25 Cecil Day Lewis Quotes

Cecil Day Lewis quotes

1. Is it birthday weather for you, dear soul? Is it fine your way

2. It's hard to believe a spirit could die Of such generous glow

3. Put out the lights now! Look at the Tree, the rough tree dazzled In oriole plumes of flame, Tinselled with twinkling frost fire, tasselled With stars and moons

4. So feast your eyes now On mimic star and moon-cold bauble: Worlds may wither unseen, But the Christmas Tree is a tree of fable, A phoenix in evergreen

5. Who will say farewell? The beating bell. Will anyone miss me? That I dare not tell - Quick, Rose, and kiss me.

6. Tempt me no more, for I Have known the lightning's hour, The poet's inward pride, The certainty of power.

7. I have had worse partings, but none that so Gnaws at my mind still.

8. They who in folly or mere greed Enslaved religion, markets, laws, Borrow our language now and bid Us to speak up in freedom's cause.

9. It is the logic of our times, No subject for immortal verse- That we who lived by honest dreams Defend the bad against the worse.

10. Nigel's six feet sprawled all over the place; his gestures were nervous and little uncouth; a lock of sandy coloured hair dropping over his forehead, and the deceptive naivete of his face in repose gave him a resemblance to an overgrown prep. schoolboy. His eyes were the same blue as his uncle's, but shortsighted and noncommittal. Yet there was an underlying similarity between the two. A latent, sardonic humor in their conversation, a friendliness and simple generosity in their smiles, and that impression of energy in reserve which is always given by those who possess an abundance of life directed towards consciously-realised aims.

1. Selfhood begins with a walking away, And love is proved in letting go.

2. Love is proved in the letting go.

3. To travel like a bird, lightly to view | Deserts where stone gods founder in the sand, | Ocean embraced in a white sleep with land; | To escape time, always to start anew... | Hooded by a dark sense of destination... | Travelers, we're fabric of the road we go; We settle, but like feathers on time's flow.

4. High sprits they had: gravity they flouted.

5. There's a kind of release And a kind of torment in every goodbye for every man.

6. The poetic myths are dead; and the poetic image, which is the myth of the individual, reigns in their stead.

7. Flying alone! Nothing gives such a sense of mastery over time over mechanism, mastery indeed over space, time, and life itself, as this.

8. A poet is not a public figure. A poet should be read and not seen.

9. It is unwise to equate scientific activity with what we call reason, poetic activity with what we call imagination. Without the imaginative leap from facts to generalisation, no theoretic discovery in science is made. The poet, on the other hand, must not imagine but reason--that is to say, he must exercise a great deal of consciously directed thought in the selection and rejection of his data: there is a technical logic, a poetic reasoning in his choice of the words, rhythms and images by which a poem's coherence is achieved.

10. “When bullying April bruised mine eyes With sleet-bound appetites and crude Experiments of green, I still was wise And kissed the blossoming rod.”

11. “The river this November afternoon Rests in an equipoise of sun and cloud: A glooming light, a gleaming darkness shroud Its passage. All seems tranquil, all in tune.”

12. “See this abdicated beast, once king Of them all, nibble his claws: Not anger enough left—no, nor despair— To break his teeth on the bars.”

13. “poetry is not—except in a very limited sense—a form of self-expression. Who on earth supposes that the pearl expresses the oyster?”

14. “And yet this self, contains Tides, continents and stars―a myriad selves, Is small and solitary as one grass-blade Passed over by the wind Amongst a myriad grasses on the prairie.”

15. “In June we picked the clover, And sea-shells in July: There was no silence at the door, No word from the sky. A hand came out of August And flicked his life away: We had not time to bargain, mope, Moralize, or pray.”