth. I'm not trying to be coy, but it doesn't tickle my ego. ~ Joseph Brodsky, #NFDB
747:Poems should be like pins which prick the skin of boredom and leave a glow equal in its pride to the gate of the sadist who stuck the pin and walked away ~ Norman Mailer, #NFDB
748:Swan, by Mary Oliver. Poems and prose. Reading from this book is as if visiting a very wise friend. There is wisdom and welcoming kindness on every page. ~ Jessye Norman, #NFDB
749:This observe, thy task in thy destiny noble or fallen;
Time and result are the gods’; with these things be not thou troubled. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
750:While thou livest, perfectly fulfil
Thy part, conceive
Earth as thy stage, thyself the actor strong,
The drama His. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,#NFDB
751:For grief and pain
Are errors of the clouded soul; behind
They do not stain
The living spirit who to these is blind. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,#NFDB
752:I mean you ask me
not to fall in love with you
and then you go write poems
with your tongue
and draw constellations
in my freckles. ~ Clementine von Radics,#NFDB
753:I read poems for the pleasure of the mouth. My heart is in my mouth, and the sound of poetry is the way in." ~from an interview in Narrative magazine ~ Donald Hall, #NFDB
754:It took me 14 years to write poems about Vietnam. I had never thought about writing about it, and in a way I had been systematically writing around it. ~ Yusef Komunyakaa, #NFDB
755:Non-Violence
Deem nothing vain: through many veils
This Spirit gleams.
The dreams of God are truths and He prevails. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,#NFDB
756:Occult masters of destiny,
They who sit in the Secrecy
And watch unmoved ever
Unto the end of all. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Winged with Dangerous Deity,#NFDB
757:Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
758:Poems build our capacity for imaginative thinking, create a tolerance for ambiguity, and foster an appreciation for the role of the unknown in human life. ~ Tony Hoagland, #NFDB
759:The language is spare and under control and has a genuine immediacy...The poems never preach but are lined out with a cool and therefore devastating effect ~ Vern Rutsala, #NFDB
760:These poems, with all their crudities, doubts and confusions, are written for the love of man and in Praise of God, and I'd be a damn fool if they weren't. ~ Dylan Thomas, #NFDB
761:Great men and death
Such puissance great well-poisèd natures prove
To mould to their own likeness all they love. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Khaled of the Sea,#NFDB
762:In the hard reckoning made by the grey-robed accountant at even
Pain is the ransom we pay for the smallest foretaste of heaven. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#NFDB
763:Light, brooding Light! each smitten passionate cell
In a mute blaze of ecstasy preserves
A living sense of the Imperishable. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Light,#NFDB
764:She's right. We would compose poems about love and tell stories that have been heard in some form before. But it would be our first time feeling and telling. ~ Ally Condie, #NFDB
765:All those years and their moments—
Crackling bacon, slamming car doors,
Poems tried out on friends,
Will be one more archive,
One more shaky text. ~ Gary Snyder,#NFDB
766:Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together. ~ Mary Oliver, #NFDB
767:Always a few will be left whom the threatenings of Fate cannot conquer,
Always souls are born whose courage waits not on fortune ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
768:Hear its cry when God’s moment changing our fate comes visored
Silently into our lives and the spirit too knows, for it watches. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
769:There's so much rage in the world now and I'm finding poems to be the place where I want to stay. I rage and rage and then write a poem and return to breathing. ~ Ada Limon, #NFDB
770:These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I'd be a damn' fool if they weren't. ~ Dylan Thomas, #NFDB
771:All the stories and poems and letters and oracles and wisdom verses of God's Word, like individual instruments in a great orchestra, serve THE WHOLE story. ~ James MacDonald, #NFDB
772:Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems. ~ Harold Bloom, #NFDB
773:Fine natures are like fine poems; a glance at the first two lines suffices for a guess into the beauty that waits you if you read on. ~ Edward Bulwer Lytton 1st Baron Lytton, #NFDB
774:I don't like basements, but definitely basements could be poems. Not fond of skin diseases, but again, there's a pattern. Probably anything could be a poem. ~ Matthea Harvey, #NFDB
775:Not as the ways of other mortals are theirs who are guided,
They whose eyes are the gods and they walk by a light that is secret. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
776:We can no longer allow them to write just stories and poems; we must teach them the forms of nonfiction writing as well, specifically that of writing on demand. ~ Troy Hicks, #NFDB
777:Hypocrisy, false labels, can create slogans but no poems; propaganda but not life: there are no roots, there are no realities to nurture creative work. ~ Pablo Antonio Cuadra, #NFDB
778:If rulers refuse to consider poems as crimes, then someone must commit crimes that serve the function of poetry, or texts that possess the resonance of terrorism. ~ Hakim Bey, #NFDB
779:I just can't help thinking what a real shaking up it would give people if, all of a sudden, there were no new books, new plays, new histories, new poems . . . ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
780:Life with her wine-cup of longing under the purple of her tenture,
Death as her gate of escape and rebirth and renewal of venture. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#NFDB
781:Many of my poems try to use a comic element to reach a place that isn't comic at all. The comic element works as a surprise. It is unexpected and energizing. ~ Stephen Dobyns, #NFDB
782:Paula Bonhoeffer had memorized an impressive repertoire of poems, hymns, and folk songs, which she taught her children, who remembered them into their old age. ~ Eric Metaxas, #NFDB
783:Robert Conquest once suggested that 'a curious little volume might be made of the poems of Stalin, Castro, Mao and Ho Chi Minh, with illustrations by A. Hitler. ~ Martin Amis, #NFDB
784:Souls that are true to themselves are immortal; the soulless for ever
Lingers helpless in Hades a shade among shades disappointed. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
785:Atom and molecule in their unseen plan
Buttress an edifice of strange onenesses,
Crystal and plant, insect and beast and man, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Electron,#NFDB
786:One of the remarkable things about love is that, despite very irritating people writing poems and songs about how pleasant it is, it really is quite pleasant. ~ Daniel Handler, #NFDB
787:One sole oracle helps, still armoured in courage and prudence
Patient and heedful to toil at the work that is near in the daylight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
788:Only of one thing
Man can be sure, the will in his heart and his strength in his purpose:
This too is Fate and this too the gods ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
789:Poetry is so close to music, not just in cadence and sound but in silences. That's why, to me, I can't talk about prose poems. I can talk about poetic prose. ~ Pattiann Rogers, #NFDB
790:She was learning to treat laws as most people treat poems, making them mean whatever she wanted them to without reference to the author's intention or achievement. ~ Jane Rule, #NFDB
791:The ancient Greek "oral poets" all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the muse to help them remember. ~ David Antin, #NFDB
792:To desire to write poems that endure-we undertake such a goal certain of two things: that in all likelihood we will fail, and if we succeed we will never know it ~ Donald Hall, #NFDB
793:Destiny’s lasso, its slip-knot tied by delight and repining,
Draws us through tangles of failure and victory’s inextricable twining. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#NFDB
794:Earth has beatitudes warmer than heaven’s that are bare and undying,
Marvels of Time on the crest of the moments to Infinity flying. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#NFDB
795:I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet. ~ Tahar Ben Jelloun, #NFDB
796:Of rapturous Love,
The bright epiphany whom we name God,
Towards whom we drove
In spite of weakness, evil, grief and pain. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,#NFDB
797:Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton, #NFDB
798:On the safe land
To linger is to lose what God has planned
For man’s wide soul,
Who set eternal godhead for its goal. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, To the Sea,#NFDB
799:poetry it takes a lot of desperation dissatisfaction and disillusion to write a few good poems. it’s not for everybody either to write it or even to read it. ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
800:Yet was the battle decreed for the means supreme of the mortal
Placed in a world where all things strive from the worm to the Titan. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
801:Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay. ~ Janet Fitch, #NFDB
802:And this the reason of his high unease,
Because he came from the infinities
To build immortally with mortal things; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, In the Moonlight,#NFDB
803:Confessional poetry is, to my mind, more slippery than poems that are sloppily autobiographical; I find the confessional mode much more akin to dramatic monologue. ~ Cate Marvin, #NFDB
804:He gives me that hint of a half smile tempered with those smoky eyes, a look that’s probably stolen virginities, broken hearts, and inspired a few bad poems. ~ Roxanne St Claire, #NFDB
805:I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife. ~ Philip Larkin, #NFDB
806:It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write. ~ Philip Larkin, #NFDB
807:I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic. ~ Thom Gunn, #NFDB
808:Life in my limbs shall grow deathless, flesh with the God-glory tingle,
Lustre of Paradise, light of the earth-ways marry and mingle. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#NFDB
809:O Life, thy breath is but a cry to the Light
Immortal, whence has come thy swift delight,
Thy grasp. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, O Life, thy Breath is but a Cry,#NFDB
810:The relevant poems are Milton's Paradise Lost, Pope's Essay on Man, Wordsworth's Excursion, Tennyson's In Memoriam. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925), #NFDB
811:There's a Welsh poet, R.S. Thomas. He was a very crotchety, strange man, but his poems are wonderful. He was nominated for the Nobel in the 1990s but never won. ~ Stephen Dobyns, #NFDB
812:Those who are not very concerned with art want poems or pictures to record for them something they already know - as one might want a picture of a place he loves. ~ George Oppen, #NFDB
813:We must pass through the aeons; Space is a bar twixt our ankles,
Time is a weight that we drag and the scar of the centuries rankles: ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#NFDB
814:You can't just be reactive to the things going on in your life. You have to imagine, and you have to plunder other people's work, books, poems, ideas, observations. ~ David Gray, #NFDB
815:Ahead and to the west was our ranger station - and the mountains of Idaho, poems of geology stretching beyond any boundaries and seemingly even beyond the world. ~ Norman Maclean, #NFDB
