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Aldous Huxley

The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems

  • wonderhoyhas quoted3 months ago
    The spirit of life and love that triumphs still
    In its slow struggle towards some far-off goal
    Through lust and death and the bitterness of will.
  • wonderhoyhas quoted3 months ago
    Defined and hard:—If he could kiss her face,
    Could kiss her hair! As if by chance, her hand
    Brushes on his ... Ah, can she understand?
    Or is she pedestalled above the touch
    Of his desire? He wonders: dare he seek
    From her that little, that infinitely much?
    And suddenly she kissed him on the cheek.
  • nhas quoted5 years ago
    I am mine no more: I have become a part
    Of that great earth that draws a breath and stirs
    To meet the spring. But I could wish my heart
    Were still a winter of frosty gossamers.
  • nhas quoted5 years ago
    COMPLAINT OF A POET MANQUÉ
    e judge by appearance merely:
    If I can't think strangely, I can at least look queerly.
  • nhas quoted5 years ago
    And I'm not a poet: but never despair!
    I'll madly live the poems I shall never write.
  • nhas quoted5 years ago
    THE LIFE THEORETIC
    hile I have been fumbling over books
    And thinking about God and the Devil and all,
    Other young men have been battling with the days
    And others have been kissing the beautiful women.
    They have brazen faces like battering-rams.
    But I who think about books and such—
    I crumble to impotent dust before the struggling,
    And the women palsy me with fear.
    But when it comes to fumbling over books
    And thinking about God and the Devil and all,
    Why, there I am.
    But perhaps the battering-rams are in the right of it,
    Perhaps, perhaps ... God knows.
  • nhas quoted5 years ago
    And when, absurdly, death arrives at last,
    'Twill please you awhile to kiss your latest lover.
  • nhas quoted5 years ago
    The wild flowers bloom and die; the heavens go round
    With the song of wheeling planetary rings:
  • nhas quoted5 years ago
    Their immaterial season quickly past,
    They grow opaque, and therefore needs must die,
    Since every earth to earth returns at last.
  • nhas quoted5 years ago
    VALEDICTORY
    had remarked—how sharply one observes
    When life is disappearing round the curves
    Of yet another corner, out of sight!—
    I had remarked when it was "good luck" and "good night"
    And "a good journey to you," on her face
    Certain enigmas penned in the hieroglyphs
    Of that half frown and queer fixed smile and trace
    Of clouded thought in those brown eyes,
    Always so happily clear of hows and ifs—
    My poor bleared mind!—and haunting whys.

    There I stood, holding her farewell hand,
    (Pressing my life and soul and all
    The world to one good-bye, till, small
    And smaller pressed, why there I'd stand
    Dead when they vanished with the sight of her).
    And I saw that she had grown aware,
    Queer puzzled face! of other things
    Beyond the present and her own young speed,
    Of yesterday and what new days might breed
    Monstrously when the future brings
    A charger with your late-lamented head:
    Aware of other people's lives and will,
    Aware, perhaps, aware even of me ...
    The joyous hope of it! But still
    I pitied her; for it was sad to see
    A goddess shorn of her divinity.
    In the midst of her speed she had made pause,
    And doubts with all their threat of claws,
    Outstripped till now by her unconsciousness,
    Had seized on her; she was proved mortal now.
    "Live, only live! For you were meant
    Never to know a thought's distress,
    But a long glad astonishment
    At the world's beauty and your own.
    The pity of you, goddess, grown
    Perplexed and mortal."
    Yet ... yet ... can it be
    That she is aware, perhaps, even of me?

    And life recedes, recedes; the curve is bare,
    My handkerchief flutters blankly in the air;
    And the question rumbles in the void:
    Was she aware, was she after all aware?
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