Carolina QuotesThe soul has no assignments, neither cooks Nor referees: it wastes its time. It wastes its time. Here in this enclave there are centuries For you to waste: the short and narrow stream Of life meanders into a thousand valleys Of all that was, or might have been, or is to be. The books, just leafed through, whisper endlessly.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
"A Girl in a Library," lines 32-29
- work
- The Seven-League Crutches (1951)
- year
- 1951
Cite this record
“The soul has no assignments, neither cooks Nor referees: it …” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-8039854736. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/8039854736
More from Randall Jarrell
I see at last that all the knowledgeI wrung from the darkness — that the darkness flung me — Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing, The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness And we call it wisdom. It is pain.
If there were only some mechanism (like Seurat's proposed system of painting, or the projected Universal Algebra that Gödel believes Leibnitz to have perfected and mislaid) for reasonably and systematically converting into poetry what we see and feel and are! When one reads the verse of people who cannot write poems — people who sometimes have more intelligence, sensibility, and moral discrimination than most of the poets — it is hard not to regard the Muse as a sort of fairy godmother who says to the poet, after her colleagues have showered on him the most disconcerting and ambiguous gifts, "Well, never mind. You're still the only one that can write poetry."
...the work of a poet who has a real talent, but not for words.