816:Being deeply aware of fragility and ecstasy seems to me an essential part of being alive and living fully - and there's no way for me to separate this from my poems. ~ Alex Lemon, #NFDB
817:Books become my refuge. Reading keeps me hopeful. I fall in love with small poems, the shorter the better- haiku from Japan, and tiny rhymes by Emily Dickinson. ~ Margarita Engle, #NFDB
818:Charmed men applaud the skilful purpose, the dexterous speaker;
This they forget that a Force decides, not the wiles of the statesman. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
819:Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss Poems that take a thousand years to die But ape the immortality of this Red label on a little butterfly . ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
820:don't start talkin about books or quotin poems at them. these is good folks but they ain't real crazy about readin books. just do what i do and you'll be all right. ~ William Gay, #NFDB
821:In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
822:In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
823:I said, “Lee, you have the soul of a poet.” He said, “I am a poet—I’ve written over a hundred poems,” which, I think, is about the least poetic thing I’ve ever heard. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
824:Talk of poems and prayers and promises, and things that we believe in. How sweet it is to love someone, how right it is to care, how long it's been since yesterday. ~ John Denver, #NFDB
825:The passages in which Milton has alluded to his own circumstances are perhaps read more frequently, and with more interest, than any other lines in his poems. ~ Thomas B Macaulay, #NFDB
826:When I went to film school about three years ago, the first two years you're required to make a series of short films. I started making films based on short poems. ~ James Franco, #NFDB
827:and i don't think you should lie to me with any nature poems
because you know you don't think sand is beautiful
unless you are in a good mood, which you never are ~ Tao Lin,#NFDB
828:Black spring! Pick up your pen, and weeping,
Of February, in sobs and ink,
Write poems, while the slush in thunder
Is burning in the black of spring. ~ Boris Pasternak,#NFDB
829:Dear are the halls of our childhood, dear are the fields of our fathers,
Yet to the soul that is free no spot on the earth is an exile. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
830:I can't quite see the point of poems like "Wittgenstein Goes for a Walk with A Hawk in Sherwood Forest." I know they're trying to be clever, but they're not. ~ Andre Naffis Sahely, #NFDB
831:In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest, where no one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that light becomes this art. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
832:Maybe you're one of those people who writes poems, but rarely reads them. Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don't read, your writing is going to suck. ~ Kim Addonizio, #NFDB
833:This is the nature of earth that to blows she responds and by scourgings
Travails excited; pain is the bed of her blossoms of pleasure. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
834:Wystan loved medical talk, and he had a soft spot for physicians. (In his book Epistle to a Godson, there are four poems dedicated to doctors, including one to me.) ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
835:Even though we've written epic poems and made incredible films about love, I still don't think anyone can understand what it is, or why it means everything. ~ Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, #NFDB
836:Hard is the way to the Eternal for the mind-born will of the mortal
Bound by the body and life to the gait of the house-burdened turtle. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#NFDB
837:Hid in our hearts is his glory; the Spirit works in our members.
Silence is he, with our voices he speaks, in our thoughts he remembers. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#NFDB
838:One is there only, apart in his greatness, the End and Beginning,—
He who has sent through his soul’s wide spaces the universe spinning. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#NFDB
839:One of these poems I wrote after having been here only a month. The other, I wrote this morning. In the space between the two poems, I have found acres of grace ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
840:Poems are language turned into art; sound and sense matter; they can be as long or longer than The Odyssey or as short or shorter than a haiku. Not very helpful. ~ Campbell McGrath, #NFDB
841:Some time later, she leaned over and kissed me. It felt just like all those songs and poems had promised it would. It felt wonderful. Like being struck by lightning. ~ Ernest Cline, #NFDB
842:What is Friendship, Definition of Friend, True Friendship - All about the meaning of true friends, what friendship means, meaning of friendship bracelets, poems, ring ~ Mark Vernon, #NFDB
843:Blood and grief are the ransom of men for the joys of their transience,
For we are mortals bound in our strength and beset in our labour. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
844:I wanted his hands at my back and his lips speaking poems on mine and our journey to each other to be completed, the miles between us consumed and all distance closed. ~ Ally Condie, #NFDB
845:Strange, remote and splendid
Childhood’s fancy pure
Thrills to thoughts we cannot fathom,
Quick felicities obscure. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A Child’s Imagination,#NFDB
846:Thomas make it easy to cave to temptation with his golden - blond hair, muscle from head to toe and sexy brooding expression a few girls have written about in poems. ~ Katie McGarry, #NFDB
847:He was young, no older than fifteen, pale and dark-haired, wearing jeans and a soft white T-shirt that had SHAKESPEARE HATES YOUR EMO POEMS written across the chest. ~ Marjorie M Liu, #NFDB
848:I am that Madan who inform the stars
With lustre and on life’s wide canvas fill
Pictures of light and shade, of joy and tears. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Love and Death,#NFDB
849:I read poems for the pleasure of the mouth. My heart is in my mouth, and the sound of poetry is the way in." ~ Donald Hallfrom an interview in Narrative magazine ~ Donald Hall, #NFDB
850:Mythologies, in other words, mythologies and religions are great poems and, when recognized as such, point infallibly through things and events to the ubiquity of a ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
851:None has been able to hold all the gods in his bosom unstaggered,
All have grown drunken with force and have gone down to Hell and to Ate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
852:The most exhilarating for the writer and the reader, are gift-things-poems which arrive on their own energy, poems that in William Shakespeare's term "slip" from you. ~ Seamus Heaney, #NFDB
853:while I walk on the moon keeps pace beside me: friend in the water [1852.jpg] -- from Japanese Death Poems, Translated by Yoel Hoffman
~ Masahide, Masahides Death Poem
,#NFDB
854:Also, I designed a pretty fascinating bracelet, where you put a rubber band around your favorite book of poems for a year, and then you take it off and wear it. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer, #NFDB
855:As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other. ~ Mary Oliver, #NFDB
856:His poems have no capital letters in them, which is, I believe, the essence of modernity. His books are about unpleasant people leading lives of surpassing dullness. ~ Agatha Christie, #NFDB
857:I admire Ginsberg as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when he is bad. But he will last, or at least those poems will last. ~ Leslie Fiedler, #NFDB
858:Life, the river of the Spirit, consenting to anguish and sorrow
If by her heart’s toil a loan-light of joy from the heavens she can borrow. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#NFDB
859:Poetry doesn't function by saying things straightforwardly because the language is too imprecise, too limited often, to address the underlying subject of most poems. ~ Pattiann Rogers, #NFDB
860:There our sun cannot shine and our moon has no place for her lustres,
There our lightnings flash not, nor fire of these spaces is suffered. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
861:[To write poems] I think it's important to do research, and research mostly is going to come from books, so all of your reading is potentially helpful to your poetry. ~ Nikki Giovanni, #NFDB
862:Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to. ~ John Berger, #NFDB
863:Dread not the ruin, fear not the storm-blast, yield not, O Trojans.
Zeus shall rebuild. Death ends not our days, the fire shall not triumph. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
864:However, I began to submit poems to British magazines, and some were accepted. It was a great moment to see my first poems published. It felt like entering a tradition. ~ Helen Dunmore, #NFDB
865:I did a load of medicine cabinets a long time ago and I named them after Sex Pistols songs. I suppose I must be getting old if I'm naming work after Philip Larkin poems. ~ Damien Hirst, #NFDB
866:It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge. ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
867:I've got to have something. I want to stop it all, the whole monumental grotesque joke, before it's too late. But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good. ~ Sylvia Plath, #NFDB
868:My soul unhorizoned widens to measureless sight, My body is God’s happy living tool, My spirit a vast sun of deathless light. (Collected poems ~ Transformation )#SriAurobindo, #NFDB
869:Not on the tramp of the multitudes, not on the cry of the legions
Founds the strong man his strength but the god that he carries within him. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
870:One critic wrote . . . that my poems sounded as though they had been translated from the Hungarian. I don't know why, but somehow that made me feel quite lighthearted. ~ Stanley Kunitz, #NFDB
871:There's not too much difference between writing a picture book and writing a collection of a hundred poems or so, except that the bigger books take a lot longer to do. ~ Jack Prelutsky, #NFDB
872:Whitman's poems present no trace of rhyme, save in a couple or so of chance instances. Parts of them, indeed, may be regarded as a warp of prose amid the weft of poetry, ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
873:Gods change not their strength, but are of old
And as of old, and man, though less than these,
May yet proceed to greater, self-evolved. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Urvasie,#NFDB
874:He shrugged. “Whatever does it mean? We write poems about it all day and sing songs about it all night but if there is such a thing in real life I’m damned if I know. ~ Philippa Gregory, #NFDB
875:I see the progress typical in some of my poems as starting with something simple and moving into something more demanding. This is certainly the pattern of weird poetry. ~ Billy Collins, #NFDB
876:It is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls) that my poems are competing. ~ e e cummings, #NFDB
877:Knowing all vain, yet we strive; for our nature seizing us always
Drives like the flock that is herded and urged towards shambles or pasture. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
878:Life that pursuing her boundless march to a goal which we know not,
Ever her own law obeys, not our hopes, who are slaves of her heart-beats. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
879:What we need are poems that interrogate the world of pronouns, open up possibilities of language and life; forms of politics that support and encourage self-affirmation. ~ Judith Butler, #NFDB
880:Easy is the love that lasts
Only with favours in the shopman heart!
