The Complete Poetry Quotes

“There are desires to return, to love, to not disappear,
and there are desires to die, fought by two
opposing waters that have never isthmused.”
― César Vallejo, The Complete Poetry

“Agile Soffits: Sacred Defoliacity”

Moon! Crown of an immense head,
which you keep shedding in golden shadows!
Red crown of a Jesus who thinks
tragically sweet of emeralds!

Moon! Maddened celestial heart
—why are you rowing like this, inside the cup
full of blue wine, toward the west,
such a defeated and aching stern?

Moon! And by flying off in vain,
you holocaust into scattered opals:
perhaps you are my gypsy heart
wandering the blue weeping verses!”
― César Vallejo, The Complete Poetry

“Black Stone on a White Stone"

I will die in Paris with a rainstorm,
on a day I already remember,
I will die in Paris—and I don't shy away—
perhaps on a Thursday, as today is, in autumn.

It will be Thursday, because today, Thursday, as I prose
these lines, I've put on my humeri in a bad mood,
and, today like never before, I've turned back,
with all of my road, to see myself alone.

César Vallejo has died; they kept hitting him,
everyone, even though he does nothing to them,
they gave it to him hard with a club and hard

also with a rope; witnesses are
the Thursday days and the humerus bones,
the solitude, the rain, the roads. . .”
― César Vallejo, The Complete Poetry

“Remain in the eternal
nebula, there,
in the polyessence of a sweet nonbeing.”
― César Vallejo, The Complete Poetry

“Moon! Maddened celestial heart
-why are you rowing like this, inside the cup
full of blue wine, toward the west,
such a defeated and aching stern?

Moon! And by flying off in vain,
you holocaust into scattered opals:
perhaps you are my gypsy heart
wandering the blue weeping verses!

from “Agile Soffits”
― César Vallejo, The Complete Poetry

“Ruben Dario has said that the sorrow of the gods lies in not reaching death. As for men, if from the moment they are conscious, they could be sure of reaching death, they could be happy forever, But unfortunately, men are never sure of dying: they feel an obscure desire and a yearning to die but they always doubt that they will die. The sorrow of men, we declare, lies in never being certain of death.”
― César Vallejo, The Complete Poetry