“If Rilke cut himself shaving, he would bleed poetry.”
—Stephen Spender, The New York Review of Books
“I think that my biggest achievement is that after going through a rather difficult time, I consider myself comparatively sane.”
—Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to the poet Stephen SpenderThe Poems from THAT video
Love After Love
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
Derek Walcott
The Truly Great
BY STEPHEN SPENDER
I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.
What is precious, is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple 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.
Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,
See how these names are fêted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.
Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun
And left the vivid air signed with their honour.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot (Not Elliot.)
And I’m having trouble identifying the Keats poem. I’ll keep working on it.
“Something happens in America which is like the change when water reaches freezing point or boiling point, and I suddenly see Americans in a warm and sympathetic light, which makes their furnishing of their houses, their conformism by which one might so easily judge them, irrelevant.”
—Stephen Spender
British Poet and Writer
