Quotes from Vicente Aleixandre

Poetry is a succession of questions which the poet constantly poses.

Poetry is a succession of questions which the poet constantly poses.

In the deepest nights words left behind or asleep may find their connections. In scattered papers, who knows or forgets them? Someday perhaps they'll resonate—who knows?— in a few sympathetic hearts.

I would say a few words in your ear. A doubtful man has little faith. Live a long time and it gets dark, and suddenly you know you don't know yourself. But I'd say them even so. Since my eyes repeat what they take in: your beauty, your name, the river's sound, the woods, the soul on its own.

After the dead words, after the ones still said and spoken, what do you expect? Some flying leaves, more scattered papers. Who knows? Some dissolving words, like the light or the echo dying out there in the great night.

I move and, circling, seek myself, O center, O center, road, voyagers of the world, of the future existing beyond the seas, in my pulse-beat.

Un pájaro de papel en el pecho dice que el tiempo de los besos no ha llegado

Did I know who I was, or did I just learn to forget myself?

I have such a dark mission, loving you.

That profound darkness where weeping doesn't exist.

yes, I know what you loved, brooding by the shore, your cheek in your still-damp hand, thinking, —Vicente Aleixandre, from "Tragic Destiny," A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2007)

I love you, yes, oh Shivering One!

Wrap me up in the reddest cloak, in that flight of your tendons, and lead me into another kingdom, into the heroic ability to love, into the combination to every safe, into the wild dice you feel in your sad fingers when roses shipwreck next to the bridge of salvation. When there's nothing you can do.

If I die, leave me alone. Don't sing to me. Bury me wrapped in the deck I leave behind, in that lovely treasure that will know how to strum me like a sure hand. I'll sound like a fragrance from the depths, very grave. I 'll rise to your ears, and from there, turned into pure vegetation, I 'll debunk myself, untelling my own story, my own plot, Rowing back into my mouth left ajar, into the Dream that keeps on swallowing and, like a cardboard mask, won 't cough me up.

Fertile ether where the destruction of worlds is a single heart that burns itself out with love.

Deeper, much deeper, the fire purifies. It is the wilderness fire to which no one descends. An exile, forbidden to souls, forbidden to shadows. Bowels that burn with an unholy solitude.

You are the calling of lovers, the signals that silently appeal to one another in the dark. Sky with rubbed out stars, you give yourself, like a warm field, to these noiseless wings.

There are moments of loneliness when the astonished heart realizes it feels no love.

Pero otro día toco tu mano. Mano tibia... Tu delicada mano silente. A veces cierro mis ojos y toco leve tu mano, leve toque que comprueba su forma, que tienta su estructura, sintiendo bajo la piel alada el duro hueso insobornable, el triste hueso adonde no llega nunca el amor. Oh carne dulce, que sí empapa del amor hermoso.

Allí surtiendo de lo oscuro, rompiendo de lo oscuro, serena, pero casi cruel, como una leve diosa recobrada, hete aquí que ella emerge, sagradamente su ademán extendiendo, para que la luz del día, la ya gozosa luz que la asalta, se vierta doradamente viva sobre su palma núbil.

And so eternity was the minute.

We've gone over all the soul's smallest details.

Man's dignity is in his death.

And let the clean space shine in the hands of its captor the slow, elegant, daily drinker of the waves.