Shadow Poetry Quotes & Sayings

At two o'clock in the morning, if you open your window and listen,
You will hear the feet of the Wind that is going to call the sun.
And the trees in the Shadow rustle and the trees in the moonlight glisten,
And though it is deep, dark night, you feel that the night is done. — Rudyard Kipling

I bought you love poetry! 'I love you as certain dark things are loved, secretly, between the shadow and the soul.'" I blink at him. "Neruda. I starred the passage. God," he moans. "Why didn't you open it? — Stephanie Perkins

Everything had become song. The curve of the road beneath the clouds here, and there the strokes of dark earth, the green and the gray, the torn pink of clay and gravel under fingertips. The consonance was above all that of the muffled shadow and grass to the depths of sky, where a flutter of cheerful feathers quivered.

In these dreams there are also black walnut trees, and then a forest that opens in a breeze. Nothing. Nothing more than the obstinate sound of wind. — Deborah Heissler

Where are you hiding my love?
Each day without you will never come again.
Even today you missed a sunset on the ocean,
A silver shadow on yellow rocks I saved for you,
A squirrel that ran across the road,
A duck diving for dinner.
My God! There may be nothing left to show you
Save wounds and weariness
And hopes grown dead,
And wilted flowers I picked for you a lifetime ago,
Or feeble steps that cannot run to hold you,
Arms too tired to offer you to a roaring wind,
A face too wrinkled to feel the ocean's spray. — James Kavanaugh

Every pain, addiction, anguish, longing, depression, anger or fear
is an orphaned part of us
seeking joy,
some disowned shadow
wanting to return
to the light
and home
of ourselves. — Jacob Nordby

Welcome the small cracking of your hard-clodded shell,
Embrace the warm sting of tears,
Kiss the shadow which frightens you awake as you turn the corners of your day,
Love the whole of everything,
Smooth sunshine skies and
Jagged edges
Which all seek us out in
Constant whisper and touch
To say, 'hello, Beautiful. You're alive — Jacob Nordby

We don't know how to say goodbye,
We wander on, shoulder to shoulder
Already the sun is going down
You're moody, and I am your shadow.
Let's step inside a church, hear prayers, masses for the dead
Why are we so different from the rest?
Outside in the graveyard we sit on a frozen branch.
That stick in your hand is tracing
Mansions in the snow in which we will always be together. — Anna Akhmatova

It is always easy to mock 'distress,' but we are its contemporaries; we are at the endpoint of what Nous, ratio, & Logos, still today the framework for what we are, cannot have failed to show: that murder is the first thing to count on, and elimination the surest means of identification. Today, everywhere, against this black but 'enlightened' background, remaining reality is disappearing in the mire of a 'globalized' world. Nothing, not even the most obvious phenomena, not even the purest, most wrenching love, can escape this era's shadow: a cancer of the subject, whether in the ego or in the masses... — Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe

I see what I want of Love ... I see horses making the meadow dance, fifty guitars sighing, and a swarm of bees suckling the wild berries, and I close my eyes until I see our shadow behind this dispossessed place ...
I see what I want of people: their desire to long for anything, their lateness in getting to work and their hurry to return to their folk ... and their need to say: Good Morning ... — Mahmoud Darwish

As children we learned our shadow
is a darkness we never totally shake
until we lie down, pull the shades,
draw the curtains, shut out the world,
and turn our own light out. — B.J. Ward

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life. — James Wright

I'm looking for you
in the bare corridor
where my shadow is the only passerby
harmonizing an unsettling whisper:
echoed through my chiming thoughts
From the poem 'Looking For You — Munia Khan

