Our minds can go no further. The human imagination is capable of no further expression of beauty than the carved owl of Athene, the archaic, marble serpent, the arrogant selfish head of the Acropolis Apollo.
— Hilda Doolittle
The most controversy Hilda Doolittle quotes that are little-known but priceless
In my garden the winds have beaten the ripe lilies;
in my garden, the salt has wilted the first flakes of young narcissus.
The fallen hazel-nuts, Stripped late of their green sheaths, The grapes, red-purple, Their berries Dripping with wine, Pomegranates already broken, And shrunken fig, And quinces untouched, I bring thee as offering.
I could not accept from wisdom what love taught, woman is perfect.
She did not look at the daffodils. They didn't mean anything. She looked at the daffodils. She said, 'Thank you for the daffodils.
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.
You will not see that desire begets love, until it all flames into one concise and metallic blaze.
Words were her plague and words were her redemption.
O beautiful white land, olives and wild anemone and violet mingled among the shale, and purple wings of little winter-butterflies say, here Psyche, the soul, lies.
Until it seems the whole city will be covered with gold pollen shaken from the bell-towers, lilies plundered with the weight of massive bees . . .
I smiled, I waited, I was circumspect; O never, never, never write that I missed life or loving.
Luminous, unfearful; high-priestesses, our fervour shall banish all evil.
Writing. Love is writing.
The elixir of life, the philosopher's stone is yours if you surrender sterile logic, trivial reason.
The stallion and his mare, unbridled, with arrow-pattern, are worked on.
the blue cloth before the door of religion and inspiration.
Music sets up ladders, it makes us invisible, it sets us apart, it lets us escape; but from the visible there is no escape.
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.
Dead men would start and move toward me to learn of love.
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.
Escape from the power of the hunting pack, and to know that wisdom is best and beauty sheer holiness.
I testify to rainbow feathers, to the span of heaven and walls of colour, the colonnades of jasper.
remember the golden apple-trees; O, do not pity them, as you watch them drop one by one, for they fall exhausted, numb, blind but in certain ecstasy, for theirs is the hunger for Paradise.
It is no madness to say you will fall, you great cities.
O happy, happy each man whom predestined fate leads to the holy rite of hill and mountain worship.
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.
Maid of the luminous grey-eyes, Mistress of honey and marble implacable white thighs and Goddess, chaste daughter of Zeus.
Passionate grave thought, belief enhanced, ritual returned and magic.
I spit honey out of my mouth: nothing is second-best after the sweet of Eros.
Fall the deep curtains, delicate the weave, fair the thread.
Lift up our eyes to you? no, God, we stare and stare, upon a nearer thing that greets us here, Death, violent and near.
Not God with wine, nor death, nor hate for a cry, but God with a song
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.
(Those women whom the distaff no longer claims nor spun cloth) driven made, mad, mad by Bacchus.
We don't have to know,only to be:let go the jumble of worn words,reason and vanity.
Dance until the earth dance.
War is a fevered god who takes alike maiden and king and clod.
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.
The Greeks have snatched up their spears.
They have pointed the helms of their ships Toward the bulwarks of Troy.
Ardent yet chill and formal, how I ache to tempt a chisel as a sculptor.
Love that I bear within my breast how is my armour melted how my heart
War wreaked on you his hideous ravishment;
We, we alone, Nereids inviolate, Remain to weep, with the sea-birds to chant: Corinth is lost, Corinth is desolate.
Thoth, Hermes, the stylus, the palette, the pen, the quill endure, though our books are a floor of smouldering ash under our feet.
Love, why have you sought the horde of spearsmen, why the tent Achilles pitched beside the river-ford?
The quivering of Psyche's butterflies.
I will be free, no lover's kiss to bind me to earth, no bliss of love to counteract actual bliss.
Ah love is bitter and sweet, but which is more sweet the bitterness or the sweetness, none has spoken it.
The whole white world is ours.
Love has no charm when Love is swept to earth: you'd make a lop-winged god, frozen and contrite, of god up-darting, winged for passionate flight.
That way of inspiration is always open, and open to everyone;
it acts as go-between, interpreter, it explains symbols of the past in to-day's imagery.