Home ⇒ 📌Constantine P Cavafy ⇒ As Much As You Can
As Much As You Can
Even if you cannot shape your life as you want it,
At least try this
As much as you can; do not debase it
In excessive contact with the world,
In the excessive movements and talk.
Do not debase it by taking it,
Dragging it often and exposing it
To the daily folly
Of relationships and associations,
Until it becomes burdensome as an alien life.
(2 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)
Related poetry:
- The Fabulists When all the world would keep a matter hid, Since Truth is seldom Friend to any crowd, Men write in Fable, as old AEsop did, Jesting at that which none will name aloud. And this they needs must do, or it will fall Unless they please they are not heard at all. When desperate Folly […]...
- Acrostic Little maidens, when you look On this little story-book, Reading with attentive eye Its enticing history, Never think that hours of play Are your only HOLIDAY, And that in a HOUSE of joy Lessons serve but to annoy: If in any HOUSE you find Children of a gentle mind, Each the others pleasing ever Each […]...
- I Feel (Verse Libre) I feel Very much Like taking Its unholy perpetrators By the hair Of their heads (If they have any hair) And dragging them around A few times, And then cutting them Into small, irregular pieces And burying them In the depths of the blue sea. They are without form And void,/ Or at least The […]...
- Our Daily Bread “Give me my daily bread. It seems so odd, When all is done and said, This plea to God. To pray for cake might be The thing to do; But bread, it seems to me, Is just our due. “Give me my daily toil,” I ought to say – (If from life’s cursed coil I’d […]...
- Sonnet 76: Why is my verse so barren of new pride? Why is my verse so barren of new pride? So far from variation or quick change? Why with the time do I not glance aside To new-found methods, and to compounds strange? Why write I still all one, ever the same, And keep invention in a noted weed, That every word doth almost tell my […]...
- Folly (For A. K. K.) What distant mountains thrill and glow Beneath our Lady Folly’s tread? Why has she left us, wise in woe, Shrewd, practical, uncomforted? We cannot love or dream or sing, We are too cynical to pray, There is no joy in anything Since Lady Folly went away. Many a knight and gentle […]...
- An ignorance a Sunset An ignorance a Sunset Confer upon the Eye Of Territory Color Circumference Decay Its Amber Revelation Exhilirate Debase Omnipotence’ inspection Of Our inferior face And when the solemn features Confirm in Victory We start as if detected In Immortality...
- Fuck Me FUCK ME I’m all screwed up so FUCK ME. FUCK ME And take out the garbage Feed the cat and FUCK ME You can do it, I know you can. FUCK ME And theorize about Sado Masochism’s relationship To classical philosophy Tell me how this stimulates The fabric of most human relationships, I love that […]...
- Unlyric Love Song It is time to give that-of-myself which I could not at first: To offer you now at last my least and my worst: Minor, absurd preserves, The shell’s end-curves, A document kept at the back of a drawer, A tin hidden under the floor, Recalcitrant prides and hesitations: To pile them carefully in a desparate […]...
- Platonic I knew it the first of the summer, I knew it the same at the end, That you and your love were plighted, But couldn’t you be my friend? Couldn’t we sit in the twilight, Couldn’t we walk on the shore With only a pleasant friendship To bind us, and nothing more? There was not […]...
- 409. Epigram-The Raptures of Folly THOU greybeard, old Wisdom! may boast of thy treasures; Give me with young Folly to live; I grant thee thy calm-blooded, time-settled pleasures, But Folly has raptures to give....
- Hortense Robbins My name used to be in the papers daily As having dined somewhere, Or traveled somewhere, Or rented a house in Paris, Where I entertained the nobility. I was forever eating or traveling, Or taking the cure at Baden-Baden. Now I am here to do honor To Spoon River, here beside the family whence I […]...
- Are You Drinking? washed-up, on shore, the old yellow notebook out again I write from the bed as I did last year. will see the doctor, Monday. “yes, doctor, weak legs, vertigo, head- aches and my back hurts.” “are you drinking?” he will ask. “are you getting your Exercise, your vitamins?” I think that I am just ill […]...