Gloire de Dijon
When she rises in the morning
I linger to watch her;
She spreads the bath-cloth underneath the window
And the sunbeams catch her
Glistening white on the shoulders,
While down her sides the mellow
Golden shadow glows as
She stoops to the sponge, and her swung breasts
Sway like full-blown yellow
Gloire de Dijon roses.
She drips herself with water, and her shoulders
Glisten as silver, they crumple up
Like wet and falling roses, and I listen
For the sluicing of their rain-dishevelled petals.
In the window full of sunlight
Concentrates her golden shadow
Fold on fold, until it glows as
Mellow as the glory roses. — D.H. Lawrence

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
They are subtle : they seem to float, though they weigh me down,
Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.
Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen. — Sylvia Plath

Once upon a time, son,
they used to laugh with their hearts
and laugh with their eyes;
but now they only laugh with their teeth,
while their ice-block-cold eyes
search behind my shadow.
There was a time indeed
they used to shake hands with their hearts;
but that's gone, son.
Now they shake hands without hearts
while their left hands search
my empty pockets. — Gabriel Okara

Shakespeare carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity, as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration which uttered itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good from day to day, for ever. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Like a mountain path that ends at a cliff
I travel along the edge of your thoughts,
and my shadow falls from your white forehead,
my shadow shatters, and I gather the pieces
and go with no body, groping my way — Octavio Paz

Meridian


First daylight on the bittersweet-hung
sleeping porch at high summer; dew
all over the lawn, sowing diamond-
point-highlighted shadows;
the hired man's shadow revolving
along the walk, a flash of milkpails
passing; no threat in sight, no hint
anywhere in the universe, of that

apathy at the meridian, the noon
of absolute boredom; flies
crooning black lullabies in the kitchen,
milk-soured crocks, cream separator
still unwashed; what is there to life
but chores and more chores, dishwater,
fatigue, unwanted children; nothing
to stir the longueur of afternoon

except possibly thunderheads;
climbing, livid, turreted alabaster
lit up from within by splendor and terror
-- forded lightening's
split-second disaster. — Amy Clampitt

There is an ancient conversation going on between mosses and rocks, poetry to be sure. About light and shadow and the drift of continents. This is what has been called the "dialect of moss on stone - an interface of immensity and minute ness, of past and present, softness and hardness, stillness and vibrancy, yin and yan. — Robin Wall Kimmerer

Loneliness of heart
In the still of the night my heart doth cry out, who can hear it for time is far spent. In the darkness in the shadow of the depth I find isolation and fear ... — M.I. Ghostwriter

What is this life? A frenzy, an illusion,
A shadow, a delirium, a fiction.
The greatest good's but little, and this life
Is but a dream, and dreams are only dreams. — Pedro Calderon De La Barca

PRETENDING TO DROWN

The only regret is that I waited
longer than a breath
to scatter the sun's reflection
with my body.

New stars burst upon the water
when you pulled me in.

On the shore, our clothes
begged us to be good boys again.

Every stick our feet touched
a snapping turtle, every shadow
a water moccasin.

Excuses to swim closer to one another.

I sank into the depths to see you
as the lake saw you: cut in half
by the surface, taut legs kicking,
the rest of you sky.

Suddenly still, a clear view
of what you knew I wanted
to see.

When I resurfaced, slick grin,
knowing glance; you pushed me
back under.

I pretended to drown,
then swallowed you whole. — Saeed Jones

I looked at all the trees and didn't know what to do.
A box made out of leaves.
What else was in the woods? A heart, closing. Nevertheless.
Everyone needs a place. It shouldn't be inside of someone else.
I kept my mind on the moon. Cold moon, long nights moon.
From the landscape: a sense of scale.
From the dead: a sense of scale.
I turned my back on the story. A sense of superiority.
Everything casts a shadow.
Your body told me in a dream it's never been afraid of anything. — Richard Siken

Writing is the light of imagination playing over shadow of thoughts. — Khaled Talib

A lot of the shadow self is the home of poetry, story, prayer. My deepest understandings are often released from the part of me of which I am least aware most of the time. — Madeleine L'Engle

Tell this to ladies: how a hero man
Assail a thick and scandalous giant
Who casts true shadow in the sun,
And die, but play no truant.

