“I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
Source: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Poems
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T.S. Eliot270
20th century English author 1888–1965Related quotes
Empedocles (-490–-430 BC) ancient Greek philosopher
fr. 117
Variant translations:
Once on a time a youth was I, and I was a maiden/A bush, a bird, and a fish with scales that gleam in the ocean.
tr. Jane Ellen Harrison
Purifications
Source: Harrison, Jane Ellen. (1903). Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. Princeton University Press. p. 590.
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland
“Have always been at daggers-drawing,
And one another clapper-clawing.”
Samuel Butler (poet) (1612–1680) poet and satirist
Canto II, line 79
Source: Hudibras, Part II (1664)
“Stately as a galleon, I sail across the floor,
Doing the military two-step, as in the days of yore.”
Joyce Grenfell (1910–1979) British comedian, singer, actress
Stately as a Galleon (1978), " Stately as a Galleon http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1241.html"
“Memories cartwheel out of her head & tumble across the floor.”
Anthony Doerr book All the Light We Cannot See
Source: All the Light We Cannot See
“Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghost”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet
"Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit"
Transport to Summer (1947)
Context: p> If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the room and on the stair,Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghostOr Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.He must be incapable of speaking, closed,
As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolnessA vermillioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.</p
“Risest from forth thy silent sea of pines.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher
"Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni" (1802)
William Watson (poet) (1858–1935) English poet, born 1858
World-Strangeness, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).