Who, smitten, takes and gives the kiss, he loves. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Meditations of Mandavya,#NFDB
881:For Aliki Barnstone, poetry seems a natural medium. The vision and cadences of these poems suggest a sensibility for which poetry is as inevitable as breathing or eating. ~ Robert Pinsky, #NFDB
882:I don't know if there are topics that I unconsciously avoid, but as soon as they pop up in my writing, I try to take on those topics, whether or not I publish the poems. ~ Denise Duhamel, #NFDB
883:I treat myself as one of the sources. And, again, I think that’s accurate. One of the poets I read most frequently is myself. I really do. I read my own poems obsessively. ~ Dan Chiasson, #NFDB
884:The human eye is a wonderful device,” I quoted from Poems and Other Prevarications absently. “With a little effort, it can fail to see even the most glaring injustice. ~ Richard K Morgan, #NFDB
885:The night before, I'd gone overboard with my Lila poems, and maybe it's true that I was hoping that in them he'd see the genius of me, the beauty of my words in his hands. ~ Beth Kephart, #NFDB
886:This grey hour was born
For the ascetic in his silent cave
And for the dying man whose heart released
Loosens its vibrant strings. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Chitrangada,#NFDB
887:But the point is this: stories grow out of other stories, poems out of other poems. And they don’t have to stick to genre. Poems can learn from plays, songs from novels. ~ Thomas C Foster, #NFDB
888:I felt very bad in Washington. . . I didn't like my job, and I didn't know what was going to happen to me, and I was cold and half-hungry, so I wrote a great many poems. ~ Langston Hughes, #NFDB
889:I never try to force poems into a collection simply because they were written/published within a certain period of time. They will eventually find their perfect home. ~ Rigoberto Gonzalez, #NFDB
890:It is not hope but despair that gives us the measure of our ambitions. We may yield secretly to beautiful poems of hope but grief looms start and stripped of all veils. ~ Honore de Balzac, #NFDB
891:Man, by experience of passion purged,
His myriad faculty perfecting, widens
His nature as it rises till it grows
With God conterminous. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Urvasie,#NFDB
892:Did you ever read one of her Poems backward, because the plunge from the front overturned you? I sometimes (often have, many times) have - A something overtakes the Mind. ~ Emily Dickinson, #NFDB
893:Always man’s Fate hangs poised on the flitting breath of a moment;
Called by some word, by some gesture it leaps, then ‘tis graven, ‘tis granite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
894:A poetess who had died young of cancer had said in one of her poems that for her, on sleepless nights, 'the night offers toads and black dogs and corpses of the drowned. ~ Yasunari Kawabata, #NFDB
895:Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much? Have you practis’d so long to learn to read? Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
896:I enjoyed learning the poems, but I didn't understand of what use they might possibly be. ‘They'll keep you company on the day you have no books to read,' my teacher said. ~ Alberto Manguel, #NFDB
897:One of the things I took from the show was emotional possibility. I never thought I would type that I learned how to emote in poems from watching Star Trek but there it is. ~ Adrian Matejka, #NFDB
898:People spend their whole lives looking for love. Poems and songs and entire novels are written about it. But how can you trust something that can end as suddenly as it begins? ~ Nicola Yoon, #NFDB
899:[poems are] crystals deposited after the effervescent contact of the spirit with reality.
(cristaux deposes apres l'effervescent contact de l'esprit avec la realite) ~ Pierre Reverdy,#NFDB
900:There is no comment on pictures but pictures, on music but music, on poems but poetry. If you do, you do. If you don't, you don't. And that's all there is to that. ~ William Carlos Williams, #NFDB
901:We, too, by the Eternal Might are led
To whatsoever goal He wills.
Our helm He grasps, our generous sail outspread
His strong breath fills. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, To R.,#NFDB
902:What I like about prose poems is that they seem to make people uncomfortable - people want to define them, justify them, attack them. Prose poems are natural fence-sitters. ~ Matthea Harvey, #NFDB
903:When the end comes, dark and hungry I'll be alone, love When the end comes, black and starving I'll say good-bye, love.-from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter ~ Maggie Stiefvater, #NFDB
904:And I never wanted to tell anyone but the poems because I was the one with the pink garter belt and the thigh-high stockings. And I was the one with the little black dress. ~ Trista Mateer, #NFDB
905:Drowned in the Absolute, found in the Godhead,
Swan of the supreme and spaceless ether wandering winged through the universe,
Spirit immortal. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ascent,#NFDB
906:In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, #NFDB
907:I was intoxicated by the romantic poetry of our great writers. I arranged the world according to my private use, looking at it through the poems I had devoured. ~ Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont, #NFDB
908:The constructive intellect [genius] produces thoughts, sentences, poems, plans, designs, systems. It is the generation of the mind, the marriage of thought with nature. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
909:The only difference between me and others is that they think they can change something with cute little poems, nice cards or embracing trees and being nice to little lapdogs. ~ Henry Rollins, #NFDB
910:Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting, Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them, And yet they expose me more than all my other poems ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
911:He who would bring the heavens here
Must descend himself into clay
And the burden of earthly nature bear
And tread the dolorous way. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A God’s Labour,#NFDB
912:Sin exalted
Seizes secure on the thrones of the world for her glorious portion,
Down to the bottomless pit the good man is thrust in his virtue. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
913:Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds. ~ Dorianne Laux, #NFDB
914:And all man’s ghastly company of fears
Are born of folly that believes this span
Of brittle life can limit immortal man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, To Weep because a Glorious Sun,#NFDB
915:As it was, it was like being set down in the best of poems, carried into a cold landscape, blindfolded, turned around, unblindfolded, forced, then, to invent new ways of seeing. ~ Colum McCann, #NFDB
916:I always wrote little things when I was younger. My first opus was a book of poems put down in a spiral notebook at five or six, handsomely accompanied by crayon illustrations. ~ Nicole Krauss, #NFDB
917:In poems or in speeches I say the word or two that has got to be said, adhere to the body, step with the countless common footsteps, and remind every man and woman of something. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
918:I simply don't want the poems mixed up with my life or opinions or picture or any other regrettable concomitants. I look like a bear and live in a cave; but you should worry. ~ Randall Jarrell, #NFDB
919:I wrote poems and an essay about that weird language. We still remember it to a certain extent, and it still comes up when we're all together. It's so fundamental to how I think. ~ Paul Beatty, #NFDB
920:Later, we'll look up what was recorded in our history about yours in faraway lands.
Then we'll ask ourselves, "Was Andalusia here or there? On earth, or only in poems? ~ Mahmoud Darwish,#NFDB
921:May Moorland weavers boast Pindaric skill, And tailors' lays be longer than their bill! While punctual beaux reward the grateful notes, And pay for poems--when they pay for coats. ~ Lord Byron, #NFDB
922:So for whatever reason those short lines just felt right to me, in my physical self. They were right for the movement of the poems. Some poems in the book have longer lines. ~ Matthew Zapruder, #NFDB
923:The Truth of truths men fear and deny,
The Light of lights they refuse;
To ignorant gods they lift their cry
Or a demon altar choose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A God’s Labour,#NFDB
924:A tree beside the sandy river-beach
Holds up its topmost boughs
Like fingers towards the skies they cannot reach,
Earth-bound, heaven-amorous. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A Tree,#NFDB
925:I am interested in the confines of the page and busting through/off the page as well. A writer must let go of the line when writing prose poems, which brings its own pleasures. ~ Denise Duhamel, #NFDB
926:It was interesting, not stupid or silly or sappy or overly intellectual—not any of those things that I thought poetry was. Some poems were easier than others. Some were inscrutable. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
927:My soul unhorizoned widens to measureless sight,
My body is God’s happy living tool,
My spirit a vast sun of deathless light. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Transformation,#NFDB
928:Our poems formulate the implications of ourselves, what we feel within and dare make real (or bring action into accordance with), our fears, our hopes, our most cherished terrors. ~ Audre Lorde, #NFDB
929:Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. ~ Theodor W Adorno, #NFDB
930:Is not the world his disguise? when that cloak is tossed back from his shoulders,
Beauty looks out like a sun on the hearts of the ravished beholders. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#NFDB
931:It is very difficult to pass from pleasure to work. Accordingly more poems have been swallowed up by sorrow than ever happiness caused to blaze forth in unparalleled radiance. ~ Honore de Balzac, #NFDB
932:Sometimes I Do In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest, where no one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that light becomes this art. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
933:Don'T Look For My Life In These Poems
Poems have order, sanity
aesthetic distance from debris.
All I've learnt from pain
I always knew,
but could not do.
~ Eunice de Souza,#NFDB
934:His seven so-called Phallic Poems are among the best non-love verses since the brave days of Marvell and the Metaphysicals; they openly announce that fucking is its own justification. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
935:I don't think all poems need to be written in conversational language - those are often great poems but there should also be poems of incoherent bewilderment and muddled mystery. ~ Matthea Harvey, #NFDB
936:If you were going to make sculptures of them, the swivel poems would be disparate objects all attached with hinges and the prose poems would be small sheep wrapped in extra wool. ~ Matthea Harvey, #NFDB
937:I know
you and I
are not about poems or
other sentimental bullshit
but I have to tell you
even the way
you drink your coffee
knocks me the fuck out. ~ Clementine von Radics,#NFDB
938:My obsessions tend to cluster, so I often have families of poems in which only a couple of them make it to the book. It can be satisfying to banish poems to my "crappy poems" file. ~ Anna Journey, #NFDB
939:The best poems take long journeys. I like poetry best that journeys--while remaining in the human scale--to the other world, which may be a place as easily overlooked as a bee's wing ~ Robert Bly, #NFDB
940:Vain, they have said, is the anguish of man and his labour diurnal,
Vainly his caravans cross through the desert of Time to the Eternal. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Vain, they have Said,#NFDB
941:In some faint dawn,
In some dim eve,
Like a gesture of Light,
Like a dream of delight
Thou com’st nearer and nearer to me. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, In Some Faint Dawn,#NFDB
942:I used to hide my real emotions in gobbledegook, like in In His Own Write. When I wrote teenage poems, I wrote in gobbledegook because I was always hiding my real emotions from Mimi. ~ John Lennon, #NFDB
943:Maybe because I can't even put together an IKEA desk, I've never been tempted to think of my own poems as built objects - but I do sometimes imagine them as mathematical constructs. ~ James Arthur, #NFDB
944:Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no can't in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestion, the raw material of possible poems and histories. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
945:Thick and persistent the night confronts all his luminous longings;
Dire death’s sickle mows like a harvest his hosts and his throngings. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Vain, they have Said,#NFDB
946:Wilt thou not perfect this rather that sprang too from Wisdom and Power?
