Collected Poems 1931-74 (35 page)

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Authors: Lawrence Durrell

BOOK: Collected Poems 1931-74
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  • Unblade the brighter passions one by one.
    1
  • Unrevisited perhaps forever
    1
  • Vagina Dentata I love you so,
    1
  • Veronese grey! Here in the Octagon Room
    1
  • Walk upon dreams, and pass behind the book,
    1
  • Waterbirds sailing upon the darkness
    1
  • Waters rebribing a new moon are all
    1
  • We aliens are too greedy. They took their time,
    1
  • We had a heritage that we have lost,
    1
  • We had endured vicissitude and change,
    1
  • We have no more of time nor growing old,
    1
  • We suffer according to the terms we make
    1
  • What would you have me write?
    1
  • When one smile grazed the surface
    1
  • When they brought on the sleeping child
    1
  • Who first wrapped love in a green leaf,
    1
  • Who told you you were it,
    1
  • Wind among prisms all tonight again:
    1
  • Windless plane-trees above Rodini
    1
  • Winter and love are Euclid's properties.
    1
  • With dusk rides up the god-elated night,
    1
  • Wrap your sulky beauty up,
    1
  • Writing this stuff should not have been like
    1
  • Yellow bottles in a barber's door
    1
  • You and who else?
    1
  • You gone, the mirrors all reverted,
    1
  • You have been surely as a great moon.
    1
  • You have so dressed your eyes with love for me
    1
  • ‘You look at this landscape for five years.'
    1
  • You saw them, Sabina? Did you see them?
    1
  • You sleeping child asleep, away
    1
  • You too will pass as other lovers pass.
    1
  • You were that search for the Sovereign Form
    1
  • You who pass the islands will perhaps remember
    1
  • You will have no more beauty in that day
    1
  • Your panic fellowship is everywhere,
    1
  • Your ship will be leaving Penang
    1
  • Zarian was saying: Florence is youth
    1

Lawrence Durrell was born in 1912 in India. He attended the Jesuit College at Darjeeling and St Edmund's School, Canterbury. His first literary work,
The Black Book
, appeared in Paris in 1938. His first collection of poems, A Private Country, was published in 1943, followed by the three Island books:
Prospero
's Cell, Reflections on a Marine Venus
, about Rhodes, and
Bitter Lemons
, his account of life in Cyprus. Durrell's wartime sojourn in Egypt led to his masterpiece,
The Alexandria Quartet
, which he completed in southern France where he settled permanently in 1957. Between the Quartet and
The Avignon Quintet
he wrote the two-decker
Tunc
and
Nunquam
. His oeuvre includes plays, a book of criticism, translations, travel writing, and humorous stories about the diplomatic corps.
Caesar
'
s Vast Ghost
, his reflections on the history and culture of Provence, including a late flowering of poems, appeared a few days before his death in Sommières in 1990.

First published in 1957
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
Completely revised in 1980
This ebook edition first published in 2012 

All rights reserved
© Lawrence Durrell, 1957, 1960, 1968, 1971, 1977, 1980

The right of Lawrence Durrell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

ISBN 978–0–571–28880–9

 

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