Hilda Doolittle Quotes

In my garden the winds have beaten the ripe lilies; in my garden, the salt has wilted the first flakes of young narcissus.

We are voyagers, discoverers of the not-known, the unrecorded; we have no map; possibly we will reach haven, heaven.

I will be free, no lover's kiss to bind me to earth, no bliss of love to counteract actual bliss.

She did not look at the daffodils. They didn't mean anything. She looked at the daffodils. She said, 'Thank you for the daffodils.

Dance until the earth dance.

One flower may slay the winter and meet death.

I could not accept from wisdom what love taught, woman is perfect.

You are wind in a stark tree, you are the stark tree unbent, you are a strung bow, you are an arrow.

Ah love is bitter and sweet, but which is more sweet the bitterness or the sweetness, none has spoken it.

Words were her plague and words were her redemption.

You will not see that desire begets love, until it all flames into one concise and metallic blaze.

No poetic phantasy but a biological reality, a fact: I am an entity like bird, insect, plant or sea-plant cell; I live; I am alive.

O beautiful white land, olives and wild anemone and violet mingled among the shale, and purple wings of little winter-butterflies say, here Psyche, the soul, lies.

Until it seems the whole city will be covered with gold pollen shaken from the bell-towers, lilies plundered with the weight of massive bees . . .

But beauty is set apart, beauty is cast by the sea, a barren rock, beauty is set about with wrecks of ships.

For you are abstract, making no mistake, slurring no word in the rhythm you make, the poem, writ in the air.

I smiled, I waited, I was circumspect; O never, never, never write that I missed life or loving.

Pompeii has nothing to teach us, we know crack of volcanic fissure, slow flow of terrible lava, pressure on heart, lungs, the brain about to burst its brittle case (what the skull can endure!)

Writing. Love is writing.

Luminous, unfearful; high-priestesses, our fervour shall banish all evil.

Music sets up ladders, it makes us invisible, it sets us apart, it lets us escape; but from the visible there is no escape.

I knew the poor, I knew the hideous death they die, when famine lays its bleak hand on the door; I knew the rich, sated with merriment, who yet are sad.

There's a black rose growing in your garden.

When the shingles hissed in the rain incendiary, other values were revealed to us

No one knows the colour of a flower till it is broken.

No one knows, the heart of a child, how it grows until it is too late.

The elixir of life, the philosopher's stone is yours if you surrender sterile logic, trivial reason.

The stallion and his mare, unbridled, with arrow-pattern, are worked on. the blue cloth before the door of religion and inspiration.

That way of inspiration is always open, and open to everyone; it acts as go-between, interpreter, it explains symbols of the past in to-day's imagery.

Dead men would start and move toward me to learn of love.

The laying of fish on the embers, the taste of the fish, the feel of the texture of bread, the round and the half-loaf, the grain of a petal, the rain-bow and the rain.

Light threatens, is active, is gone, so it is with a song.

Escape from the power of the hunting pack, and to know that wisdom is best and beauty sheer holiness.

Sing and your hell is heaven, your heaven less hell.

War is a fevered god who takes alike maiden and king and clod.

It is no madness to say you will fall, you great cities.

remember the golden apple-trees; O, do not pity them, as you watch them drop one by one, for they fall exhausted, numb, blind but in certain ecstasy, for theirs is the hunger for Paradise.

Maid of the luminous grey-eyes, Mistress of honey and marble implacable white thighs and Goddess, chaste daughter of Zeus.

Cheat me not with time, with the dull ache of flesh, for all flesh turns, even the loveliest ankle and frail thigh, to bitterest dust.

O happy, happy each man whom predestined fate leads to the holy rite of hill and mountain worship.

I testify to rainbow feathers, to the span of heaven and walls of colour, the colonnades of jasper.

My eye-balls are glass, my limbs marble, my face fixed in its marble mask.

Passionate grave thought, belief enhanced, ritual returned and magic.

Think of the moment you count most foul in your life; conjure it, supplicate, pray to it; your face is bleak, you retract, you dare not remember it.

I spit honey out of my mouth: nothing is second-best after the sweet of Eros.

(Those women whom the distaff no longer claims nor spun cloth) driven made, mad, mad by Bacchus.

The things I have are nameless, old and true; they may not be named; few may live and know.

Ardent yet chill and formal, how I ache to tempt a chisel as a sculptor.

Alas, day, you brought light, You trailed splendour You showed us god: I salute you, most precious one, But I go to a new place, Another life.

Let Love step down, open the clasped hands, forfeit the thorny crown, retrieve the garment that was whole, body and spirit one, spirit and soul.