This is more horrible: that the darling egg
Of the chosen people hatch a creature
Of noblest mind and powerful leg
Who cannot fathom nor perform his nature. — John Crowe Ransom

The poet discovers that what men value as substances have a higher value as symbols; that Nature is the immense shadow of man. A man's action is only a picture-book of his creed. He does after what he believes. Your condition, your employment, is the fable of you. The world is thoroughly anthropomorphized, as if it had passed through the body and mind of man, and taken his mould and form. Indeed, good poetry is always personification, and heightens every species of force in nature by giving it a human volition. We are advertised that there is nothing to which man is not related; that everything is convertible into every other. The staff in his hand is the radius vector of the sun. The chemistry of this is the chemistry of that. Whatever one act we do, whatever one thing we learn, we are doing and learning all things, - marching in the direction of universal power. Every healthy mind is a true Alexander or Sesostris, building a universal monarchy. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance. — Carl Sandburg

Between the desire
And the spasm,
Between the potency
And the existence,
Between the essence
And the descent,
Falls the Shadow. — T. S. Eliot

September has come, it is hers
Whose vitality leaps in the autumn,
Whose nature prefers
Trees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace.
So I give her this month and the next
Though the whole of my year should be hers who has rendered already
So many of its days intolerable or perplexed
But so many more so happy.
Who has left a scent on my life, and left my walls
Dancing over and over with her shadow
Whose hair is twined in all my waterfalls
And all of London littered with remembered kisses. — Louis MacNeice

I'll lie here and learn
How, over their ground,
Trees make a long shadow
And a light sound. — Louise Bogan

I don't analyze beautiful. I sit in its presence and love the wholeness of it--the sweet and sad and raw and bright together.
Poetry is that, the weaving of light-shadow. Making words from the unwordable. — Jacob Nordby

The stars are putting on their glittering belts,
They throw around their shoulders cloaks that flash
Like a great shadow's last embellishment — Wallace Stevens

You sleep with a dream of summer weather,
wake to the thrum of rain - roped down by rain.
Nothing out there but drop-heavy feathers of grass
and rainy air. The plastic table on the terrace
has shed three legs on its way to the garden fence.
The mountains have had the sense to disappear.
It's the Celtic temperament - wind, then torrents, then remorse.
Glory rising like a curtain over distant water.
Old stonehouse, having steered us through the dark,
docks in a pool of shadow all its own.
That widening crack in the gloom is like good luck.
Luck, which neither you nor tomorrow can depend on. — Anne Stevenson

True poetry is the perception of human feelings, the voice of the heart, open or hidden. It is the lyrics, compositions, and melody of the relation between humankind, the universe and God, a shadow pinpointing each of the truths we can discern everywhere (from the earth to the stars), a photograph of the creation's projection cast in our feelings and thoughts and framed through words, a heartfelt tune of our loves and joys played on different strings, and it is a bouquet of our faith, hope, determination, beauty, love, reunion, and yearnings. — M. Fethullah Gulen

I recall my life every day. I recall my sins and my acts of purity. I remind myself I was never a religious man. I remind myself that I have been dead for half of forever. I remind myself of nothing. I move along to the next minute. Next day. Next year. The earth doesn't change so much anymore. It doesn't change so quickly. With humans, the earth had to keep changing. But you can only replace a dying thing so many times before someone notices. There haven't been humans for years. Maybe a decade. Maybe more. I find myself loving their absence. The absence of humanity is the absence of violence. I love this peace. But then I remember my bones. My mind and my memories. I remember I'm human. I am the thing I detest. The creature that haunts my steps. It's my shadow I see watching me. It's my reflection in the water. I keep remembering. I live in fear. But still, I walk on. — F.K. Preston

I hate the very noise of troublous man
Who did and does me all the harm he can.
Free from the world I would a prisoner be
And my own shadow all my company. — John Clare

