11 Roy Campbell Quotes

Roy Campbell quotes

1. South Africa, renowned both far and wide For politics and little else beside.

2. Translations (like wives) are seldom strictly faithful if they are in the least attractive.

3. The frost stings sweetly with a burning kiss As intimate as love, as cold as death.

4. The timeless, surly patience of the serf That moves the nearest to the naked earth And ploughs down palaces, and thrones, and towers.

5. We shall not meet again: over the wave Our ways divide, and yours is straight and endless - But mine is short and crooked to the grave: Yet what of these dark crowds, amid whose flow I battle like a rock, aloof and friendless - Are not their generations, vague and endless, The waves, the strides, the feet on which I go?

6. With white tails smoking free, Long streaming manes, and arching necks, they show Their kinship to their sisters of the sea - And forward hurl their thunderbolts of snow. Still out of hardships bred, Spirits of power and beauty and delight Have ever on such frugal pastures fed And loved to course with tempests through the night.

7. Of all the clever people round me here I most delight in Me - Mine is the only voice I care to hear, And mine the only face I like to see.

8. You praise the firm restraint with which they write - I'm with you there, of course: They use the snaffle and the curb all right, But where's the bloody horse?

9. Roy Campbell was one of the very few great poets of our time. His poems are of great stature, and have a giant's strength and power of movement. They have, too, an extraordinary sensuous beauty. Everything is transformed to greatness.

10. He became a Roman Catholic, but an unpleasantly militant one, sharing the hysterically nihilist mood of some of the fascist rebels in Spain:He himself was no fascist, simply a naive who lamented - but without ever bothering to take serious thought - modern technology's erosion of individuality.

1. “Or like a poet woo the Moon, Riding an armchair for my steed, And with a flashing pen harpoon Terrific metaphors of speed.”