21 Quotes by W.S. Merwin

Separation Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.

part memory part distance remainingmine in the ways that I learn to miss you

Utterance"Sitting over wordsVery late I have heard a kind of whispered sighingNot farLike a night wind in pines or like the sea in the darkThe echo of everything that has everBeen spokenStill spinning its one syllableBetween the earth and silence

My words are the garment of what I shall never be Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy.

I offer you what I have myPoverty

from what we cannot hold the stars are made

Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.

So this is what I amPondering his eyes that could notConceive that I was a creature to run fromI who have always believed too much in words

I think there's a kind of desperate hope built into poetry now that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there's still time.