Cynthia

“THE OWLS

by: Charles Baudelaire

UNDER the overhanging yews,
The dark owls sit in solemn state,
Like stranger gods; by twos and twos
Their red eyes gleam. They meditate.

Motionless thus they sit and dream
Until that melancholy hour
When, with the sun's last fading gleam,
The nightly shades assume their power.

From their still attitude the wise
Will learn with terror to despise
All tumult, movement, and unrest;

For he who follows every shade,
Carries the memory in his breast,
Of each unhappy journey made.
'The Owls' is reprinted from The Poems and Prose Poems of Charles Baudelaire. Ed. James Huneker. New York: Brentano's, 1919.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends. --Bernard, The Waves”
― Virginia Woolf

“I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry later on.”
― Isaac Rosenberg

“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own