The ageing of my body and my beauty is a wound from a merciless knife. I'm not resigned to it at all. I turn to you, Art of Poetry, because you have a kind of knowledge about drugs: certain sedatives, in Language and Imagination. It's a wound from a merciless knife. Bring...
After a while you learn the subtle difference Between holding a hand and chaining a soul, And you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning And company doesn’t mean security. And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts And presents aren’t promises, And you begin to accept your defeats With your head...
The young poet Evmenis complained one day to Theocritus: "I've been writing for two years now and I've composed only one idyll. It's my single completed work. I see, sadly, that the ladder of Poetry is tall, extremely tall; and from this first step I'm standing on now I'll never climb any higher." Theocritus...
ALL that a man achieves and all that he fails to achieve is the direct result of his own thoughts. In a justly ordered universe, where loss of equipoise would mean total destruction, individual responsibility must be absolute. A man’s weakness and strength, purity and...
I said it to you for the clouds I said it to you for the tree of the sea For each wave for the birds in the leaves For the pebbles of sound For familiar hands For the eye that becomes landscape or face And sleep returns it the heaven of...
I failed in everything. Since I had no aims, maybe everything was indeed nothing. What I was taught, I climbed out of that, down from the window at the back of the house. I went to the countryside with grand plans, But all I found there was grass and trees, And when...
I am like the king of a rainy land, Wealthy but powerless, both young and very old, Who contemns the fawning manners of his tutors And is bored with his dogs and other animals. Nothing can cheer him, neither the chase nor falcons, Nor his people dying before his balcony. The...
Half past twelve. The time has quickly passed since nine o'clock when I first turned up the lamp and sat down here. I've been sitting without reading, without speaking. With whom should I speak, so utterly alone within this house? The apparition of my youthful body, since nine o'clock when I...
When suddenly, at midnight, you hear an invisible procession going by with exquisite music, voices, don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now, work gone wrong, your plans all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly. As one long prepared, and graced with courage, say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving. Above all, don’t...
According to one version of this myth, Aphrodite didn't give real Helen to Paris, but one phantom image of her. Hermes ordered by Hera led Helen to Egypt, at the palace of the king Protea, where Menelaos met her as he was returning from Troy....
