Conrad Aiken QUOTES

1 " It's time to make love, douse the glim; The fireflies twinkle and dim; The stars lean together Like birds of a feather, And the loin lies down with the limb. "

― Conrad Aiken

2 " It is precisely the sort of thing I am always trying to do in my writing – to present my unhappy reader with a wide-ranged chaos – of actions and reactions, thoughts, memories and feelings – in the vain hope that at the end he will see that the whole thing represents only one moment, one feeling, one person. A raging, trumpeting jungle of associations, and then I announce at the end of it, with a gesture of despair, 'This is I! "

― Conrad Aiken , Blue Voyage

3 " Death is never an ending, death is a change;
Death is beautiful, for death is strange;
Death is one dream out of another flowing. "

― Conrad Aiken , The House of Dust

4 " Is it a comb, a fan, a torn dress, a curtain, a bed, an empty rice-bin? It hardly seems to matter. The Chinese poet makes a heart-breaking poetry out of these quite as naturally as Keats did out of the song of a nightingale heard in a spring garden. It is rarely dithyrambic, rarely high-pitched: part of its charm is its tranquility, its self-control. And the humblest reads it with as much emotion as the most learned. "

― Conrad Aiken

5 " It is moonlight. Alone in the silence
I ascend my stairs once more,
While waves remote in pale blue starlight
Crash on a white sand shore.
It is moonlight. The garden is silent.
I stand in my room alone.
Across my wall, from the far-off moon,
A rain of fire is thrown.
There are houses hanging above the stars,
And stars hung under the sea,
And a wind from the long blue vault of time
Waves my curtains for me.
I wait in the dark once more,
swung between space and space:
Before the mirror I lift my hands
And face my remembered face. "

― Conrad Aiken

6 " Music I heard with you was more than music. And bread I broke with you was more than bread. "

― Conrad Aiken

7 " MUSIC I heard with you was more than music,
And bread I broke with you was more than bread.
Now that I am without you, all is desolate,
All that was once so beautiful is dead.
Your hands once touched this table and this silver,And I have seen your fingers hold this glass.
These things do not remember you, beloved:
And yet your touch upon them will not pass.
For it was in my heart you moved among them,And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes.And in my heart they will remember always:
They knew you once, O beautiful and wise! "

― Conrad Aiken

8 " Cosmos mariner destination unknown "

― Conrad Aiken

9 " Variations: II

Green light, from the moon,
Pours over the dark blue trees,
Green light from the autumn moon
Pours on the grass ...
Green light falls on the goblin fountain
Where hesitant lovers meet and pass.

They laugh in the moonlight, touching hands,
They move like leaves on the wind ...
I remember an autumn night like this,
And not so long ago,
When other lovers were blown like leaves,
Before the coming of snow. "

― Conrad Aiken

10 " Before him, numberless lovers smiled and talked. And death was observed with sudden cries, And birth with laughter and pain. And the trees grew taller and blacker against the skies And night came down again. "

― Conrad Aiken , The House of Dust

11 " Everybody of course, was like this, - depth beyond depth, a universe chorally singing, incalculable, obeying tremendous laws, chemical or divine, of which it was able to give its own consciousness not the faintest inkling… He brushed the dark hair of this universe. He looked into its tranquil black-pooled eyes. Its mouth was humorous and bitter. And this universe would go out and talk inanely to other universes – talking only with some strange minute fraction of its identity, like a vast sea leaving on the shore, for all mention of itself, a single white pebble, meaningless. A universe that contained everything – all things – yet said only one word: ‘I.’ A music, an infinite symphony, beautifully and majestically conducting itself there in the darkness, but remaining for ever unread and unheard. "

― Conrad Aiken , Blue Voyage

12 " . . . while daisies burn like stars on the darkened hill. "

― Conrad Aiken

13 " ...Her eyes, he says, are stars at dusk,
Her mouth as sweet as red-rose-musk;
And when she dances his young heart swells
With flutes and viols and silver bells;
His brain is dizzy, his senses swim,
When she slants her ragtime eyes at him...

Moonlight shadows, he bids her see,
Move no more silently than she.
It was this way, he says, she came,
Into his cold heart, bearing flame.
And now that his heart is all on fire
Will she refuse his heart's desire?―... "

― Conrad Aiken

14 " Our hands are hot and raw with the stones we have laid,
We have built a tower of stone high into the sky,
We have built a city of towers. "

― Conrad Aiken , The House of Dust

15 " The moon rose, and the moon set;
And the stars rushed up and whirled and set;
And again they swarmed, after a shaft of sunlight;
And the dark blue dusk closed above him, like an ocean of regret. "

― Conrad Aiken , The Charnel Rose, Senlin: a Biography, and Other Poems

16 " Bend as the bow bends, and let fly the shaft,
the strong cord loose its words as light as flame;
speak without cunning, love, as without craft,
careless of answer, as of shame or blame:
this to be known, that love is love, despite
knowledge or ignorance, truth, untruth, despair;
careless of all things, if that love be bright,
careless of hate and fate, careless of care.
Spring the word as it must, the leaf or flower
broken or bruised, yet let it, broken, speak
of time transcending this too transient hour,
and space that finds the beating heart too weak:
thus, and thus only, will our tempest come
by continents of snow to find a home. "

― Conrad Aiken

17 " Silence thronged the room, and he was aware of the focused scrutiny of the three people who confronted him. "

― Conrad Aiken

18 " Beyond the doctor’s shoulder was the fire, the fingers of flame making light prestidigitation against the sooty fireback, the soft sound of their random flutter the only sound. "

― Conrad Aiken , Silent Snow, Secret Snow

19 " How is it that I am now so softly awakened,
My leaves shaken down with music?―
Darling, I love you.

It is not your mouth, for I have known mouths before,―
Though your mouth is more alive than roses,
Roses singing softly
To green leaves after rain.

It is not your eyes, for I have dived often in eyes,―
Though your eyes, even in the yellow glare of footlights,
Are windows into eternal dusk.

Nor is it the live white flashing of your feet,
Nor your gay hands, catching at motes in the spotlight;
Nor the abrupt thick music of your laughter,
When, against the hideous backdrop,
With all its crudities brilliantly lighted,
Suddenly you catch sight of your alarming shadow,
Whirling and contracting.

How is it, then, that I am now so keenly aware,
So sensitive to the surges of the wind, or the light,
Heaving silently under blue seas of air?―
Darling, I love you, I am immersed in you… "

― Conrad Aiken

20 " Bread and Music

Music I heard with you was more than music,
And bread I broke with you was more than bread;
Now that I am without you, all is desolate;
All that was once so beautiful is dead.

Your hands once touched this table and this silver,
And I have seen your fingers hold this glass.
These things do not remember you, belovèd,
And yet your touch upon them will not pass.

For it was in my heart you moved among them,
And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes;
And in my heart they will remember always,—
They knew you once, O beautiful and wise.

D. H. Lawrence is better known today for his novels, which include the then-infamous Lady Chatterley's Lover, but he was one of the better early modernist poets "

― Conrad Aiken

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