Taking the earthly rose canst thou image not Heaven in a flower? ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Descent of Ahana,#NFDB
947:I had been dreaming a complicated dream about helping poets revise their poems, so that each ending would open like a flower. I was not arguing, but engaged in a rousing discussion. ~ Diane Wakoski, #NFDB
948:I'm going to spend my life writing poems, turning them into music that will affect people and touch their hearts. I'm going to write the songs that people can't write for themselves. ~ Stevie Nicks, #NFDB
949:Thus, the earlier part of her life had taught her that, while you can tell stories or write poems about life, you cannot make life poetic, live it as though it were a work of art... ~ Hannah Arendt, #NFDB
950:Well-wrought poems and works of imaginative literature can do for us what stone-cold prose can never do. They can help us grasp the full dimension of ways of life other than our own. ~ James W Sire, #NFDB
951:I'm not religious. I love what Clive James said the other day. James is a brilliant writer, but he keeps on writing poems on stuff. And he said, "God doesn't have a leg to stand on." ~ Tom Courtenay, #NFDB
952:No matter how many romantic poems you recite, no matter how many glorious tales of love you read, how can you really understand the condition if you've never found yourself in it? ~ Sherry D Ficklin, #NFDB
953:Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. ~ Mary Oliver, #NFDB
954:What I'm fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project. ~ Gwendolyn Brooks, #NFDB
955:I don't see much difference between prose poems and flash fiction (I've often taught the latter as the former), but then I also don't see that much difference between art and poetry. ~ Matthea Harvey, #NFDB
956:Life is equal parts strange and beautiful and horrible, and we're tossed into it without a map or an instruction guide. Poems and stories have a way of helping us make sense of things. ~ Chuck Wendig, #NFDB
957:Life is equal parts strange and beautiful and horrible, and we’re tossed into it without a map or an instruction guide. Poems and stories have a way of helping us make sense of things. ~ Chuck Wendig, #NFDB
958:My mind is awake in stirless trance,
Hushed my heart, a burden of delight;
Dispelled is the senses’ flicker-dance,
Mute the body aureate with light. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Trance,#NFDB
959:Some dreams, some poems, some musical phrases, some pictures, wake feelings such as one never had before, new in colour and form—spiritual sensations, as it were, hitherto unproved ~ George MacDonald, #NFDB
960:When I started reciting my own poems in public, I worried that it would seem too theatrical, but now I find recitation very natural, because it allows me to address audiences directly. ~ James Arthur, #NFDB
961:Around me was a formless solitude:
All had become one strange Unnameable,
An unborn sole Reality world-nude,
Topless and fathomless, for ever still. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Adwaita,#NFDB
962:Confident of His grace, expect His will;
Let Him lead; though hidden be the bourne,
See Him in all that happens; that fulfil
For which thou wert born. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, To R.,#NFDB
963:fools! whose pride
Absurd the gods permit a little space
To please their souls with laughter, then replace
In the loud limbo of futilities. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Lines on Ireland,#NFDB
964:like short poems with weird rhyme schemes, because that’s what life is like.” “That’s what life is like?” I was trying to get his meaning. “Yeah. It rhymes, but not in the way you expect. ~ John Green, #NFDB
965:One of Walt Whitman's best-known poems is this one: When I heard the learn'd astronomer,.... The trouble is, Whitman is talking through his hat, but the poor soul didn't know any better ~ Isaac Asimov, #NFDB
966:Poets do not compose their poems with knowledge, but by some inborn talent and by inspiration, like seers and prophets who also say many fine things without any understanding of what they say. ~ Plato, #NFDB
967:Rejoice and fear not for the waves that swell,
The storms that thunder, winds that sweep;
Always our Captain holds the rudder well,
He does not sleep. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, To R.,#NFDB
968:Time is a strong convention; future and present
Were living in the past;
They are one image that our wills complaisant
Into three schemes have cast. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Rebirth,#NFDB
969:Don't go on thinking poetry's just for sissies. There's mushy love poems, for sure, but there's also funny ones, lots about nature, war even. Whole point of it-they make ya feel something ~ Delia Owens, #NFDB
970:I take pride in never being rude to anyone on this earth, which contains a great number of unbearable villains who set upon you to recount their sufferings and even recite their poems. ~ Heinrich Heine, #NFDB
971:Lo, all these peoples and who was it fashioned them? Who is unwilling
Still to have done with it? laughs beyond pain and saves in the killing? ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Descent of Ahana,#NFDB
972:Our souls and heaven are of an equal stature
And have a dateless birth;
The unending seed, the infinite mould of Nature,
They were not made on earth, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Rebirth,#NFDB
973:Summer is dead and rich repose
And springtide and the rose,
And woods and all sweet things make moan;
The weeping earth is turned to stone. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Songs to Myrtilla,#NFDB
974:Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction. ~ Dylan Thomas, #NFDB
975:I'm sorry," Billy says, "but I felt it was too organized. I like ellipses and teeny jottings and spontaneous poems and particularly all those devices like long lists of melancholy things. ~ Edmund White, #NFDB
976:Like many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later in the poems. ~ Margaret Atwood, #NFDB
977:Man worships the ungrasped. His vagrant thought
Still busy with the illimitable void
Lives all the time by little things upbuoyed
Which he contemns ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Euphrosyne,#NFDB
978:Noble be in peace, invincible, brave in the battle,
Stern and calm to thy foe, to the suppliant merciful. Mortal
Favour and wrath as thou walkst heed never ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
979:I
Like
The Way
That when you
Tilt
Poems
On their side
They
Look like
Miniature
Cities
From
A long way
Away.
Skyscrapers
Made out
Of
Words. ~ Matt Haig,#NFDB
980:I have laboured and suffered in Matter’s night
To bring the fire to man;
But the hate of hell and human spite
Are my meed since the world began. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A God’s Labour,#NFDB
981:I work hard to make the poems as good as they can be, and if they're not good enough I scrap them. I find it difficult after a gap of a few years to tinker - I'm more likely to destroy. ~ Michael Longley, #NFDB
982:Somewhere back a whiskey or so ago I wrote that thinking was a real thing in the world, just like anything else. I mean that very literally, materially. And it's true about poems, too. ~ Matthew Zapruder, #NFDB
983:Stars are important," I say, laughing.
"Sure, but why not more poems about the sun? The sun is also a star, and it's our most important one. That alone should be worth a poem or two. ~ Nicola Yoon,#NFDB
984:Still, still we can hear them
Now, if we listen long in our souls, the bygone voices.
