Stephen Spender Quotes

Let your ghost follow The young men to the Pole, up Everest, to war: by love, be shot. For the uncreating chaos descends And claims you in marriage: though a man, you were ever a bride:

History has tongues Has angels has guns — has saved has praised — Today proclaims Achievements of her exiles long returned Now no more rootless, for whom her printed page Glazes their bruised waste years in one Balancing present sky.

My single pair of eyes Contain the universe they see; Their mirrored multiplicity Is packed into a hollow body Where I reflect the many, in my one.'

The ultimate aim of politics is not politics, but the activities which can be practised within the political framework of the State. Therefore an effective statement of these activities — e.g. science, art, religion — is in itself a declaration of ultimate aims around which the political means will crystallise … a society with no values outside of politics is a machine carrying its human cargo, with no purpose in its institutions reflecting their care, eternal aspirations, loneliness, need for love.

...Tolstoy's characters seem to come forward to meet you, very conscious of the impression they are making on one another and on the reader.

My philosophy, if you can call it that, is that I am happy because there is no sufficient reason why I should be unhappy.

What is precious is never to forget The delight of the blood drawn from ancient springs Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth; Never to deny its pleasure in the simple morning light, Nor its grave evening demand for love; Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.

One, a poet, went babbling like a fountain Through parks. All were jokes to children. All had the pale unshaven stare of shuttered plants Exposed to a too violent sun.

Then, in a flush of rose, she woke and her eyes that opened Swam in blue through her rose flesh that dawned. From her dew of lips, the drop of one word Fell like the first of fountains: murmured 'Darling', upon my ears the song of the first bird. 'My dream becomes my dream,' she said, 'come true. I waken from you to my dream of you.' Oh, my own wakened dream then dared assume The audacity of her sleep. Our dreams Poured into each other's arms, like streams.

When a child, my dreams rode on your wishes, I was your son, high on your horse, My mind a top whipped by the lashes Of your rhetoric, windy of course.

Across this dazzling Mediterranean August morning The dolphins write such Ideograms: With power to wake Me prisoned in My human speech They sign: 'I AM!'

The iron arc of the avoiding journey Curves back upon my weakness at the end; Whether the faint light spark against my face Or in the dark my sight hide from my sight, Centre and circumference are both my weakness.

They think how one life hums, revolves and toils, One cog in a golden singing hive...

To break out of the chaos of my darkness Into a lucid day is all my will. My words like eyes in night, stare to reach A centre for their light: and my acts thrown To distant places by impatient violence Yet lock together to mould a path of stone Out of my darkness into a lucid day.

My words like eyes that flinch from light, refuse And shut upon obscurity; my acts Cast to their opposites by impatient violence Break up the sequent path; they fly On a circumference to avoid the centre.