- "I Love You Sweatheart" A man risked his life to write the words. A man hung upside down (an idiot friend Holding his legs?) with spray paint To write the words on a girder fifty feet above A highway. And his beloved, The next morning driving to work…? His words are not (meant to be) so unique. Does she […]...
- The Avenue Now that we’ve come to the end I’ve been trying to piece it together, Not that distance makes anything clearer. It began in the half-light While we walked through the dawn chorus After a party that lasted all night, With the blackbird, the wood-pigeon, The song-thrush taking a bludgeon To a snail, our taking each […]...
- Jesus, Thou Divine Companion Jesus, Thou divine Companion, By Thy lowly human birth Thou hast come to join the workers, Burden bearers of the earth. Thou, the Carpenter of Nazareth, Toiling for Thy daily food, By Thy patience and Thy courage, Thou hast taught us toil is good. They who tread the path of labor Follow where Thy feet […]...
- TO HIS PECULIAR FRIEND, MR JOHN WICKS Since shed or cottage I have none, I sing the more, that thou hast one; To whose glad threshold, and free door I may a Poet come, though poor; And eat with thee a savoury bit, Paying but common thanks for it. Yet should I chance, my Wicks, to see An over-leaven look in thee, […]...
- Golden Days Another day of toil and strife, Another page so white, Within that fateful Log of Life That I and all must write; Another page without a stain To make of as I may, That done, I shall not see again Until the Judgment Day. Ah, could I, could I backward turn The pages of that […]...
- DROPS OF A STREAM Bhaskar Roy Barman As does the Great River On to the sea and back To the matted hair of Lord Shiva, On flows the life-stream Adorned with ornaments, As is a newly-wed couple. Following on the footprints of the Great River That leaves nonchalantly behind A good many water-drops Evaporating midway through And mingling with […]...
- Oh To Be Odd! Hypochondriacs Spend the winter at the bottom of Florida and the summer on top of The Adirondriacs. You go to Paris and live on champagne wine and cognac If you’re dipsomognac. If you’re a manic-depressive You don’t go anywhere where you won’t be cheered up, and people say “There, there!” if your bills are excessive. […]...
- Roscoe Purkapile She loved me. Oh! how she loved me! I never had a chance to escape From the day she first saw me. But then after we were married I thought She might prove her mortality and let me out, Or she might divorce me. But few die, none resign. Then I ran away and was […]...
- How Is Your Heart? during my worst times on the park benches in the jails or living with whores I always had this certain contentment- I wouldn’t call it happiness- it was more of an inner balance that settled for whatever was occuring and it helped in the factories and when relationships went wrong with the girls. it helped […]...
- Like A Scarf The directions to the lunatic asylum were confusing, More likely they were the random associations And confused ramblings of a lunatic. We arrived three hours late for lunch And the lunatics were stacked up on their shelves, Quite neatly, I might add, giving credit where credit is due. The orderlies were clearly very orderly, and […]...
- Obsessive Combination Of Onotological Inscape, Trickery And Love Busy, with an idea for a code, I write Signals hurrying from left to right, Or right to left, by obscure routes, For my own reasons; taking a word like writes Down tiers of tries until its secret rites Make sense; or until, suddenly, RATS Can amazingly and funnily become STAR And right to left […]...
- The Argument Of His Book I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers, Of April, May, of June, and July-flowers. I sing of May-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes, Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal-cakes. I write of youth, of love, and have access By these to sing of cleanly wantonness. I sing of dews, of rains, and piece by […]...
- The Garden En robe de parade. Samain Like a skien of loose silk blown against a wall She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens, And she is dying piece-meal of a sort of emotional anaemia. And round about there is a rabble Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor. They […]...
- Poetry it Takes A lot of Desperation Dissatisfaction And Disillusion To Write A Few Good Poems. It’s not For Everybody Either to Write It Or even to Read It....
