Edith Sitwell (1887 – 1964)
English poet and critic.
The living blind and seeing Dead together lie
As if in love . . . There was no more hating then,
And no more love; Gone is the heart of Man.
Small things I handled and caressed and loved.
I let the stars assume the whole of night.
Still falls the Rain
At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross.
Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us —
I am resigned to the fact that people who don't know me loathe me. Perhaps it is because I am a woman writing poetry. It must be annoying to a man who wants to write to see this horrid old lady who can.
White as a winding sheet,
Masks blowing down the street:
Moscow, Paris London, Vienna — all are undone.
The drums of death are mumbling, rumbling, and tumbling,
Mumbling, rumbling, and tumbling,
The world's floors are quaking, crumbling and breaking.
I wouldn't dream of following a fashion... how could one be a different person every three months?
Tall windows show Infinity;
And, hard reality,
The candles weep and pry and dance
Like lives mocked at by Chance.
The trouble with most Englishwomen is that they will dress as if they had been a mouse in a previous incarnation... they do not want to attract attention.
People are usually made Dames for virtues I do not possess.
I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. ... I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. ... I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.
The aim of flattery is to soothe and encourage us by assuring us of the truth of an opinion we have already formed about ourselves.
Within your magic web of hair, lies furled
The fire and splendour of the ancient world;
The dire gold of the comet's wind-blown hair;
The songs that turned to gold the evening air
When all the stars of heaven sang for joy.
I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent.
The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth.
The great gold planet that is the mourning heat of the Sun
Is greater than all gold, more powerful
Than the tawny body of a Lion that fire consumes
Like all that grows or leaps... so is the heart
More powerful than all dust.
I'm not the man to baulk at a low smell,
I’m not the man to insist on asphodel.
This sounds like a He-fellow, don’t you think?
It sounds like that. I belch, I bawl, I drink.
There are people, also, who cannot believe that beauty and gaiety are a part of goodness.
When we think of cruelty, we must try to remember the stupidity, the envy, the frustration from which it has arisen.
Oh how the Vacancy
Laughed at them rushing by.
"Turn again, flesh and brain,
Only yourselves again!
How far above the ape
Differing in each shape,
You with your regular
Meaningless circles are!"
Still falls the Rain —
Still falls the Blood from the Starved Man's wounded Side:
He bears in His Heart all wounds, — those of the light that died,
The last faint spark
In the self-murdered heart, the wounds of the sad uncomprehending dark...
Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.