Wednesday, November 28, 2018

Poemquotes 3


"Vijaya. I will wait here, Amrita. // Anashuya. By mighty Brahma's ever-rustling robe, / Who is Amrita? Sorrow of all sorrows! / Another fills your mind. // Vijaya. My mother's name."
-W. B. Yeats, "Anashuya and Vijaya", from Crossways, 1889

"Between the 4 walls of this low-slung room moved dark spirits, and others extremely light and luminous. / A nearly naked man entered in the middle of these webs and in these expanses of ice and desert."
-Pierre Reverdy, "L'intrus" [The Intruder], from Poèmes en prose [Poems in Prose], 1915, my translation

"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, "To Foreign Lands" (whole poem presented here), from Leaves of Grass, "Inscriptions", 1855-1892

"Have the greenish succubus and the rose elf / Poured you fear and love from their urns? / Has the nightmare, with a despotic and mutinous grip, / Drowned you at the bottom of a fabled Minturnae?"
-Charles Baudelaire, "La muse malade" [The Sick Muse], from Les fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil], "Spleen et Idéal" [Spleen and Ideal], 1857, my translation

"She too is discontent / And would have purple stuff upon her arms"
-Wallace Stevens, "The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage", from Harmonium, 1923/1931

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