Earth in her fibres remembers, the breezes are stored with our echoes. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
985:We recognize that we cannot survive on meditation, poems and sunsets. We are restless. We have an irresistible urge to dip our hands into the stuff of the earth and do something with it. ~ Samuel Florman, #NFDB
986:You needn't tell a bird it's a bird. Or remind a fish of its purpose. It's only us who lose our way. We have names because we must. - from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter ~ Maggie Stiefvater, #NFDB
987:They're not. That's partly what's so awful. I mean they're not real poets. They're just people that write poems that get published and anthologized all over the place but they're not poets. ~ J D Salinger, #NFDB
988:I like when a poem ends on its "receipts," meaning it gives me something tactile or tangible to dwell on as I exit the reading experience. So I strive to end my own poems that way as well. ~ Allison Joseph, #NFDB
989:I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay. ~ Dylan Thomas, #NFDB
990:On the white summit of eternity
A single Soul of bare infinities,
Guarded he keeps by a fire-screen of peace
His mystic loneliness of nude ecstasy. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Shiva,#NFDB
991:There are some books in which every poem is a facet of the same thing. So the book is like a piece of music. And there are books of poems that I love so much that I carry them around with me. ~ Joan Larkin, #NFDB
992:Therefore is the woman’s part
Nearest divine, who to one motion keeps
And like the fixed immortal planets’ round
Is constant to herself in him she loves. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Uloupie,#NFDB
993:With time some poems just fall by the wayside. Other poems get better over time with revision, revision, revision. My ladybug poem took 10 minutes to write but was 10 years in the making. ~ Douglas Florian, #NFDB
994:You know, Emily Dickinson is here too. All she does is write poems about life all the time. The irony! She keeps asking me to read them. I refuse, of course. The days are long enough as it is. ~ John Boyne, #NFDB
995:Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays; By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
996:I like to hope that Rumi's poems, even in translation, carry the essence of the transforming friendship of Rumi and Shams, that the sun can reappear, whole and radiant in any one of us at any moment. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
997:Maybe lurking in my unconscious was the idea that when someone's collected poems are published it means that the poet is dead. I found myself looking at my work as if I were at my own funeral. ~ Ron Padgett, #NFDB
998:Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily l ~ Audre Lorde, #NFDB
999:Sometimes people come up and they get infatuated with some little brief imagistic poem or something, and they say, "Oh, I really like your Zen poems." And I say, "Which ones are not Zen poems?" ~ Sam Hamill, #NFDB
1000:Writing is performative - and while, yes, the words in essence will be there "forever," poems are often about ecstatic moments rather than trying to pin down a particular truth of an event. ~ Denise Duhamel, #NFDB
1001:As for all your latest Mayan discoveries and poems, I want to hear every word of it if you want to transmit it, or tell it when we meet, but don’t expect me to get excited by anything anymore. ~ Jack Kerouac, #NFDB
1002:Form in its heart of silence recondite
Hides the significance of His mystery,
Form is the wonder-house of eternity,
A cavern of the deathless Eremite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Form,#NFDB
1003:In a funny way, poems are suited to modern life. They're short, they're intense. Nobody has time to read a 700-page book. People read magazines, and a poem takes less time than an article. ~ Caroline Kennedy, #NFDB
1004:It is commonly asserted and accepted that Paradise Lost is among the two or three greatest English poems; it may justly be taken as the type of supreme poetic achievement in our literature. ~ John Drinkwater, #NFDB
1005:I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off. I read those letters of rejection years later and I agreed with those editors. ~ Carl Sandburg, #NFDB
1006:Love poems, discovered in Egyptian tombs, strongly hint that it was the Egyptian women who did the courting, oftimes wooing the male by plying him with intoxicants to weaken his protestations. ~ Merlin Stone, #NFDB
1007:The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry - actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself. ~ Paul Auster, #NFDB
1008:When I go to the shore, I take along the poems of Pablo Neruda. I suppose it's because the poems are simultaneously lush and ripe and kind of lazy, yet throbbing with life - like summer itself. ~ Tom Robbins, #NFDB
1009:You've read some of the poems in this new unpublished book [Walker's Alphabet], e.g., the poem "C." I have a number of poems whose titles are letters of the alphabet: A, B, C, D, E, F. ~ Shirley Geok lin Lim, #NFDB
1010:Crows appear in many of my new unpublished poems. In these walks, they take on a symbolic life apart from their irritating, undeniable, interruptive presence. I figure them differently. ~ Shirley Geok lin Lim, #NFDB
1011:I'm filled with admiration, delight, and gratitude at discovering James Lasdun's poems in A Jump Start. He has wit, speed, intelligence, a keen eye, precision, and imagination of a high order. ~ Anthony Hecht, #NFDB
1012:Yama, the strong pure Hades sad and subtle,
Dharma, who keeps the laws of old untouched,
Critanta, who ends all things and at last
Himself shall end. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Love and Death,#NFDB
1013:Irish history having been forbidden in schools, has been, to a great extent, learned from Raftery's poems by the people of Mayo, where he was born, and of Galway, where he spent his later years. ~ Lady Gregory, #NFDB
1014:Often I find that poems predict what I'm going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have. ~ Erica Jong, #NFDB
1015:Temple-ground
Man, shun the impulses dire that spring armed from thy nature’s abysms!
Dread the dusk rose of the gods, flee the honey that tempts from its petals! ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
1016:There is a beautiful thing inside you
that is thousands of years old.
Too old to be captured in poems.
Too old to be loved by everyone
But loved so very deeply
by a chosen few. ~ Nikita Gill,#NFDB
1017:We are all burnt by ultraviolet rays. We all contain water in about the same ratio as Earth does, and salt water in the same ratio that the oceans do. We are poems about the hyperobject Earth. ~ Timothy Morton, #NFDB
1018:If there is anything I love most, in the poems I love, it is the audible braiding of that bravery, that essential empty-handedness, and that willingness to be taken by surprise, all in one voice. ~ Jorie Graham, #NFDB
1019:I had no idea, when I was writing early on, that my poems would be published or read by anyone, never mind people I knew or would meet. I just wrote urgently - naïvely, I suppose, looking back. ~ Denise Duhamel, #NFDB
1020:In writing these poems about relatives, I found it almost impossible to write about the mother. I was stuck. My feelings about my mother, you see, must be too complicated to easily flow into words. ~ Ted Hughes, #NFDB
1021:I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I have to like that trend or go along with it. ~ Pat Conroy, #NFDB
1022:Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes indeed. ~ Mary Oliver, #NFDB
1023:Some of my poems indicate that I am writing while living alone after a split with a woman, and I've had many splits with women. I need solitude more often when I'm not writing than when I am. ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
1024:We hold the moon in our bellies and fire in our hearts. We bleed We give milk. We are the mothers of first words. These words grow. They are our children. They are our stores and poems. ~ Terry Tempest Williams, #NFDB
1025:A king of greatness and a slave of love,
Host of the stars and guest in Nature’s inn,
A high spectator spirit throned above,
A pawn of passion in the game divine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Lila,#NFDB
1026:Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives. ~ Audre Lorde, #NFDB
1027:The interesting thing is that you don't often meet a poet who doesn't have a sense of humour, and some of them do keep it out of their poems because they're afraid of being seen as light versifiers. ~ Wendy Cope, #NFDB
1028:Who, in the midst of passion, is vigilant against illness? Who listens to the reports of recently decimated populations in Spain, India, Bora Bora, when new lips, tongues and poems fill the world? ~ Lauren Groff, #NFDB
1029:Even in the worm is a god and it writhes for a form and an outlet.
Workings immortal obscurely struggling, hints of a godhead
Labour to form in this clay a divinity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
1030:I don't aspire, but I would be very happy if one of my poems suddenly offered someone a shady rest stop, a breather in our interminable march under the murderous, scorching heat of the superfluous. ~ Kiki Dimoula, #NFDB
1031:In other words the pictures are in a kind of relationship with each other which is touching only at points rather than pictures being illustrations of poems or poems extrapolations of the pictures. ~ Peter Porter, #NFDB
1032:I started writing poetry when I was six. I had this teacher who didn't believe the poems I'd bring in were mine because they were dark and sad. But I wrote about what I experienced in my childhood. ~ Mariah Carey, #NFDB
1033:So writing about love or having it infuse the poems that I'm writing has never been something I've set myself to do, except when I write a poem for my wife, for an occasion, such as our anniversary. ~ Ron Padgett, #NFDB
1034:Writers don't write from experience, although many are hesitant to admit that they don't. ...If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy. ~ Nikki Giovanni, #NFDB
1035:You needn't tell a bird it's a bird
Or remind a fish of its purpose
It's only us who lose our way
We have names because we must.
– from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter ~ Maggie Stiefvater,#NFDB
1036:All is not finished in the unseen decree;
A Mind beyond our mind demands our ken,
A life of unimagined harmony
Awaits, concealed, the grasp of unborn men. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Evolution - II,#NFDB
1037:Clouds are poems, and the most moving poems linger on the blackboard so long, written in cursive so lovely, they also exist inside our fingertips. We never really erase them at the end of the lesson. ~ Ann Beattie, #NFDB
1038:He is in me, round me, facing everywhere.
Self-walled in ego to exclude His right,
I stand upon its boundaries and stare
Into the frontiers of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Omnipresence,#NFDB
1039:I like to go back and read poems that I wrote fifty years ago, twenty years ago, and sometimes they surprise me - I didn't know I knew that then. Or maybe I didn't know it then, and I know more now. ~ Maya Angelou, #NFDB
1040:Let the little troubled life-god within
Cast his veils from the still soul,
His tiger-stripes of virtue and sin,
His clamour and glamour and thole and dole ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Musa Spiritus,#NFDB
1041:Human bodies are words, myriads of words, (In the best poems re-appears the body, man's or woman's, well-shaped, natural, gay, Every part able, active, receptive, without shame or the need of shame.) ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
1042:I wanted many of the poems to have long legs. At first I was calling them clothespin poems, before I knew what I was doing. The lines seem pulled on either end, tight and taut against the wind. ~ Lucie Brock Broido, #NFDB
1043:Poems reveal secrets when they are analyzed. The poet's pleasure in finding ingenious ways to enclose her secrets should be matched by the reader's pleasure in unlocking and revealing these secrets. ~ Diane Wakoski, #NFDB
1044:Wise are the gods in their silence,
Wise when they speak; but their speech is other than ours and their wisdom
Hard for a mortal mind to hold and not madden or wander. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
1045:Blue eyes. No, not just blue, blue like glacial waters, like romantic poems, like heavens and moonstones. Cornflower blue. And-
Blue like romantic poems? What the everliving fuck? (Austin) ~ Dani Alexander,#NFDB
1046:I like connecting the abstract to the concrete. There's a tension in that. I believe the reader or listener should be able to enter the poem as a participant. So I try to get past resolving poems. ~ Yusef Komunyakaa, #NFDB
1047:I shall not die.
