The Shapes of Death
Shapes of death haunt life,
Neurosis eclipsing each in special shadow:
Unrequited love not
One’s need to become another’s
Wears black invisibility:
The greed for
Heaps a skyscraper over the breathing ribs:
The speedlines of
Cut their own stalks:
From afar, we watch the best of us –Whose adored desire was to die for the world.
Ambition is my death.
That flat thin flameI feed, that plants my shadow.
This prevents
And offers love of being loved or loving.
The humorous self-forgetful
It hates, demands the slavish
Be built.
Who can
His death’s industry, which when he
Throws up its towers?
And conceals in
The dreams of revolution, the birth of death?
Also the swallows by autumnal
Comfort us with their effortless
In great unguided flight to their complete South.
There on my fancied pyramids they
But for delight, their whole compulsion.
Not teaching me to love, but soothing my eyes;
Not saving me from death, but saving me for speech.
Stephen Spender
Other author posts
The Landscape near an Aerodrome
More beautiful and soft than any With burring furred antennae feeling its huge Through dusk, the air-liner with shut-off Glides over suburbs and the sleeves set trailing
On The Third Day
On the first summer day I lay in the valley Above rocks the sky sealed my eyes with a The grass licked my skin The flowers bound my
I Think Continually
I think continually of those who were truly great Who, from the womb, remembered the soul's Through corridors of light where the hours are Endless and singing
Port Bou
As a child holds a pet, Arms clutching but with hands that do not join, And the coiled animal watches the To outer freedom in animal air,
