“Why be saddled with this thing called life expectancy? Of what relevance to an individual is such a statistic? Am
—Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
collected from other authors
“Why be saddled with this thing called life expectancy? Of what relevance to an individual is such a statistic? Am
—Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
If you have not a bird inside you,
You have no reason to sing.
But if a pent bird chide you,
A beak and a bleeding wing,
Then you have reason to sing.
If merely you are clever
With thoughts and rhymes and words,
Then always your poems sever
The veins of our singing-birds,
With blades of glinting words.
Yet if a Song, without ending,
Inside you choke for breath,
And a beak, devouring, rending,
Tear through your lungs for breath,
Sing—or you bleed to death.
—Louis Golding (1895–1958), “The Prisoner,” Sorrow of War, 1919
“A horse loves freedom, and the weariest old work horse will roll on the ground or break into a lumbering gallop when he is turned loose in the open.”
—Gerald Raftery (1905–1986), Snow Cloud, 1951
—LIFE magazine, 1922
“The desert was quiet. The coyotes were not howling yet. I was my own howling coyote. Outwardly a comfortable-looking man in an
—J. B. Priestley (1894–1984), Midnight on the Desert: A Chapter of Autobiography, 1917
I who have loved the sound of leaves
Restlessly writhing into speech
Desire that to my silent grave
Only leaves shall reach.
So I who walked above the ground,
And leaves that danced before the sun
May meet below to form one dust
And in the earth be one.
When the last wind has stripped the boughs
Some autumn, go out anywhere
To any tree, and look beneath
The leaves: I may be there.
—Paul Engle, “Leaves for the Dead,” 1929
Trickling down from branch to branch
Like a saffron avalanche,
Filtering through the sylvan gauze
As a frozen topaz thaws,
Lay, in puddles on the moss,
Golden solar, apple-sauce…
—Tom Prideaux (1908–1993), “The Sun-Shunner,” written in the
“Life is a vale of tears in which there are moments you just can’t
—Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
I shook off the house like a hooded cape,
And came out, free, into the March-blown street…
At a lash of the gale, at a sight of the cloud-tattered skies,
As a coat discarded,
I shook off civilization
And became wild,
And my naked soul raced the clouds,
And the flavor of the Earth was fresh and primitive…
—James Oppenheim (1882–1932), “March Night,” War and Laughter, 1916
Driving down the wrong road and knowing it,
The fork years behind, how many have thought
To pull up on the shoulder and leave the car
Empty, strike out across the fields; and how many
Are still mazed among dock and thistle,
Seeking the road they should have taken?
—Damon Knight (1922–2002), The Man in the Tree, 1984
In the rash lustihead of my young powers,
I shook the pillaring hours
And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears,
I stand amid the dust o’ the mounded
My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap.
—Francis Thompson, from “The Hound of Heaven,” 1890
“On the floor of your mind, then — is it not this that makes you a poet? — rhythm keeps up its perpetual beat. Sometimes it seems to die down to nothing; it lets you eat, sleep, talk like other people. Then it swells again and rises and attempts to sweep all the contents of your mind into one dominant dance. Tonight is such an occasion. Although you are alone, and have taken one boot off and are about to undo the other, you cannot go on with the process of undressing, but must instantly write at the bidding of the dance. You snatch pen and paper; you hardly trouble to hold the one or to straighten the other. And while you write, while the first stanzas of the dance are being fastened down, I will withdraw a little and look out of the window. A woman passes, then a man; a car glides to a stop and then — but there is no need to say what I see out of the window, nor indeed is there time, for I am suddenly recalled from my observations by a cry of rage or despair. Your page is crumpled in a ball; your pen sticks upright by the nib in the carpet… You are rasped, jarred, thoroughly out of temper. And if I am to guess the reason, it is, I should say, that the rhythm which was opening and shutting with a force that sent shocks of excitement from your head to your heels has encountered some hard and hostile object upon which it has smashed itself to pieces. Something has worked in which cannot be made into poetry; some foreign body, angular, sharp-edged, gritty, has refused to join the dance…
“The poet as I guess has strained himself to include an emotion that is not domesticated and acclimatized to poetry; the effort has thrown him off his balance; he rights himself… by a violent recourse to the poetical — he invokes the moon or the nightingale. Anyhow, the transition is sharp. The poem is cracked in the middle. Look, it comes apart in my hands: here is reality on one side, here is beauty on the other; and instead of acquiring a whole object rounded and entire, I am left with broken parts in my hands…”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), letter to John Lehmann, 1931
I vowed that I would be a tree.
I went up to an oak and said,
“What shall I do that I might be
A beech, an oak, or any tree,
With branches leafing from my head?”
There was a sound of sap that ran,
There was a wind of leaves that spoke.
“So you would cease to be a man,
And be a green tree, if you can,
A pine, a beech, an oak?”
I answered, “I am tired of men,
As tired as they of me.
I fain would not return again
To the perplexity of men,
But straightway be a tree.”
There was a sound of winds that went
To summon every oldest tree,
To hold their austere Parliament
About the thing had craved to be
Elect of their calm company.
There was a sound of bursting tide,
There was a wash of clanging foam,
A crumbling shore, a bursting tide.
There came a thunder that outcried,
“Go, wretched mortal, get thee home!
“Who art thou that would be a tree,
Least of the weeds that shoot and pass?
Bide till a Wisdom come, and see
Before a mortal be a tree,
He first must be a blade of grass!”
—Louis Golding (1895–1958), “I Vowed that I Would Be a Tree,” Sorrow of War, 1919