Although this body, when the spirit tires
Of its cramped residence, shall feed the fires,
My house consumes, not I. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Triumph-Song of Trishuncou,#NFDB
1048:Why do comparisons of words and tone poems (poetry and music) never take into consideration that the word is a mere signifier, but that the sound, aside from being a signifier, is also an object? ~ Franz Grillparzer, #NFDB
1049:I always hesitate to call myself a children's poet, and I always hesitate to call what I write for children poetry. Though a few of the verses that I've written, yes, I think they are truly poems. ~ Mary Ann Hoberman, #NFDB
1050:I believe in creative failing - to contine to write poems that fail and fail and fail until a day comes when you've got a thousand poems behind you and you're relaxed and you finally write a good poem. ~ Ray Bradbury, #NFDB
1051:I think of my poems as personal and public at the same time. You could say they serve as psychological overlays. One fits on top of the other, and hopefully there's an ongoing evolution of clarity. ~ Yusef Komunyakaa, #NFDB
1052:The years rolled their brutal course down the hill of time. Still poor, my clothes still smelling of the horse barn, still writing those doubtful poems where too much emotion clashed with too many words. ~ Paul Engle, #NFDB
1053:We must begin to understand the nature of intertextuality . . . the manner by which texts poems and novels respond to other texts. After all, all cats may be black at night, but not to other cats. ~ Henry Louis Gates, #NFDB
1054:Once outside the magic circle the writers became their lonely selves, pondering on poems, observing their fellow men ruthlessly, putting people they knew into novels; no wonder they were without friends. ~ Barbara Pym, #NFDB
1055:The pure playfulness of certain wholly whimsical portions of (Charles) Cros’s work should not obscure the fact that at the center of some of his most beautiful poems a revolver is leveled straight at us. ~ Andr Breton, #NFDB
1056:Whereas there are lots of good novels out there; there are a few good movies out there. People have been writing great poems for years, but there aren't a lot of good comics. I like trying to write them. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
1057:Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems. ~ W H Auden,#NFDB
1058:Fate severe like a mother
Teaches our wills by disaster and strikes down the props that would weaken,
Fate and the Thought on high that is wiser than yearnings of mortals. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
1059:If politicians can't do it, I want to do it. We have to do it. Artists, put it in paintings. Poets, put it in poems, novels. That's what we have to do. And I think it's so important to save the world. ~ Michael Jackson, #NFDB
1060:I have broken the limits of embodied mind
And am no more the figure of a soul.
The burning galaxies are in me outlined;
The universe is my stupendous whole. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Cosmic Spirit,#NFDB
1061:I have escaped and the small self is dead;
I am immortal, alone, ineffable;
I have gone out from the universe I made,
And have grown nameless and immeasurable. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Liberation - I,#NFDB
1062:I have given my mind to be dug Thy channel mind,
I have offered up my will to be Thy will:
Let nothing of myself be left behind
In our union mystic and unutterable. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Surrender,#NFDB
1063:I write you poems because God spoke the universe into existence, so don’t ever let me hear you say that words are just words. that words don’t leave a mark, make a change, create where once was nothing. ~ Upile Chisala, #NFDB
1064:lift the veil that obscures the heart and there you will find what you are looking for [2248.jpg] -- from Beloved May I Enter: Kabir dohas and other poems, Translated by Sushil Rao
~ Kabir, lift the veil
,#NFDB
1065:My job is writing poems, reading them out loud, getting them printed, studying, learning how to become the kind of man who has something of worth to say. It's a great job.
Naturally I'm starving to death ~ Lew Welch,#NFDB
1066:The pure playfulness of certain wholly whimsical portions of (Charles) Cros’s work should not obscure the fact that at the center of some of his most beautiful poems a revolver is leveled straight at us. ~ Andre Breton, #NFDB
1067:'A Literary Method'
His poems Riley says that he indites
Upon an empty stomach. Heavenly Powers,
Feed him throat-full: for what the beggar writes
Upon his empty stomach empties ours!
~ Ambrose Bierce,#NFDB
1068:Blumenthal goes straight to the heart in these poems. Gorgeously wrought, surprising, true, wise, elegiac, they leave me with a sense of having listened to Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus. Who could ask for more? ~ Lynn Freed, #NFDB
1069:EpitaphMoulded of twilight and the vesper starMidnight in her with noon made quiet war; –Moulded twixt life and death, Love came between;Then the night fell; twilight faded, the star had been. ~ Sri AurobindoShort Poems, #NFDB
1070:I came from a very avant-garde documentary kind of film making world. I like cinema verité, documentaries. I liked non-story, non-character tone poems. And that's the film making that I was interested in. ~ George Lucas, #NFDB
1071:In the republic of poetry, poets rent a helicopter to bombard the national palace with poems on bookmarks, and everyone in the courtyard rushes to grab a poem fluttering from the sky, blinded by weeping. ~ Mart n Espada, #NFDB
1072:I think of myself as a writer who photographs. Images, for me, can be considered poems, short stories or essays. And I've always thought the best place for my photographs was inside books of my own creation. ~ Sam Abell, #NFDB
1073:I write poems for children to help them celebrate the joy and wonder of their world and to look at their lives from the inside out. I write humorous poems to tickle the funny bone of their imaginations. ~ Charles Ghigna, #NFDB
1074:People love their fathers. Their sisters. People love dogs or songs or poems. If I've got to be the champion of something, make it something that doesn't change what it means every time someone says it. ~ Daniel Abraham, #NFDB
1075:Pessimism is too easy, even delicious, the badge and plume of intellectuals everywhere. It absolves the thinking classes of solutions. We excite ourselves with dark thoughts in plays, poems, novels, movies. ~ Ian McEwan, #NFDB
1076:We thought: we're poor, we have nothing, but when we started losing one after the other so each day became remembrance day, we started composing poems about God's great generosity and our former riches. ~ Anna Akhmatova, #NFDB
1077:Years ago I used to set my alarm for 4 am, so that I could wake up in the middle of a dream and move directly into writing. I guess my favorite poems contain a mixture of intuitive and analytical thought. ~ James Arthur, #NFDB
1078:And it didn’t matter how many songs or poems had already been written about them, because whenever he thought about the girl, the stars shone brighter. As if she were the one keeping them illuminated. ~ Stephanie Perkins, #NFDB
1079:Fools or hypocrites! Meanest falsehood is this among mortals,
Veils of purity weaving, names misplacing ideal
When our desires we disguise and paint the lusts of our nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
1080:He is not anything, yet all is He;
He is not all but far exceeds that scope.
Both Time and Timelessness sink in that sea:
Time is a wave and Space a wandering drop. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Parabrahman,#NFDB
1081:I suppose it's useful in designating writing that tends to come from personal experience, work that delineates an "I," but it's a loose lasso, one which may rope certain poems by one poet and not others. ~ Matthea Harvey, #NFDB
1082:The critics could never mortify me out of heart - because I love poetry for its own sake, - and, tho' with no stoicism and some ambition, care more for my poems than for my poetic reputation. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning, #NFDB
1083:There are Brahmins to-day who have committed to memory, and who can repeat at will, the entire collection of religious poems known as the Mahabarata, consisting of over 300,000 slokas or verses. ~ William Walker Atkinson, #NFDB
1084:They're not," Franny said. "That's partly what's so awful. I mean they're not real poets. They're just people that write poems that get published and anthologized all over the place, but they're not poets. ~ J D Salinger, #NFDB
1085:Wast thou not made in the shape of a woman? Sweetness and beauty
Move like a song of the gods in thy limbs and to love is thy duty
Graved in thy heart as on tablets of fate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#NFDB
1086:And high Delight, a spirit infinite,
That is the fountain of this glorious world,
Delight that labours in its opposite,
Faints in the rose and on the rack is curled. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Parabrahman,#NFDB
1087:He felt himself in suspension between the two worlds, the warm, neat civilization behind his back, the cool, dark mystery outside. We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words. ~ John Fowles, #NFDB
1088:(I also occasionally write poems, after first explaining carefully to the audience and myself that I am not a poet and this is not actually a poem and no poetry was harmed in the making of this blog post.) ~ T Kingfisher, #NFDB
1089:If she only knew that all of his poems had been written to her and no one else, every single one, even the one to Night, even the one to the Spirit of the Swamp. But that was something she should never know. ~ Knut Hamsun, #NFDB
1090:In recent poems, I have abandoned the theme of not being able to write for an even more obsessive subject, the nature of language, particularly English, in the formation of my imagination and being. ~ Shirley Geok lin Lim, #NFDB
1091:Sometimes you completely forget your own works, your own poems, and your own words, but others remember them line by line, word for word! That is the greatest present you can ever have for your works! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
1092:I am completing a book I began back in 2002 called 'Poems in the Manner of.' 'The Matador of Metaphor' is from this manuscript. It is an homage to Wallace Stevens that appropriates certain of his techniques. ~ David Lehman, #NFDB
1093:It's a beautiful universe... wondrous and the more exciting because no one has written plays and poems and built sculptures to indicate the structure of desire I negotiate every day as I move about in it. ~ Samuel R Delany, #NFDB
1094:Poems and songs penned as an unstoppable outpouring of the heart take on a life of their own. They transcend the limits of nationality and time as they pass from person to person, from one heart to another. ~ Daisaku Ikeda, #NFDB
1095:There are two beings in my single self.
A Godhead watches Nature from behind
At play in front with a brilliant surface elf,
A time-born creature with a human mind. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Dual Being,#NFDB
1096:The small things of life were often so much bigger than the great things . . . the trivial pleasure like cooking, one's home, little poems especially sad ones, solitary walks, funny things seen and overheard. ~ Barbara Pym, #NFDB
1097:God would seem to indicate to us and not allow us to doubt that these beautiful poems are not human, or the work of man, but divine and the work of God; and that the poets are only the interpreters of the Gods... ~ Socrates, #NFDB
1098:the writer liked machines and people who work with machines, he respected what they do, and he wrote poems showing that the lives of engineers and miners and pilots have their own excitement and romance. ~ Charles Sheffield, #NFDB
1099:TO FOREIGN LANDS. I heard that you ask’d for something to prove this puzzle the New World, And to define America, her athletic Democracy, Therefore I send you my poems that you behold in them what you wanted. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
1100:Without this excitement they cannot have their Lyric Verse, and so they get it by any convenient means -- and with absolute sincerity -- but the Poems are not for the young lady, the young lady is for the Poems. ~ A S Byatt, #NFDB
1101:I soon realized that poets do not compose their poems with knowledge, but by some inborn talent and by inspiration, like seers and prophets who also say many fine things without any understanding of what they say. ~ Socrates, #NFDB
1102:No sir, I’ll live to write dozens more poems to read aloud to you.” Mrs. Wiggins looked at him, and a big sob that was coming up in her throat, turned into a laugh, and she said: “That’s what I’m afraid of. ~ Walter R Brooks, #NFDB
1103:Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail the sky cracked its poems in naked wonder, that the clinging of the church bells blew far into the breeze, leaving only bells of lightning and its thunder ~ Bob Dylan, #NFDB
1104:A life of intensities wide, immune
Floats behind the earth and her life-fret,
A magic of realms mastered by spell and rune,
Grandiose, blissful, coloured, increate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Life Heavens,#NFDB
1105:All is abolished but the mute Alone.
