Edward Hirsch > Quotes

“I am a tiny seashell
that has secretly drifted ashore
and carries the sound of the ocean
surging through its body.”
― Edward Hirsch

“A Partial History of My Stupidity

Traffic was heavy coming off the bridge
and I took the road to the right, the wrong one,
and got stuck in the car for hours.

Most nights I rushed out into the evening
without paying attention to the trees,
whose names I didn't know,
or the birds, which flew heedlessly on.

I couldn't relinquish my desires
or accept them, and so I strolled along
like a tiger that wanted to spring,
but was still afraid of the wildness within.

The iron bars seemed invisible to others,
but I carried a cage around inside me.

I cared too much what other people thought
and made remarks I shouldn't have made.
I was slient when I should have spoken.

Forgive me, philosophers,
I read the Stoics but never understood them.

I felt that I was living the wrong life,
spiritually speaking,
while halfway around the world
thousands of people were being slaughtered,
some of them by my countrymen.

So I walked on--distracted, lost in thought--
and forgot to attend to those who suffered
far away, nearby.

Forgive me, faith, for never having any.

I did not believe in God,
who eluded me.”
― Edward Hirsch

“I need to live like that crooked tree--...
that knelt down in the hardest winds
but could not be blasted away.”
― Edward Hirsch

“And every year there is a brief, startling moment
When we pause in the middle of a long walk home and
Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless
Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air:
It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies;
It is the changing light of fall falling on us.”
― Edward Hirsch, Wild Gratitude

“All that rescues us is love.”
― Edward Hirsch, On Love: Poems

“Works of art imitate and provoke other works of art, the process is the source of art itself.”
― Edward Hirsch

“Read poems to yourself in the middle of the night. Turn on a single lamp and read them while you're alone in an otherwise dark room or while someone else sleeps next to you. Read them when you're wide awake in the early morning, fully alert. Say them over to yourself in a place where silence reigns and the din of the culture — the constant buzzing noise that surrounds us — has momentarily stopped. These poems have come from a great distance to find you.”
― Edward Hirsch

“I did not know the work of mourning
Is like carrying a bag of cement
Up a mountain at night

The mountaintop is not in sight
Because there is no mountaintop
Poor Sisyphus grief

I did not know I would struggle
Through a ragged underbrush
Without an upward path

...

Look closely and you will see
Almost everyone carrying bags
Of cement on their shoulders

That’s why it takes courage
To get out of bed in the morning
And climb into the day.”
― Edward Hirsch, Gabriel: A Poem

“I wish I could believe in the otherworld I wish I could believe in a place Of reunions outside of memory”
― Edward Hirsch, Gabriel: A Poem

“Look closely and you will see Almost everyone carrying bags Of cement on their shoulders That’s why it takes courage To get out of bed in the morning And climb into the day”
― Edward Hirsch, Gabriel: A Poem

“To Poetry"

Don’t desert me
just because I stayed up last night
watching The Lost Weekend.

I know I’ve spent too much time
praising your naked body to strangers
and gossiping about lovers you betrayed.

I’ve stalked you in foreign cities
and followed your far-flung movements,
pretending I could describe you.

Forgive me for getting jacked on coffee
and obsessing over your features
year after jittery year.

I’m sorry for handing you a line
and typing you on a screen,
but don’t let me suffer in silence.

Does anyone still invoke the Muse,
string a wooden lyre for Apollo,
or try to saddle up Pegasus?

Winged horse, heavenly god or goddess,
indifferent entity, secret code, stored magic,
pleasance and half wonder, hell,

I have loved you my entire life
without even knowing what you are
or how—please help me—to find you.”
― Edward Hirsch

“Robert Frost liked to distinguish between grievances (complaints) and griefs (sorrows). He even suggested that grievances, which are propagandistic, should be restricted to prose, “leaving poetry free to go its way in tears.”
― Edward Hirsch, How To Read A Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry

“I did not know the work of mourning Is a labor in the dark We carry inside ourselves”
― Edward Hirsch, Gabriel: A Poem

“The same soul never steps into the river twice.”
― Edward Hirsch, On Love: Poems

“I keep scraping the canvas
And painting him over again
But he keeps slipping away”
― Edward Hirsch, Gabriel: A Poem

“If you had told me, though, when I was twenty-four that I would write about Skokie, Illinois, where I grew up, I would have said, ‘You’re out of your mind. Why would I have Skokie in a poem?’ But you become resigned. Your job is to write about the life you actually have.”
― Edward Hirsch

“I did not know the work of mourning
Is like carrying a bag of cement
Up a mountain at night

The mountaintop is not in sight
Because there is no mountaintop
Poor Sisyphus grief

I did not know I would struggle
Through a ragged underbrush
Without an upward path

Because there is no path
There is only a blunt rock
With a river to fall into

And Time with its medieval chambers
Time with its jagged edges
And blunt instruments

