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Ghostly above us in lamplight the towers gleam ... and after a while they will fall to dust and rain or else we will tear them down with impatient hands and hew rock out of the earth, and build them again.

Conrad Aiken

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Conrad Aiken
Age: 84 †
Born: 1889
Born: August 5
Died: 1973
Died: August 17
Essayist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Writer
Savannah
Georgia
Conrad Aiken
Earth
Rain
Rock
Lamplight
Build
Ghostly
Rocks
Gleam
Tears
Impatient
Fall
Towers
Else
Tear
Hands
Dust

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Death is never an ending, death is a change Death is beautiful, for death is strange Death is one dream out of another flowing.
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I've tried it long ago, with hashish and peyote. Fascinating, yes, but no good, no. This, as we find in alcohol, is an escape from awareness, a cheat, a momentary substitution, and in the end a destruction of it.
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Youth yearns to youth, full blood loves full blood only.
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I began by doing book reviews on the typewriter and then went over to short stories on the machine, meanwhile sticking to pencil for poetry.
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I really don't know enough about the structure of fiction.
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Music I heard with you was more than music, and bread I broke with you was more than bread. Now that I am without you, all is desolate all that was once so beautiful is dead.
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The wind shrieks, the wind grieves It dashes the leaves on walls, it whirls then again And the enormous sleeper vaguely and stupidly dreams And desires to stir, to resist a ghost of pain.
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[At a musical concert:] . . . the music's pure algebra of enchantment.
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The hiss was now becoming a roar - the whole world was a vast moving screen of snow - but even now it said peace, it said remoteness, it said cold, it said sleep.
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I love you, what star do you live on?
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My heart has become as hard as a city street, the horses trample upon it, it sings like iron, all day long and all night long they beat, they ring like the hooves of time.
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The days, the nights, flow one by one above us. The hours go silently over our lifted faces. We are like dreamers who walk beneath a sea. Beneath high walls we flow in the sun together. We sleep, we wake, we laugh, we pursue, we flee.
Conrad Aiken
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Death is one dream out of another flowing.
Conrad Aiken
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Oh, I've discarded a great many [poems]. And occasionally I've discarded and then resurrected. I would find a crumpled yellow ball of paper in the wastebasket, in the morning, and open it to see what the hell I'd been up to and occasionally it was something that needed only a very slight change to be brought off, which I'd missed the day before.
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Time in the heart and sequence in the brain-- Such as destroyed Rimbaud and fooled Verlaine. And let us then take godhead by the neck-- And strangle it, and with it, rhetoric.
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Come back, true love! Sweet youth, return!— But time goes on, and will, unheeding, Though hands will reach, and eyes will yearn, And the wild days set true hearts bleeding.
Conrad Aiken
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It's time to make love, douse the glim The fireflies twinkle and dim The stars lean together Like birds of a feather, And the loin lies down with the limb.
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All lovely things will have an ending, all lovely things will fade and die and youth, that's now so bravely spending, Will beg a penny by and by.
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Separate we come, and separate we go, And this be it known, is all that we know.
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Forward into the untrodden! Courage, old man, and hold on to your umbrella!
Conrad Aiken