- When I read the Book WHEN I read the book, the biography famous, And is this, then, (said I,) what the author calls a man’s life? And so will some one, when I am dead and gone, write my life? (As if any man really knew aught of my life; Why, even I myself, I often think, know little or […]...
- Cacoethes Scribendi If all the trees in all the woods were men; And each and every blade of grass a pen; If every leaf on every shrub and tree Turned to a sheet of foolscap; every sea Were changed to ink, and all earth’s living tribes Had nothing else to do but act as scribes, And for […]...
- Cupid And Folly CUPID, ere depriv’d of Sight, Young and apt for all Delight, Met with Folly on the way, As Idle and as fond of Play. In gay Sports the time they pass; Now run, now wrestle on the Grass; Their painted Wings then nimbly ply, And ev’ry way for Mast’ry try: ‘Till a Contest do’s arise, […]...
- Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind Blow, blow, thou winter wind Thou art not so unkind As man’s ingratitude; Thy tooth is not so keen, Because thou art not seen, Although thy breath be rude. Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly: Most freindship if feigning, most loving mere folly: Then heigh-ho, the holly! This life is most jolly. Freeze, freeze […]...
- Psalm 102 part 1 v.1-13,20,21 C. M. A prayer of the afflicted. Hear me, O God, nor hide thy face; But answer, lest I die; Hast thou not built a throne of grace To hear when sinners cry? My days are wasted like the smoke Dissolving in the air; My strength is dried, my heart is broke, And sinking […]...
- Chamfort THERE’S Chamfort. He’s a sample. Locked himself in his library with a gun, Shot off his nose and shot out his right eye. And this Chamfort knew how to write And thousands read his books on how to live, But he himself didn’t know How to die by force of his own hand see? They […]...
- GENIAL IMPULSE THUS roll I, never taking ease, My tub, like Saint Diogenes, Now serious am, now seek to please; Now love and hate in turn one sees; The motives now are those, now these; Now nothings, now realities. Thus roll I, never taking ease, My tub, like Saint Diogenes. 1810....
- The Dead King (EDWARD VII.) 1910 Who in the Realm to-day lays down dear life for the sake of a land more dear? And, unconcerned for his own estate, toils till the last grudged sands have run? Let him approach. It is proven here Our King asks nothing of any man more than Our King himself, has done. […]...
- Behavior BEHAVIOR-fresh, native, copious, each one for himself or herself, Nature and the Soul expressed-America and freedom expressed-In it the finest art, In it pride, cleanliness, sympathy, to have their chance, In it physique, intellect, faith-in it just as much as to manage an army or a city, or to write a book-perhaps more, The youth, […]...
- Unlike, For Example, The Sound Of A Riptooth Saw gnawing through a shinbone, a high howl Inside of which a bloody, slashed-by-growls note Is heard, unlike that Sound, and instead, its opposite: a barely sounded Sound (put your nuclear ears On for it, your giant hearing horn, its cornucopia mouth Wide) a slippery whoosh of rain Sliding down a mirror Leaned against a windfallen […]...
- Oh! Doubt Me Not Oh! doubt me not the season Is o’er when Folly made me rove, And now the vestal, Reason, Shall watch the fire awaked by Love. Although this heart was early blown, And fairest hands disturb’d the tree, They only shook some blossoms down Its fruit has all been kept for thee. Then doubt me not […]...
- The Epic Stars The heroic stars spending themselves, Coining their very flesh into bullets for the lost battle, They must burn out at length like used candles; And Mother Night will weep in her triumph, taking home her heroes. There is the stuff for an epic poem This magnificent raid at the heart of darkness, this lost battle […]...
- Sonnet for Mother Decked in blooms, Swaddled in gold filigreed shrouds, Smeared with perfumes, She traveled into the clouds. A life of love lived, A life of more giving than taking, Living a life of tears shed, Turnings, and missed crossings. She lies still beside father, In an earthen grave dug for her, On ere visits she knew […]...