The mind from thought released, the heart from grief
Grow inexistent now beyond belief;
There is no I, no Nature, known-unknown. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Nirvana,#NFDB
1106:GIFT You tell me that silence is nearer to peace than poems but if for my gift I brought you silence (for I know silence) you would say This is not silence this is another poem and you would hand it back to me ~ Leonard Cohen, #NFDB
1107:It is Thy rapture flaming through my nerves
And all my cells and atoms thrill with Thee;
My body Thy vessel is and only serves
As a living wine-cup of Thy ecstasy. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Bliss of Identity,#NFDB
1108:It was strange how these poems came to him nowadays, the distillation of his private emotions, of his disillusionment, of his solitude, of his yearning for a future in which, nevertheless, he could not believe. ~ Pearl S Buck, #NFDB
1109:I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged...I had poems which were re-written so many times I suspect it was just a way of avoiding sending them out. ~ Erica Jong, #NFDB
1110:Nathan said, “Not a chance. I’ve heard him recite it in class. He knows dozens of Poe’s poems by heart. ‘The Raven,’ ‘Lenore,’ ‘The Lake,’ ‘To Annie’…dozens of them. Sometimes I think he fucking channels Poe. ~ Randall Silvis, #NFDB
1111:One thing about being a children's poet or a versifier, is that there is a large market for your wares. These things really made the rounds. I would meet people and they'd quote my poems to me. It's great. ~ Mary Ann Hoberman, #NFDB
1112:The poems I did write there [in Harvard] include Alphabets the 1984 Phi Beta Kappa poem and A Sofa in the Forties. And, of course, the John Harvard poem for the 350th anniversary Villanelle for an Anniversary. ~ Seamus Heaney, #NFDB
1113:Though it does seem like I have written an immense amount of work, over the years I have pushed the pause button. I have poems that I haven't sent out for publication, mostly based on political/social issues. ~ Denise Duhamel, #NFDB
1114:He must stride on conquering all,
Threatening and clamouring, brutal, invincible,
Until he meets upon his storm-swept road
A greater devil—or thunderstroke of God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Dwarf Napoleon,#NFDB
1115:Identified with silence and boundlessness
My spirit widens clasping the universe
Till all that seemed becomes the Real,
One in a mighty and single vastness. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ocean Oneness,#NFDB
1116:I don't think I'd ever get any better as a poet if I didn't push myself, very deliberately, to grow. My best poems surprise me, as they should, but I fight them at every turn, possibly just because I'm stubborn. ~ James Arthur, #NFDB
1117:If you must write prose or poems, the words you use should be your own. Don't plagiarize or take 'on loan'. There's always someone, somewhere, with a big nose, who knows, who'll trip you up and laugh when you fall. ~ Morrissey, #NFDB
1118:Many moons ago dictionaries of quotations may have been less needed than they are today. In those good/bad old days, people walked around with entire poems and all the Shakespearean soliloquies in their heads. ~ Joseph Epstein, #NFDB
1119:Psychographs
Says Gerald Massey: 'When I write, a band
Of souls of the departed guides my hand.'
How strange that poems cumbering our shelves,
Penned by immortal parts, have none themselves
~ Ambrose Bierce,#NFDB
1120:Delle belle eruditissima, delle erudite bellissima. - Most learned of the fair, most fair of the learned. ~ Sannazarius, inscription to Cassandra Marchesia in an edition of the letter's poems. See Greswell, Memoirs of Politian., #NFDB
1121:I was writing poems as I was walking. I was able to take that restlessness, that nomadic distraction, and use that distraction in the world and turn that distraction into observations and then into poems. ~ Shirley Geok lin Lim, #NFDB
1122:Keats, it must be remembered, was a sensualist. His poems ... reveal him as a man not altogether free from the vulgarities of sensualism, as well as one who was able to transmute it into perfect literature. ~ Robert Wilson Lynd, #NFDB
1123:Like so many aspiring writers who still have boxes of things they've written in their parents' houses, I filled notebooks with half-finished poems and stories and first paragraphs of novels that never got written. ~ Ally Carter, #NFDB
1124:Considering the number of ghastly love poems that had been written and which seemed fairly clearly a waste of everyone's time, Jonathan couldn't help but be surprised that coffee hadn't been thus immortalized. ~ James P Blaylock, #NFDB
1125:It's fun to see someone grow as a writer, moving from their first workshopped poems to publishing their earliest poems to having a book accepted for publication. It's great to see poets with persistence succeed. ~ Allison Joseph, #NFDB
1126:Making poems was a way of loving things, I had always thought, of preserving them, of living moments twice; or more than that, it was a way of living more fully, of bestowing on experience a richer meaning. But ~ Garth Greenwell, #NFDB
1127:My earlier poems were sadder than my poems are today, perhaps because I wrote them in confusion or when I was unhappy. But I am not a melancholy person, quite the contrary, no one enjoys laughing more than I do. ~ Anne Stevenson, #NFDB
1128:Some huge somnambulist Intelligence
Devising without thought process and plan
Arrayed the burning stars’ magnificence,
The living bodies of beasts and the brain of man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Inconscient,#NFDB
1129:I housed within my heart the life of things,
All hearts athrob in the world I felt as mine;
I shared the joy that in creation sings
And drank its sorrow like a poignant wine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Life-Unity,#NFDB
1130:I want to write songs with complete sentences. I almos have this obsession with short-changing words. I would never be so pretentious to say that my lyrics are poetry. ... Poems are poems. Song lyrics are for songs. ~ Ben Gibbard, #NFDB
1131:Life and mind and their glory and debate
Are the slow prelude of a vaster theme,
A sketch confused of a supernal plan,
A preface to the epic of the Supreme. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Greater Plan,#NFDB
1132:now I listen to a greater Word
Born from the mute unseen omniscient Ray:
The Voice that only Silence’ ear has heard
Leaps missioned from an eternal glory of Day. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Word of the Silence,#NFDB
1133:There is a silence greater than any known
To earth’s dumb spirit, motionless in the soul
That has become Eternity’s foothold,
Touched by the infinitudes for ever. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Jivanmukta,#NFDB
1134:I curated our love into poems
and all the pains became less
all the anger left, eventually
but, there is no denying
here on the tip of my soul
with scars still healing,
that once I loved a man. ~ Ijeoma Umebinyuo,#NFDB
1135:My mind is hushed in wide and endless light,
My heart a solitude of delight and peace,
My sense unsnared by touch and sound and sight,
My body a point in white infinities. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Liberation - I,#NFDB
1136:Silence is round me, wideness ineffable;
White birds on the ocean diving and wandering;
A soundless sea on a voiceless heaven,
Azure on azure, is mutely gazing. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ocean Oneness,#NFDB
1137:The Friend of Man helps him with life and death
Until he knows. Then, freed from mortal breath,
Grief, pain, resentment, terror pass away.
He feels the joy of the immortal play; ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Epiphany,#NFDB
1138:Who art thou in the heart comrade of man who sitst
August, watching his works, watching his joys and griefs,
Unmoved, careless of pain, careless of death and fate? ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Witness and the Wheel,#NFDB
1139:A bare impersonal hush is now my mind,
A world of sight clear and inimitable,
A volume of silence by a Godhead signed,
A greatness pure of thought, virgin of will. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Word of the Silence,#NFDB
1140:Athletes take care of their bodies. Writers must similarly take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of the poems. There is nourishment in books, other art, history, philosophies--in holiness and mirth. ~ Mary Oliver, #NFDB
1141:For poems are not words after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry." Mary Oliver (1935-2019). This quote from 'A Poetry Handbook' (1994) ~ Mary Oliver, #NFDB
1142:It is raining! In other words little poems are coming down from the sky! Nature is literature! Sun is a fable; forest is a story; birds are a theatre; mountains are a myth; rain is a poem! Nature is literature! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
1143:One on another we prey and one by another are mighty.
This is the world and we have not made it; if it is evil,
Blame first the gods; but for us, we must live by its laws or we perish. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
1144:So you heroically undertook to endure the pains of faithlessness, just to be able to write good poems. But you didn´t realise then that when you lost that voice inside you, you´d end up all alone in an empty universe. ~ Orhan Pamuk, #NFDB
1145:To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour... ~ William Blake (from "Auguries of Innocence"; via @PoetryFound) poetryfoundation.org/poems/43650/au…, #NFDB
1146:Yearning that claimed all time for its date and all life for its fuel,
All that we wonder at gazing back when the passion has fallen,
Labour blind and vain expense and sacrifice wasted ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
1147:A creature of his own grey ignorance,
A mind half shadow and half gleam, a breath
That wrestles, captive in a world of death,
To live some lame brief years. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Man the Thinking Animal,#NFDB
1148:And in that cold metal aisle, alone, I wanted him. I wanted his hands at my back and his lips speaking poems on mine and our journey to each other to be completed, the miles between us consumed and all distance closed. ~ Ally Condie, #NFDB
1149:Do you know, Considering the market, there are more Poems produced than any other thing? No wonder poets sometimes have to seem So much more businesslike than businessmen. Their wares are so much harder to get rid of. ~ Robert Frost, #NFDB
1150:His heart was now beating rapidly. He wanted to embrace her, cover her with kisses, caress her hair, touch her breast, stroke her thighs: he wanted to sing songs for her, dance dances for her, write poems for her. ~ Andrew M Greeley, #NFDB
1151:I’d like to ask you a question, if I may.”
