1.
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.
Hilda Doolittle
2.
In my garden
the winds have beaten
the ripe lilies;
in my garden, the salt
has wilted the first flakes
of young narcissus.
Hilda Doolittle
3.
...if you do not even understand what words say, how can you expect to pass judgement on what words conceal?
Hilda Doolittle
4.
We are voyagers, discoverers
of the not-known,
the unrecorded;
we have no map;
possibly we will reach haven,
heaven.
Hilda Doolittle
5.
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.
Hilda Doolittle
6.
I will be free,
no lover's kiss
to bind me to earth,
no bliss of love
to counteract
actual bliss.
Hilda Doolittle
7.
Dance until the earth dance.
Hilda Doolittle
8.
She did not look at the daffodils. They didn't mean anything. She looked at the daffodils. She said, 'Thank you for the daffodils.
Hilda Doolittle
9.
One flower may slay the winter
and meet death.
Hilda Doolittle
10.
You are wind in a stark tree,
you are the stark tree unbent,
you are a strung bow,
you are an arrow.
Hilda Doolittle
11.
I could not accept from wisdom
what love taught,
woman is perfect.
Hilda Doolittle
12.
Ah love is bitter and sweet,
but which is more sweet
the bitterness or the sweetness,
none has spoken it.
Hilda Doolittle
13.
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.
Hilda Doolittle
14.
Words were her plague and words were her redemption.
Hilda Doolittle
15.
You will not see
that desire begets
love,
until it all flames
into one concise
and metallic blaze.
Hilda Doolittle
16.
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.
Hilda Doolittle
17.
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 . . .
Hilda Doolittle
18.
I smiled,
I waited,
I was circumspect;
O never, never, never write that I
missed life or loving.
Hilda Doolittle
19.
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!)
Hilda Doolittle
20.
But beauty is set apart,
beauty is cast by the sea,
a barren rock,
beauty is set about
with wrecks of ships.
Hilda Doolittle
21.
For you are abstract,
making no mistake,
slurring no word
in the rhythm you make,
the poem,
writ in the air.
Hilda Doolittle
22.
Writing. Love is writing.
Hilda Doolittle
23.
The elixir of life, the philosopher's stone
is yours if you surrender
sterile logic, trivial reason.
Hilda Doolittle
24.
No one knows the colour of a flower
till it is broken.
Hilda Doolittle
25.
No one knows,
the heart of a child,
how it grows
until it is too late.
Hilda Doolittle
26.
The stallion and his mare,
unbridled, with arrow-pattern,
are worked on.
the blue cloth
before the door
of religion and inspiration.
Hilda Doolittle
27.
When the shingles hissed
in the rain incendiary,
other values were revealed to us
Hilda Doolittle
28.
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.
Hilda Doolittle
29.
There's a black rose growing in your garden.
Hilda Doolittle
30.
Luminous,
unfearful;
high-priestesses,
our fervour
shall banish
all evil.
Hilda Doolittle
31.
Music sets up ladders,
it makes us invisible,
it sets us apart,
it lets us escape;
but from the visible
there is no escape.
Hilda Doolittle
32.
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.
Hilda Doolittle
33.
Dead men would start and move
toward me to learn of love.
Hilda Doolittle
34.
Light threatens, is active, is gone,
so it is with a song.
Hilda Doolittle
35.
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.
Hilda Doolittle
36.
Escape
from the power of the hunting pack,
and to know that wisdom is best
and beauty
sheer holiness.
Hilda Doolittle
37.
It is no madness to say
you will fall, you great cities.
Hilda Doolittle
38.
War is a fevered god who takes alike maiden and king and clod.
Hilda Doolittle
39.
I testify
to rainbow feathers, to the span of heaven
and walls of colour,
the colonnades of jasper.
Hilda Doolittle
40.
O happy, happy each
man whom predestined fate
leads to the holy rite
of hill and mountain worship.
Hilda Doolittle
41.
Maid
of the luminous grey-eyes,
Mistress
of honey and marble implacable white thighs
and Goddess,
chaste daughter of Zeus.
Hilda Doolittle
42.
Sing
and your hell is heaven,
your heaven less hell.
Hilda Doolittle
43.
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.
Hilda Doolittle
44.
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.
Hilda Doolittle
45.
My eye-balls are glass,
my limbs marble,
my face fixed
in its marble mask.
Hilda Doolittle
46.
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.
Hilda Doolittle
47.
I spit
honey out of my mouth:
nothing is second-best
after the sweet of Eros.
Hilda Doolittle
48.
Passionate grave thought,
belief enhanced,
ritual returned and magic.
Hilda Doolittle
49.
For this beauty,
beauty without strength,
chokes out life.
Hilda Doolittle
50.
Every concrete object
has abstract value, is timeless
in the dream parallel.
Hilda Doolittle