Shadow is ever besieged, for that is its nature. Whilst darkness devours, and light steals. And so one sees shadow ever retreat to hidden places, only to return in the wake of the war between dark and light. — Steven Erikson

Poetry and painting continue to be companions: they cast their shadow and light, their silences and tones, at the edges of each other. — Pierre Coupey

She had imagined her mind would be bare before his, naked under a scorching desert sun, with neither shelter nor refuge. Instead, it was like playing hide-and-seek in the light and shadow of a forest, discovering and inventing a new language of double meaning, subtlety, poetry, and image. As a linguist, she was captivated; as a lover, she was enraptured. Nothing could be said the same way twice. — Karen Lord

From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,
A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up
From your book, saw it the moment it landed. That's all
There was to it. — Mark Strand

Fog and hypocrisy - that is to say, shadow, convention, decency - these were the very things that lent to London its poetry and romance. — Ada Leverson

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations. — Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Sonnet: Political Greatness
Nor happiness, nor majesty, nor fame,
Nor peace, nor strength, nor skill in arms or arts,
Shepherd those herds whom tyranny makes tame;
Verse echoes not one beating of their hearts,
History is but the shadow of their shame,
Art veils her glass, or from the pageant starts
As to oblivion their blind millions fleet,
Staining that Heaven with obscene imagery
Of their own likeness. What are numbers knit
By force or custom? Man who man would be,
Must rule the empire of himself; in it
Must be supreme, establishing his throne
On vanquished will, quelling the anarchy
Of hopes and fears, being himself alone. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within ... could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the result; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline; and the most glorious poetry that has been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Shadow of Your Spirit

At night I see the shadow of your spirit
Mixing with my blood and soul
During the day I see your photos
They tell me come to me
Come to my world and romance
Even I don't know by myself
How I fell into your love
I cannot remove it from my heart
Your love stabled my soul — Kamaran Ihsan Salih

History repeats itself. Someone says this.
History throws its shadow over beginning, over the desktop, over the sock drawer with its socks, its hidden letters.
history is the little man in a brown suit trying to define a room he is outside of,
I know history. There are many names in history ... but none of them are ours. — Richard Siken

With its leaves so rich and heavy with elation and its crimson face made brighter with visions of divinity the shadow of a certain rose looks just like an angel eating light. — Aberjhani

She wielded it easily, lightly. She carried it swinging like a baseball bat, only with more poetry to it. It was a frightening thing to watch, this small shadow of billowing grey fabric and sprawling, wild hair splaying out behind her, the axe held at the ready with both hands, poised and prepared. — Cherie Priest

Here is a handful
of shadow I have brought back to you:
this decay, this hope, this mouth-
ful of dirt, this poetry. — Margaret Atwood

You want the sweetness of our beginning without the bitterness of our struggle - what are you asking - do you want light without shadow? ... — John Geddes

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor:
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted - nevermore! — Edgar Allan Poe

Your father is only your father
until one of you forgets. Like how the spine
won't remember its wings
no matter how many times our knees
kiss the pavement. Ocean,
are you listening? The most beautiful part
of your body is wherever
your mother's shadow falls. — Ocean Vuong

Echo and Shadow

A room
and a room. And between them

she leans in the doorway
to say something,

lintel bright above her face,
threshold dark beneath her feet,

her hands behind her head gathering
her hair to tie and tuck at the nape.

A world and a world.

Dying and not dying.
And between them
the curtains blowing
and the shadows they make on her body,

a shadow of birds, a single flock,
a myriad body of wings and cries
turning and diving in complex unison.
Shadow of bells,

or the shadow of the sound
they make in the air, mornings, evenings,
everywhere I wait for her,

as even now her voice
seems a lasting echo
of my heart's calling me home, its story
an ocean beyond my human beginning,

each wave tolling the whole note
of my outcome and belonging. — Li-Young Lee

No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.
The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness.
If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind. — Kahlil Gibran