Image

Old houses were scaffolding once
and workmen whistling.

Similarity

Commutative Law

No cow’s like a horse,
and no horse like a cow.
That’s one similarity
anyhow.

A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’ and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotny. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.

If you want to test your memory, try to recall what you were worrying about one year ago today.

To love and to be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.

A Riddle: On A Kiss

What thing is that, nor felt nor seene
Till it bee given? a present for a Queene:
A fine conceite to give and take the like:
The giver yet is farther for to seeke;
The taker doth possesse nothing the more,
The giver hee hath nothing lesse in store:
And given once that nature hath it still,
You cannot keepe or leave it if you will:
The workmanshippe is counted very small,
The labour is esteemed naught at all:
But to conclude, this gift is such indeede,
That, if some see’t ’twill make theyr hearts to bleede.

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.

Anyone who has begun to think, places some portion of the world in jeopardy.

How Doth the Little Crocodile

How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!
How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in,
With gently smiling jaws!

It is a secret in the Oxford sense. You may tell it to only one person at a time.

When I left the room after sitting next to Mr. Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But after sitting next to Mr. Disraeli, I thought I was the cleverest woman in England.

.. . and almost at the same moment I knew that I had met this before, long, long ago (it hardly seems longer now) . . . And with that plunge back into my own past there arose at once, almost like heartbreak, the memory of Joy itself, the knowledge that I had once had what I had now for years, that I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country; and the distance of the Twilight of the Gods and the distance of my own past Joy, both unattainable, flowed together into a single, unendurable sense of desire and loss, which suddenly became one with the loss of the whole experience, which, as I now stared round that dusty schoolroom like a man recovering from unconsciousness, had already vanished, had eluded me at the very moment when I could first say It is. And at once I knew (with fatal knowledge) that to “have it again” was the supreme and only important object of desire.

The Embankment

(The fantasia of a fallen gentleman on a cold, bitter night.)

Once, in finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy,
In the flash of gold heels on the hard pavement.
Now see I
That warmth’s the very stuff of poesy.
Oh, God, make small
The old star-eaten blanket of the sky,
That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.

Nothing is difficult, you only need to know how.

All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.

Fairies

You can’t see fairies unless you’re good.
That’s what Nurse said to me.
They live in the smoke of the chimney,
Or down in the roots of a tree;
They brush their wings on a tulip,
Or hide behind a pea.

But you can’t see fairies unless you’re good,
So they aren’t much use to me.

I don’t answer questions containing two or more unsupported assumptions.

‘Free verse’? You may as well call sleeping in a ditch ‘free architecture.’

One day can make your life, one day can ruin your life. All life is, is four or five days that can change everything.

Nude Descending a Staircase

Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh,
A gold of lemon, root and rind,
She sifts in sunlight down the stairs
With nothing on. Nor on her mind.

We spy beneath the banister
A constant thresh of thigh on thigh.
Her lips imprint the swinging air
That parts to let her parts go by.

One-woman waterfall, she wears
Her slow descent like a long cape
And pausing, on the final stair
Collects her motions into shape.

Inspired by the Marcel Duchamp painting of the same title which can be seen here.

Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.

Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face.

The Idiot Boy

He wandered down the moutain grade
Beyond the speed assigned–
A youth whom Justice often stayed
And generally fined.

He went alone, that none might know
If he could drive or steer.
Now he is in the ditch, and Oh!
The differential gear!

You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.

Opening lines of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man’s.

I never learned from a man who agreed with me.

The Definition of Love

My Love is of a birth as rare
As ’tis, for object, strange and high;
It was begotten by Despair
Upon Impossibility.

Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble Hope could ne’er have flown
But vainly flapped its tinsel wing.

And yet I quickly might arrive
Where my extended soul is fixed;
But Fate does iron wedges drive,
And always crowd itself betwixt.

For Fate with jealous eye does see
Two perfect loves, no lets them close;
Their union would her ruin be,
And her tyrannic power depose.

And therefore her decress of steel
Us as the distant poles have placed
(Though Love’s whole world on us doth wheel),
Not by themselves to be embraced,

Unless the giddy heaven fall,
And earth some new convulsion tear,
And, us to join, the world should all
Be cramped into a planisphere.

As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
BUt ours, so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.

Therefore the love which us doth bind,
But Fate so enviously debars,
Is the conjunction of the mind,
And opposition of the stars.

Even on the most exalted throne in the world we are only sitting on our own bottom.

An ignorant person is one who doesn’t know what you have just found out.

The Romans in Britain
(A history in forty words)

The Romans gave us aqueducts,
fine buildings and straight roads,
where all those Roman legionaries
marched with heavy loads.

They gave us central heating,
good laws a peaceful home –
then after just four centuries
they shuffled back to Rome.