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I don’t know any poetic ideas; it’s probably a sense I’m lacking. I find everything poetic, and it’s in the corners of my heart, which are sometimes mysterious, that I perceive poetry. Led harmoniously, forms and colours in themselves produce poetry. Without letting myself be surprised by the motif, I feel a sensation in front of someone else’s painting that brings me to a poetic state, depending on the painter’s intellectual forces, which emanate from it.
Paul Gauguin
Letter to Vincent van Gogh
Brittany, 7 - 9 September 1888
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For each ecstatic instant
We must an anguish pay
In keen and quivering ratio
To the ecstasy.

For each beloved hour
Sharp pittances of years,
Bitter contested farthings
And coffers heaped with tears.

Emily Dickinson

For each ecstatic instant…

Dickinson makes two main points about the relationship of joy and pain in this poem: joy and pain are inextricably related; joy is inevitably followed or paid for by suffering. Joy is brief; the resulting pain lasts.

Destruction

Always the Demon fidgets here beside me 
And swims around, impalpable as air: 
I drink him, feel him burn the lungs inside me 
With endless evil longings and despair.

Sometimes, knowing my love of Art, he uses 
Seductive forms of women: and has thus, 
With specious, hypocritical excuses, 
Accustomed me to philtres infamous.

Leading me wayworn into wastes untrod
Of boundless Boredom, out of sight of God,
Using all baits to compass my abduction,

Into my eyes, confused and full of woe, 
Soiled clothes and bleeding gashes he will throw 
And all the grim regalia of Destruction.

— Charles Baudelaire, “La Destruction” in Fleurs de Mal (Flowers of Evil, 1857).  Translated by Roy Campbell, Poems of Baudelaire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952)

L’amour s’en va comme cette eau courante
L’amour s’en va
Comme la vie est lente
Et comme l’Espérance est violente.

And love runs down like this
Water, love runs down.
How slow life is,
How violent hope is.

- Guillaume Apollinaire, Le Pont Mirabeau (Mirabeau Bridge), line 13; Alcools (1913).

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In a moment we’ll pass across the world’s threshold
into a region—name it as you please:
wilderness, death, disavowal of language,
or maybe simpler: the silence of love…
Vladimir Nabokov, The Poets (via proustitute)
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Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian generations:
her nocturnal predominance:
her satellitic dependence:
her luminary reflection:
her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect:
her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation:
her potency over effluent and refluent waters:
her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency:
the tranquil inscrutability of her visage:
the terribility of her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity:
her omens of tempest and of calm:
the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas,
her silence:
her splendour, when visible:
her attraction, when invisible.
James Joyce, Ulysses
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You lethargic, waiting upon me,
waiting for the fire and I
attendant upon you, shaken by your beauty

Shaken by your beauty
Shaken.
William Carlos Williams, Paterson

G. Apollinaire’s “La Pont Mirabeau” (The Mirabeau Bridge, 1912, from <i>Alcools</i>)

Under the Mirabeau flows the Seine
And our amours
Shall I remember it again
Joy always followed after Pain

Comes the night sounds the hour
The days go by I endure

Hand in hand rest face to face
While underneath
The bridge of our arms there races
So weary a wave of eternal gazes

Comes the night sounds the hour
The days go by I endure

Love vanishes like the water’s flow
Love vanishes
How life is slow
And how Hope lives blow by blow

Comes the night sounds the hour
The days go by I endure

Let the hour pass the day the same
Time past returns
Nor love again
Under the Mirabeau flows the Seine

Comes the night sounds the hour
The days go by I endure


🇫🇷
[Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
Et nos amours
Faut-il qu’il m’en souvienne
La joie venait toujours après la peine.

Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure

Les mains dans les mains restons face à face
Tandis que sous
Le pont de nos bras passe
Des éternels regards l’onde si lasse

Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure

L’amour s’en va comme cette eau courante
L’amour s’en va
Comme la vie est lente
Et comme l’Espérance est violente

Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure

Passent les jours et passent les semaines
Ni temps passé
Ni les amours reviennent
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine

Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure]

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The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. —Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
The World Is Too Much with Us - William Wordsworth (via fleurdulys)
“Well! we are all condamnes, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve—les homes sont tous condamnes a mort avec des sursis indefinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among ‘the children of the world,’ in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterred or others, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art’s sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.”

—Walter Pater, The Renaissance, Studies in Art and Poetry. Conclusion.

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As one knows the poet by his fine music, so one can recognize the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in neither case will the casual inspiration of the moment suffice. Here, as elsewhere, practice must precede perfection.
Oscar Wilde (via mycolorbook)
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It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions… The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life.

Excerpt of “La Gioconda,” from Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance, describing Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa

Never have I loved a piece of criticism as much as Pater’s. Beautifully written as to give justice to great works of art. I may not agree with Oscar Wilde on some things, but Pater’s great decadent essays should be savored.  

(via livelymind)

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The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only.
Victor Hugo - Les Misérables (via decembrist)

(Source: decembrist)

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Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depths of some devine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes.
Alfred Lord Tennyson (via castlekeys)

(Source: seabois)