Adelaide Crapsey Quotes

#1. Three grey women walk with me
Fate and Grief and Memory.
My fate brought grief; my grief must be
With me through Eternity,
Such thy power, memory.
Three grey women walk with me.

Adelaide Crapsey

#2. Look up ...
From bleakening hills
Blows down the light, first breath
Of wintry wind ... look up, and scent
The snow!

Adelaide Crapsey

#3. Wouldst thou find my ashes? Look
In the pages of my book;
And as these thy hand doth turn,
Know here is my funeral urn.

Adelaide Crapsey

#4. As it
Were tissue of silver
I'll wear, O Fate, thy grey,
And go mistily radiant, clad
Like the moon.

Adelaide Crapsey

#5. Seen on a night in November
How frail
Above the bulk
Of crashing water hangs,
Autumn, evanescent, wan,
The moon.

Adelaide Crapsey

#6. Ere the horne'd owl hoot
Once and twice and thrice there shall
Go among the blind brown worms
News of thy great burial;
When the pomp is passed away,
'Here's a King,' the worms shall say.

Adelaide Crapsey

#7. If it
Were lighter touch
Than petal of flower resting
On grass, oh still too heavy it were,
Too heavy!

Adelaide Crapsey

#8. In your
Curled petals what ghosts
Of blue headlands and seas,
What perfumed immortal breath sighing
Of Greece.

Adelaide Crapsey

#9. Sea-foam
And coral! Oh, I'll
Climb the great pasture rocks
And dream me mermaid in the sun's
Gold flood.

Adelaide Crapsey

#10. Listen ... With faint dry sound, Like steps of passing ghosts, The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break free from the trees And fall.

Adelaide Crapsey

#11. Still as
On windless nights
The moon-cast shadows are,
So still will be my heart when I
Am dead.

Adelaide Crapsey

#12. Is it as plainly in our living shown,
By which way the wind hath blown?

Adelaide Crapsey

#13. Reap, reap the grain and gather
The sweet grapes from the vine;
Our Lord's mother is weeping,
She hath nor bread nor wine;
She is weeping. The Queen of Heaven,
She hath nor bread nor wine.

Adelaide Crapsey

#14. Oh Lady, let the sad tears fall
To speak thy pain,
Gently as through the silver dusk
The silver rain.
Oh, let thy bosom breathe its grief
In such soft sigh
As hath the wind in gardens where
Pale roses die.

Adelaide Crapsey

#15. The old
Old winds that blew
When chaos was, what do
They tell the clattered trees that I
Should weep?

Adelaide Crapsey

#16. Just now,
Out of the strange
Still dusk ... as strange, as still ...
A white moth flew ... Why am I grown
So cold?

Adelaide Crapsey

#17. And if the many sayings of the wise
Teach of submission I will not submit
But with a spirit all unreconciled
Flash an unquenched defiance to the stars.

Adelaide Crapsey

#18. Not thou,
White rose, but thy
Ensanguined sister is
The dear companion of my heart's
Shed blood.

Adelaide Crapsey

#19. Scarlet the poppies
Blue the corn-flowers,
Golden the wheat.
Gold for the Eternal:
Blue for Our Lady:
Red for the five
Wounds of her Son.

Adelaide Crapsey

#20. With night's
Dim veil and blue
I will cover my eyes,
I will bind close my eyes that are
So weary.

Adelaide Crapsey

#21. I knowNot these my handsAnd yet I think there wasA woman like me once had handsLike these.

Adelaide Crapsey

#22. Dost thou
Not feel them slip,
How cold! how cold! the moon's
Thin wavering finger-tips, along
Thy throat?

Adelaide Crapsey

#23. No guile?
Nay, but so strangely
He moves among us. Not this
Man but Barabbas! Release to us
Barabbas!

Adelaide Crapsey

#24. These be Three silent things: The Falling snow ... the hour Before the dawn ... the mouth of one Just dead.

Adelaide Crapsey

#25. Pain ebbs,
And like cool balm,
An opiate weariness
Settles on eye-lids, on relaxed
Pale wrists.

Adelaide Crapsey

#26. Sun and wind and beat of sea,
Great lands stretching endlessly ...
Where be bonds to bind the free?
All the world was made for me!

Adelaide Crapsey

#27. Thou hast
Drawn laughter from
A well of secret tears
And thence so elvish it rings, -mocking
And sweet.

Adelaide Crapsey

#28. But me
They cannot touch,
Old age and death.the strange
And ignominious end of old
Dead folk!

Adelaide Crapsey

#29. My object to venture the suggestion that an important application of phonetics to metrical problems lies in the study of phonetic word-structure.

Adelaide Crapsey

#30. Why have I
thought the dew
Ephemeral when I
Shall rest so short a time, myself,
On earth?

Adelaide Crapsey

#31. If illness' end be health regained then I
Will pay you, Asculapeus, when I die.

Adelaide Crapsey

#32. Why do
You thus devise
Evil against her?' 'For that
She is beautiful, delicate;
Therefore.

Adelaide Crapsey