“What?”
“All these poems you’ve written and hidden—so many poems. Why?”
While she thought, morning broke and the birds sang in the garden. “Because I could not stop. ~ Jeffrey Ford,#NFDB
1152:Humanity i love you because you are perpetually putting the secret of life in your pants and forgetting it's there and sitting down on it and because you are forever making poems in the lap of death Humanity i hate you ~ e e cummings, #NFDB
1153:I can't go on flying apart just for those who want the benefit of a few verbal kicks. My God, do you know what poems like that cost? They're not written vicariously: they come out of actual suffering, real madness. ~ Theodore Roethke, #NFDB
1154:I like poems that immediately claim my attention, instead of taking my attention for granted. At first read, I want to feel compelled to pick up the poem again; I want to be curious about its byways and secret corners. ~ James Arthur, #NFDB
1155:The shape that poems make in the mind is an echo of something powerful in the cosmos. I do believe that, and that is certainly irrational, so perhaps I am no wiser than Elizabeth Perkins as to the nature of poetry. ~ Campbell McGrath, #NFDB
1156:Two genii in the dubious heart of man,
Two great unhappy foes together bound
Wrestle and strive to win unhampered ground;
They strive for ever since the race began. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, In the Moonlight,#NFDB
1157:Alone in the dense bamboo, I sit playing my lute, humming along. Lost to this world, who will notice but the bright moon shining? from Bamboo Cottage: Poems and Translations, by Doug Westendorp
~ Wang Wei, Bamboo Cottage
,#NFDB
1158:I have a little tiny Emily Dickinson so big that I carry in my pocket everywhere. And you just read three poems of Emily. She is so brave. She is so strong. She is such a sexy, passionate, little woman. I feel better. ~ Maurice Sendak, #NFDB
1159:I saw my soul a traveller through Time;
From life to life the cosmic ways it trod,
Obscure in the depths and on the heights sublime,
Evolving from the worm into the god. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Miracle of Birth,#NFDB
1160:Love and the need of mastery, joy and the longing for greatness
Rage like a fire unquenchable burning the world and creating,
Nor till humanity dies will they sink in the ashes of Nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
1161:Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative. ~ Marilyn Hacker, #NFDB
1162:One, universal, ensphering creation,
Wheeling no more with inconscient Nature,
Feel thyself God-born, know thyself deathless.
Timeless return to thy immortal existence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Soul in the Ignorance,#NFDB
1163:Siken occasionally locates a poem in loss as enacted, not implicit, event. These are among his most beautiful poems, their capitulations heartbreaking in the context of prolonged animal struggle against acknowledgement. ~ Louise Gl ck, #NFDB
1164:The crude beginnings of the lifeless earth,
The mindless stirrings of the plant and tree
Prepared our thought; thought for a godlike birth
Broadens the mould of our mortality. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Evolution - II,#NFDB
1165:The greatness of a poet is not to be measured by the scale but by the intensity and the perfection of his works. Also by his vivacity. Williams is the author of the most vivid poems of modern American poetry. ~ William Carlos Williams, #NFDB
1166:The novels, travel books and poems I read had a particular smell. The smell of cellars. An almost spicy smell, a mixture of dust and grease. Verdigris. Books today don't have a smell. They don't even smell of print. ~ Jean Claude Izzo, #NFDB
1167:This mute stupendous Energy that whirls
The stars and nebulae in its long train,
Like a huge Serpent through my being curls
With its diamond hood of joy and fangs of pain. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Witness Spirit,#NFDB
1168:We are but sparks of that most perfect fire,
Waves of that sea:
From Him we come, to Him we go, desire
Eternally,
And so long as He wills, our separate birth
Is and shall be. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,#NFDB
1169:When I think of Robert Frost's poems, like "The Road Not Taken", I feel the support of someone who is on my side, who understands what life's choices are like, someone who says, "I've been there, and it's okay to go on". ~ Fred Rogers, #NFDB
1170:All sounds, all voices have become Thy voice,
Music and thunder and the cry of birds,
Life’s babble of her sorrows and her joys,
Cadence of human speech and murmured words, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Divine Hearing,#NFDB
1171:I don't want people to write programmatic environmental poems, but I think sustainability should become deeply a part of the consciousness of poetry - an impulse toward compassion, empathy, and social justice. ~ Alison Hawthorne Deming, #NFDB
1172:If your teachers suggest that your poems are sentimental, that is only half of it. Your poems probably need to be even more sentimental. Don’t be less of a flower, but could you be more of a stone at the same time? ~ Mary Ruefle, #NFDB
1173:I have drunk the Infinite like a giant's wine. Time is my drama or my pageant dream.Now are my illumined cells joy's flaming scheme And changed my thrilled and branching nerves to fine.(Collected Poems ~ Transformation)#SriAurobindo, #NFDB
1174:In the sweep of the worlds, in the surge of the ages,
Ineffable, mighty, majestic and pure,
Beyond the last pinnacle seized by the thinker
He is throned in His seats that for ever endure. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Who,#NFDB
1175:That is our home and that the secret hope
Our hearts explore.
To bring those heavens down upon the earth
We all descend,
And fragments of it in the human birth
We can command. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Rishi,#NFDB
1176:Ah men, why do you want all this attention? I can write poems for myself, make love to a doorknob if absolutely necessary. What do you have to offer me I can't find otherwise except humiliation? Which I no longer need. ~ Margaret Atwood, #NFDB
1177:He who binds himself a joy Does the winged life destroy. But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity's sun rise. [1991.jpg] -- from William Blake: The Complete Poems, by William Blake
~ William Blake, Eternity
,#NFDB
1178:Now from his cycle sleepless and vast round the dance of the earth-globe
Gold Hyperion rose in the wake of the dawn like the eyeball
Flaming of God revealed by his uplifted luminous eyelid. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
1179:The ancients have left us model heroic poems in which the heroes furnish the whole interest of the story, and we are still unable to accustom ourselves to the fact that for our epoch histories of that kind are meaningless. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
1180:To surrender now is to pay the expensive ogre twice.
Ancient woods of my blood, dash down to the nut of the seas.
If I take to burn or return this world which is each man's work.”
― Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems ~ Dylan Thomas,#NFDB
1181:When I'm assembling a book I concentrate as though I were writing a poem. A truly imagined arrangement will indicate gaps and generate new poems. I re-read the new poems in my folder in the hope that this might happen. ~ Michael Longley, #NFDB
1182:Although consenting here to a mortal body,
He is the Undying; limit and bond he knows not;
For him the aeons are a playground,
Life and its deeds are his splendid shadow. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Jivanmukta,#NFDB
1183:... and it occured to me then and forever afterwards, that films, theatre books and poems were just a fraud. It's only music that doesn't deceive, it doesn't pretend to be anything else except what it is. Music. ~ Lars Saabye Christensen, #NFDB
1184:How do your poems start out?” “They start as a lump in the throat,” she said. “Isn’t that normally just a cocktail olive lodged there?” Olivier asked. “Once,” Ruth admitted. “Wrote quite a good poem before I coughed it up. ~ Louise Penny, #NFDB
1185:I have wrapped the wide world in my wider self
And Time and Space my spirit’s seeing are.
I am the god and demon, ghost and elf,
I am the wind’s speed and the blazing star. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Cosmic Consciousness,#NFDB
1186:The Master who bends o’er His creatures,
Suffers their sins and their errors and guides them screening the guidance;
Each through his nature He leads and the world by the lure of His wisdom. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
1187:All music is only the sound of His laughter,
All beauty the smile of His passionate bliss;
Our lives are His heart-beats, our rapture the bridal
Of Radha and Krishna, our love is their kiss. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Who,#NFDB
1188:As a reader I don't distinguish between confessional and non-confessional work. After all, how do we even know that certain "I" poems are confessional? It's a tricky business, this correlating of the speaker and the poet. ~ Matthea Harvey, #NFDB
1189:I didn’t even know my face could do this. It’s like there were hidden zippers in my cheeks. Jesus.
This must be what feelings are. This is why people write poems! I get it now.
I get it, and I want more. ~ Laini Taylor,#NFDB
1190:My life is the life of village and continent,
I am earth’s agony and her throbs of bliss;
I share all creatures’ sorrow and content
And feel the passage of every stab and kiss. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Cosmic Spirit,#NFDB
1191:No danger can perturb my spirit’s calm:
My acts are Thine; I do Thy works and pass;
Failure is cradled on Thy deathless arm,
Victory is Thy passage mirrored in Fortune’s glass. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Divine Worker,#NFDB
1192:Soul in the Ignorance, wake from its stupor.
Flake of the world-fire, spark of Divinity,
Lift up thy mind and thy heart into glory.
Sun in the darkness, recover thy lustre. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Soul in the Ignorance,#NFDB
1193:The poets, therefore, however much they adorned the gods in their poems, and amplified their exploits with the highest praises, yet very frequently confess that all things are held together and governed by one spirit or mind. ~ Lactantius, #NFDB
1194:Your clothing is not—how do we say?—not in harmony with the evening. Your shoes—oh, your shoes! I could write several depressing poems in the styling of Monsieur Camus about the existential problems posed by your shoes. ~ Christopher Bunn, #NFDB
1195:A lot of my poems are about how ill I am and how I probably won't live beyond next week. I publish a poem and everyone says 'cluck cluck, how wonderful, how brave', but then embarrassingly I'm still here! You see the problem? ~ Clive James, #NFDB
1196:I find it odd that, in real life people think I am funny but no one ever suspects that on the page! Personally, I think some of my work is a riot! I crack myself up, but I know th