You are silent and suffer in patience, and they do not understand you, holy being! You wilt away and are silent, for, oh, in vain among barbarians you seek your own kind in the sunlight.

Diotima, Hölderlin

And learned to love amidst the flowers

I held her close, but she faded in the night

They came there regularly every evening drawn by some need. It was as if the water floated off and set sailing thoughts which had grown stagnant on dry land, and gave to their bodies even some sort of physical relief.

To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

Rainy Day Women

Muriel Spark, 1960, by Charles McGrath

Nina Leen, 1949

Who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world?

To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

She longed to cherish that loneliness

They both smiled, standing there. They both felt a common hilarity, excited by the moving waves; and then by the swift cutting race of a sailing boat, which having sliced a curve in the bay, stopped; shivered; let its sail drop down; and then, with a natural instinct to complete the picture, after this swift movement, both of them looked at the dunes far away, and instead of merriment felt come over them some sadness - because the thing was completed partly, and partly because distant views seem to outlast by a million years (Lily thought) the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest.

To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

Rainy Day Women

Mary McCarthy, 1929

He cannot live and last in a poem; he lives and lasts in the world.

Buonaparte, Hölderlin

I breathe the breathless
I love you, I love you—
and let you move forever.

The flowers that I left in the ground, Leonard Cohen

if you like my poems let them
walk in the evening,a little behind you

then people will say
“Along this road i saw a princess pass
on her way to meet her lover(it was
toward nightfall)with tall and ignorant servants.”

if you like my poems let them, e. e. cummings

Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness... I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.

Letter from Virginia to Leonard Woolf, 18? March 1941

Ruby lips

Sophie Gray, John Everett Millais, 1857

Only a great poet knows that the word "incarnadine" belongs to "multitudinous seas".

In Memory of W. B. Yeats

by W. H. Auden

I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

With your hand in mine, idly we'll recline
Amid bowers of neuroses,
While the sun seeks rest in the great red west
We will sit and match psychoses.
So come dwell a while on that distant isle
In the brilliant tropic weather;
Where a Freud in need is a Freud indeed,
We'll always be Jung together.

The Passionate Freudian to His Love, Dorothy Parker

I know the truth now - I know how good and right it is to love - I have, in some part, been given permission to live -

Everything begins from now - I am reborn.

Reborn, Susan Sontag

Silent [film] star face - emphasis was on the eyes; now - on the mouth

Don't have the same type of close-ups any more - face looking at audience, seducing, entreating, etc. [Now] face looks at another face on the screen

Reborn, Susan Sontag

It must drop. It must fall. And then? she thought. For her too there would be the endless night; the endless dark. She looked ahead of her as though she saw opening in front of her a very long dark tunnel. But, thinking of the dark, something baffled her; in fact it was growing light. The blinds were white.

The Years, Virginia Woolf

Julia Strachey by Dora Carrington

Giles Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf

I want what world there is behind your eyes

Charlotte Mew

'It was merely England... I should never be myself anywhere else.'

The Waves, Virginia Woolf

Either way I lose

Stay, this moment

'Anyhow,' she told herself, finishing this paragraph, 'if I die tomorrow, the line is there.'

Virginia Woolf, Hermione Lee

A Poem a Day

Frank O'Hara today

October 8, 1929

Paris

Dear Hemingway,

Joyce would telephone to you if you had one. He asked me to ask you and Pauline to go to their house this evening at about nine. He hopes you will excuse the invitation coming at the last minute, but the party is quite impromptu. They only just now decided to have you. He hopes you are free.

Yours hastily

Sylvia

The Letters of Sylvia Beach

Self Portrait, 1950, Saul Leiter

Dick and Adele, 1947, Saul Leiter

I arise from dreams of thee

E será sempre o mesmo sonho, a mesma ausência.

S de Sophia

São claros e vastos os espaços
Onde baloiça o vento
E ninguém nunca de delícia ou de tormento
Abriu neles os seus braços.

No Alto Mar, Sophia de Mello Breyner Adresen

I saw him cry

Varina no Cais da Ribeira

For something tremendous has happened

Portrait of Anna Akhmatova, 1914, Nathan Altman

A de Akhmatova