12 Conrad Aiken Quotes on Nature

Conrad Aiken quotes on nature

5. And the shadows of tree-trunks and shadows of leaves Interlace with low voices and footsteps and sunlight To divide us forever.

9. O sweet clean earth, from whom the green blade cometh! When we are dead, my best beloved and I, Close well above us, that we may rest forever, Sending up grass and blossoms to the sky.

14. We flow, we descend, we turn . . . and the eternal dreamer Moves among us like light, like evening air . . .

18. Before him, numberless lovers smiled and talked. And death was observed with sudden cries, And birth with laughter and pain. And the trees grew taller and blacker against the skies And night came down again.

22. We were all born of flesh, in a flare of pain, We do not remember the red roots whence we rose, But we know that we rose and walked, that after a while We shall lie down again.

24. And we recall, with a gleaming stab of sadness, Vaguely and incoherently, some dream Of a world we came from, a world of sun-blue hills . . . A black wood whispers around us, green eyes gleam; Someone cries in the forest, and someone kills.

30. Weave, weave, weave, you streaks of rain! I am dissolved and woven again... Thousands of faces rise and vanish before me. Thousands of voices weave in the rain.

33. The wind shrieks, the wind grieves; It dashes the leaves on walls, it whirls then again; And the enormous sleeper vaguely and stupidly dreams And desires to stir, to resist a ghost of pain.

35. We rub the darkness from our eyes, And face our thousand devious secret mornings . . . And do not see how the pale mist, slowly ascending, Shaped by the sun, shines like a white-robed dreamer Compassionate over our towers bending.

43. Lovers walk in the noontime by that fountain. Pigeons dip their beaks to drink from the water. And soon the pond must freeze.

45. Death is a meeting place of sea and sea.

46. Two lovers, here at the corner, by the steeple, Two lovers blow together like music blowing: And the crowd dissolves about them like a sea. Recurring waves of sound break vaguely about them, They drift from wall to wall, from tree to tree.