Quotes from Hilda Doolittle

O happy, happy each man whom predestined fate leads to the holy rite of hill and mountain worship.

I fear no man, no woman; flower does not fear bird, insect nor adder.

There is no man can take, there is no pool can slake, ultimately I am alone; ultimately I am done.

No man will be present in those mysteries, yet all men will kneel, no man will be potent, important, yet all men will feel what it is to be a woman.

Light threatens, is active, is gone, so it is with a song.

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.

I testify to rainbow feathers, to the span of heaven and walls of colour, the colonnades of jasper.

Take what the old-church found in Mithra's tomb, candle and script and bell, take what the new-church spat upon and broke and shattered.

Escape from the power of the hunting pack, and to know that wisdom is best and beauty sheer holiness.

The stallion and his mare, unbridled, with arrow-pattern, are worked on. the blue cloth before the door of religion and inspiration.

No one knows the colour of a flower till it is broken.

No one knows, the heart of a child, how it grows until it is too late.

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.

We are voyagers, discoverers of the not-known, the unrecorded; we have no map; possibly we will reach haven, heaven.

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.

I smiled, I waited, I was circumspect; O never, never, never write that I missed life or loving.

The elixir of life, the philosopher's stone is yours if you surrender sterile logic, trivial reason.

Could beauty be beaten out, O youth the cities have sent to strike at each other's strength, it is you who have kept her alight.

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.

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.

Alas, day, you brought light, You trailed splendour You showed us god: I salute you, most precious one, But I go to a new place, Another life.

For this beauty, beauty without strength, chokes out life.

I had drawn away into the salt, myself, a shell emptied of life.

The race may or may not be to the swift, but tell me, is it likely that the fight will be entrusted to the dead?