W.S. Merwin Quotes

“We are asleep with compasses in our hands.”

“Tell me what you see vanishing and I will tell you who you are”

“On the last day of the world
I would want to plant a tree”

“Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.”

“So this is what I am

Pondering his eyes that could not
Conceive that I was a creature to run from

I who have always believed too much in words”

“What you remember saves you.”

“The story of each stone leads back to a mountain.”

“part memory part distance remaining
mine in the ways that I learn to miss you”

“come back
believer in shade
believer in silence and elegance
believer in ferns
believer in patience
believer in the rain”

“Send me out into another life
lord because this one is growing faint
I do not think it goes all the way”

“we travel far and fast
and as we pass through we forget
where we have been”

“How beautiful you must be
to have been able to lead me
this far with only
the sound of your going away”

“My words are the garment of what I shall never be
Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy.”

“You grieve
Not that heaven does not exist but
That it exists without us”

“Sitting over words
Very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing
Not far
Like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark
The echo of everything that has ever
Been spoken
Still spinning its one syllable
Between the earth and silence”