Hilda Doolittle quotes:

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

The fallen hazel-nuts, Stripped late of their green sheaths, The grapes, red-purple, Their berries Dripping with wine, Pomegranates already broken, And shrunken fig, And quinces untouched, I bring thee as offering.

Love, why have you sought the horde of spearsmen, why the tent Achilles pitched beside the river-ford?

Take what the old-church found in Mithra's tomb, candle and script and bell, take what the new-church spat upon and broke and shattered.

Our minds can go no further. The human imagination is capable of no further expression of beauty than the carved owl of Athene, the archaic, marble serpent, the arrogant selfish head of the Acropolis Apollo.

I fear no man, no woman; flower does not fear bird, insect nor adder.

For this beauty, beauty without strength, chokes out life.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 . . .

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

Thoth, Hermes, the stylus, the palette, the pen, the quill endure, though our books are a floor of smouldering ash under our feet.

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!)

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

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

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

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

Dance until the earth dance.

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

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

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.

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

...if you do not even understand what words say, how can you expect to pass judgement on what words conceal?

A slight wind shakes the seed-pods my thoughts are spent as the black seeds.

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

Could beauty be beaten out, O youth the cities have sent to strike at each other's strength, it is you who have kept her alight.

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

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

Every concrete object has abstract value, is timeless in the dream parallel.

Fall the deep curtains, delicate the weave, fair the thread.

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

I had drawn away into the salt, myself, a shell emptied of life.

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.

I myself have seen the floating ships And nothing will ever be the same The shouts, The harrowing voices within the house. I stand apart with an army: My mind is graven with ships.

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

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

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

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

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.

Lift up our eyes to you? no, God, we stare and stare, upon a nearer thing that greets us here, Death, violent and near.

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

Long hours trail in their purple and long years are lost in just this moment while our souls are near, our mouths separate.

Love has no charm when Love is swept to earth: you'd make a lop-winged god, frozen and contrite, of god up-darting, winged for passionate flight.

Love is a garment riven in the light that rises from Parnassus, showing the night is over.

Love that I bear within my breast how is my armour melted how my heart

Lovers may come and go, there was the memory of blood, the low call.

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

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

No man will be present in those mysteries, yet all men will kneel, no man will be potent, important, yet all men will feel what it is to be a woman.

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

Not God with wine, nor death, nor hate for a cry, but God with a song

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.

O do not weep, she says, for ages past I was and I endure

O ruthless, perilous, imperious hate, you can not thwart the promptings of my soul.

One flower may slay the winter and meet death.

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

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.

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

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

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.

The Christos-image is most difficult to disentangle from its art-craft junk-shop paint-and-plaster medieval jumble of pain-worship and death-symbol.

The Greeks have snatched up their spears. They have pointed the helms of their ships Toward the bulwarks of Troy.

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.

The quivering of Psyche's butterflies.

The race may or may not be to the swift, but tell me, is it likely that the fight will be entrusted to the dead?

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

The whole white world is ours.

There is no man can take, there is no pool can slake, ultimately I am alone; ultimately I am done.

There must be real gods see, the painted gods how fair!

There's a black rose growing in your garden.

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.

War wreaked on you his hideous ravishment; We, we alone, Nereids inviolate, Remain to weep, with the sea-birds to chant: Corinth is lost, Corinth is desolate.

We are these people, wistful, ironical, wilful, who have no part in new-world reconstruction, in the confederacy of labour.

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

We don't have to know,only to be:let go the jumble of worn words,reason and vanity.

When you would think, "what was the use of it," you'll remember something you can't grasp and you'll wonder what it was.

Who dreams of a son, save one, childless, having no bright face to flatter its own, who dreams of a son?

Why wait for Death to mow? why wait for Death to sow us in the ground?

Words were her plague and words were her redemption.

Writing. Love is writing.

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

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

I will be free,

The heart

Take what the old-church

No one knows the colour of a flower