I did not know the work of mourning
Is a labor in the dark
We carry inside ourselves

Though sometimes when I sleep
I'm with him again
And then I wake

Poor Sisyphus grief
I'm not ready for your heaviness
Cemented to my body

Look closely and you will see
Almost everyone carrying bags
Of cement on their shoulders

That's why it takes courage
To get out of bed in the morning
And climb into the day”
― Edward Hirsch, Gabriel: A Poem

“The poet would befriend and comfort himself, if only he could.”
― Edward Hirsch, How To Read A Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry

“Grief broke down in phrases
And extrapolated lines
From me without myself

Tear-stained pillow of stone
I felt I was lying
Beside him in the coffin

Wormy mother
Who takes us into the ground
With her whenever and wherever

She wants the grass glistens
And grows over us in the heat
Of late summer in the country”
― Edward Hirsch, Gabriel: A Poem

“When Ungaretti lost his nine-year-old boy
He understood that death is death
In an extremely brutal way

It was the most terrible event of my life
I know what death means
I knew it even before

But when the best part of me was ripped away
I experienced death in myself
From that moment on

It would strike me as shameless
To talk about it
That pain will never stop tormenting me”
― Edward Hirsch, Gabriel: A Poem

“I did not know the work of mourning Is like carrying a bag of cement Up a mountain at night”
― Edward Hirsch, Gabriel: A Poem

“The population of his feelings
Could not be governed
By the authorities

He had reasons why
Reason disobeyed him
And voted him out of office

Anxiety
His constant companion
Made it difficult to rest

Unruly party of one
Forget about truces or compromises
The barricades will be stormed

Every day was an emergency
Every day called for another emergency
Meeting of the cabinet

In his country
There were scenes
Of spectacular carnage

Hurricanes welcomed him
He adored typhoons and tornadoes
Furies unleashed

Houses lifted up
And carried to the sea
Uncontained uncontainable

Unbolt the doors
Fling open the gates
Here he comes

Chaotic wind of the gods
He was trouble
But he was our trouble”
― Edward Hirsch, Gabriel: A Poem

“There is no true poetry without conscious craft, absorbed attention, absolute concentration. There is no true poetry without unconscious invention. The reader, too, enters into the relationship between the controlled and the uncontrollable aspects of the art. Shelley says that 'Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.' The poem is a genie that comes out of the bottle to liberate the reader's imagination, the divinity within. The writer and the reader make meaning together. The poet who calls on help from the heavenly muse also does so on behalf of the imaginative reader.”
― Edward Hirsch, How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry

“Writing becomes a form of protest against the incontestable ravages of time. The poet takes revenge on mortality, defeating cruelty and saving what she can by thinking the unthinkable and presiding over her own creation. The joy of writing stands against the bitter knowledge of just how much of the world cannot be controlled outside the work of art. This is the art of poetry trying to kill time. “Probably”
― Edward Hirsch, How To Read A Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry

“Poetry is a voicing, a calling forth, and the lyric poem exists somewhere in the region—the register—between speech and song.”
― Edward Hirsch, How To Read A Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry

“Rainer Maria Rilke sacrificed everything
For his art he dedicated himself
To the Great Work

I admired his single-mindedness
All through my twenties
I argued his case

Now I think he was a jerk
For skipping his daughter's wedding
For fear of losing his focus

He believed in the ancient enmity
Between daily life and the highest work
Or Ruth and the Duino Elegies

It is probably a middle-class prejudice
Of mine to think that Anna Akhmatova
Should have raised her son Lev

Instead of dumping him on her husband's mom
Motherhood is a bright torture she confessed
I was not worthy of it

Lev never considered it sufficient
For her to stand outside his prison
Month after month clutching packages

And composing Requiem for the masses”
― Edward Hirsch, Gabriel: A Poem

“We live in a superficial, media-driven culture that often seems uncomfortable with true depths of feeling. Indeed, it seems as if our culture has become increasingly intolerant of that acute sorrow, that intense mental anguish and deep remorse which may be defined as grief. We want to medicate such sorrow away. We want to divide it into recognizable stages so that grief can be labeled, tamed, and put behind us.”
― Edward Hirsch, How To Read A Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry

“Every poem is shadowed by desire, but it is also shadowed by the problem of rendering desire in language. There is a place where similitude seems to break down because experience itself seems beyond compare.”
― Edward Hirsch, How To Read A Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry

“Jonson wrote a poem and called his son
His best piece of poetrie
A lovely line a little loathsome

I loved that poem once
He said we are lent our sons never take
Too much pleasure in what you love”
― Edward Hirsch, Gabriel: A Poem

“Like a spear hurtling through darkness
He was always in such a hurry
To find a target to stop him

Like a young lion trying out its roar
At the far edge of the den
The roar inside him was even louder”
― Edward Hirsch, Gabriel: A Poem