Image borrowed from YahooIn Tityrus’ view, his two acres are those from which
all the rest of the world is in exile.
Who is not an exile when, in the evening,
he hears the wind in the trees?
Much that is good began with an exile.
What an exile it must be to be closed in a battle tank!
Whatever reflection may suggest,
the idea of exile is instantly congenial.
Death is the extremest exile.
Diogenes exiled Greece from his tub.
A garden, being less a place than a world,
is a proper work for an exile.
There is no exile, as there are no circles,
without an idea of a centre and a circumference.
Pythagoras believed his friend to be exiled in a dog.
“I wept and wailed when I saw the unfamiliar land.” –
Empedokles.
Illness is a sort of exile from the every-day.
To be rehabilitated into Eden would be an exile for us.
Our true home may be found in exile.
Summer is no less an exile from spring,
than autumn from summer, and spring from winter.
Tall pine trees are the great oaks of exile.
Despotism exiles the people.
Wet days show up holidays as self-imposed exiles.
Illness and exile restore our horizons to us.
Vulgar people have no notion of the world as an exile.
Everyone feels he might bear an exile.
But to be a refugee…
In growing old, we stay into exile.
When the swallows gather, and twitter on the wires,
our staying seems an exile.
On winter water, and in the autumn clouds,
we see Apollo in his exiles.
Pine-cones and crab-apples are the chief fruits of exile.
Exiled lives are half-way to statues.
It seems the soul is so constituted, that Here is its exile,
There is its home.
Ian Hamilton Finlay
Posted over on Poems & Poetics
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