New Selected Poems QUOTES

1 " Epilogue

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme--
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name. "

― Robert Lowell , New Selected Poems

3 " he is eloquently angry, "

― Robert Lowell , New Selected Poems

5 " The wild ingrafted olive and the root Are withered, and a winter drifts to where The Pepperpot, ironic rainbow, spans Charles River and its scales of scorched-earth miles. I saw my city in the Scales, the pans Of judgment rising and descending. Piles Of dead leaves char the air— And I am a red arrow on this graph Of Revelations. "

― Robert Lowell , New Selected Poems

7 " The thick lemony honeysuckle, climbing from the earthroot to your window, will open more beautiful blossoms to the evening; "

― Robert Lowell , New Selected Poems

9 " By miracle, I left the party half an hour behind you, reached home five hours drunker, "

― Robert Lowell , New Selected Poems

11 " only by suffering the rat-race in the arena can the heart learn to beat. "

― Robert Lowell , New Selected Poems

13 " You lie in my insomniac arms, as if you drank sleep like coffee. "

― Robert Lowell , New Selected Poems

15 " Who can help us from our nothing to the all, we aging downstream faster than a scepter can check? "

― Robert Lowell , New Selected Poems