Stephen Spender: Eye

Stephen Spender was English poet and man of letters. Explore interesting quotes on eye.
Stephen Spender: 152   quotes 1   like

“Opening, my eyes say 'Let there be light',
Closing, they shut me in a coffin.”

Stephen Spender

"The Human Situation"
The Still Centre (1939)
Context: And if this I were destroyed,
The image shattered,
My perceived, rent world would fly
In an explosion of final judgement
To the ends of the sky,
The colour in the iris of the eye.
Opening, my eyes say 'Let there be light',
Closing, they shut me in a coffin.

Light

“What the eye delights in, no longer dictates
My greed to enjoy”

Stephen Spender

"Experience"
The Still Centre (1939)
Context: What the eye delights in, no longer dictates
My greed to enjoy: boys, grass, the fenced-off
deer.
It leaves those figures that distantly play
On the horizon's rim: they sign their peace, in games.

“In railway halls, on pavements near the traffic,
They beg, their eyes made big by empty staring
And only measuring Time, like the blank clock.”

Stephen Spender

"In Railway Halls, on Pavements Near the Traffic"
Context: In railway halls, on pavements near the traffic,
They beg, their eyes made big by empty staring
And only measuring Time, like the blank clock. No, I shall weave no tracery of pen-ornament
To make them birds upon my singing tree:
Time merely drives these lives which do not live
As tides push rotten stuff along the shore.

Time

“Your quicksilver declaiming eye
Had frozen to the stare of a straight line
Which only saw goals painted in its beam
And made an artificial darkness all around
Which thickened into Allies.”

Stephen Spender

"Napoleon In 1814"
The Still Centre (1939)

Painting

“There was a wood,
Habitation of foxes and fleshy burrows,
Where I learnt to uncast my childhood, and not alone,
I learnt, not alone. There were four hands, four eyes,
A third mouth of the dark to kiss. Two people
And a third not either: and both double, yet different.
I entered with myself. I left with a woman.”

Stephen Spender

"Experience"
The Still Centre (1939)

People , Kiss , Childhood

“The guns spell money's ultimate reason
In letters of lead on the spring hillside.
But the boy lying dead under the olive trees
Was too young and too silly
To have been notable to their important eye.
He was a better target for a kiss.”

Stephen Spender

"Ultima Ratio Regum"
The Still Centre (1939)

Money , Spring , Boy , Lying

“My single pair of eyes
Contain the universe they see;
Their mirrored multiplicity
Is packed into a hollow body
Where I reflect the many, in my one.”

Stephen Spender

"The Human Situation"
The Still Centre (1939)

Universe

“My words like eyes that flinch from light, refuse
And shut upon obscurity; my acts
Cast to their opposites by impatient violence
Break up the sequent path; they fly
On a circumference to avoid the centre.”

Stephen Spender

"Darkness And Light"
The Still Centre (1939)

Light , Flying

“You stared out of the window on the emptiness
Of a world exploding:
Stones and rubble thrown upwards in a fountain
Blasted sideways by the wind.
Every sensation except loneliness
Was drained out of your mind
By the lack of any motionless object the eye could
find.
You were a child again
Who sees for the first time things happen.”

Stephen Spender

"To A Spanish Poet" (for Manuel Altolaguirre)
The Still Centre (1939)

World , Time , Loneliness

“You drive the landscape like a herd of clouds
Moving against your horizontal tower
Of steadfast speed.
All England lies beneath you like a woman
With limbs ravished
By one glance carrying all these eyes.”

Stephen Spender

"The Midlands Express"
The Still Centre (1939)

Speed