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"She says, "But in contentment I still feel
The need for imperishable bliss."
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires.
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?"
About Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens (2 October 1879 – 2 August 1955) was an American modernist poet and businessman.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Shorter versions of this quote
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires.
Additional quotes by Wallace Stevens
From this the poem springs: that we live in a place
That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves
And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.
The Planet On The Table
Ariel was glad he had written his poems.
They were of a remembered time
Or of something seen that he liked.
Other makings of the sun
Were waste and welter
And the ripe shrub writhed.
His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of his self,
Were no less makings of the sun.
It was not important that they survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,
Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.
I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office.