" 'What do you weave with wool so white?' // 'I weave the shoes of Sorrow: / Soundless shall be the footfall light / In all men's ears of Sorrow, / Sudden and light.' "
-W. B. Yeats, "The Cloak, the Boat, and the Shoes", from Crossways, 1889
"His head fearfully took shelter beneath the lamp shade. It is green, and his eyes are red. There's a musician who doesn't move. He sleeps; his severed hands play violin to make him forget his poverty."
-Pierre Reverdy, "Les poètes" [The Poets], from Poèmes en prose [Poems in Prose], 1915, my translation
"By sailors young and old haply will I, a reminiscence of the land, be read, / In full rapport at last."
-Walt Whitman, "In Cabin'd Ships at Sea", from Leaves of Grass, "Inscriptions", 1855-1892
"Cybele, then, fertile in generous yields, / Found not her sons too costly a weight, / But, she-wolf with heart swollen by common tendernesses, / Fed the universe at her brown teats."
-Charles Baudelaire, "J'aime le souvenir de ces époques nues" [I Love the Memory of Those Naked Epochs], from Les fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil], "Spleen et Idéal" [Spleen and Ideal], 1857, my translation
"Timeless mother, / How is it that your aspic nipples / For once vent honey? // The pine-tree sweetens my body. / The white iris beautifies me."
-Wallace Stevens, "In the Carolinas", from Harmonium, 1923/1931
"How I love you / With warm blood, / For you give me youth / And joy and mood // For new songs / And dances. / Be ever happy / In the same way that you love me!"
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Mailied" [May-Song], 1775, my translation
"There will be time, there will be time / To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; / There will be time to murder and create, / And time for all the works and days of hands / That lift and drop a question on your plate"
-T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", from Prufrock and Other Observations, 1917
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