Hilda Doolittle Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The heart the heart the heart how it thrives on hate.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The whole white world is ours.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The quivering of Psyche's butterflies.

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.

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