Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz Poems

Beautiful face
That like a daisy opens its petals to the sun
So do you
Open your face to me as I turn the page.
...

Between going and staying
the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
...

Listen to me as one listens to the rain,
not attentive, not distracted,
light footsteps, thin drizzle,
...

Here is a long and silent street.
I walk in blackness and I stumble and fall
and rise, and I walk blind, my feet
...

Between now and now,
between I am and you are,
the word bridge.
...

Your hair is lost in the forest,
your feet touching mine.
Asleep you are bigger than the night,
but your dream fits within this room.
...

I am a man: little do I last
and the night is enormous.
But I look up:
...

More than air
More than water
More than lips
Light light
...

Space
No center, no above, no below
Ceaselessly devouring and engendering itself
Whirlpool space
...

10.

My hands
Open the curtains of your being
Clothe you in a further nudity
Uncover the bodies of your body
...

11.

Through the conduits of blood
my body in your body
spring of night
my tongue of sun in your forest
...

There is not
A single soul among the trees
And I
Don't know where I've gone.
...

13.

I turn the page of the day,
writing what I'm told
by the motion of your eyelashes.
...

There's a motionless tree
And another one coming forward
A river of trees
Hits my chest
...

In my body you search the mountain
for the sun buried in its forest.
...

La treizième revient...c’est encor la première;
et c’est toujours la seule-ou c’est le seul moment;
car es-tu reine, ô toi, la première ou dernière?
es-tu roi, toi le seul ou le dernier amant?
...

Octavio Paz Biography

Mexican poet, essayist, and political thinker. His works reflect many influences, including Marxism, surrealism, and Aztec mythology. El laberinto de la soledad/The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950), the book which brought him to world attention, explores Mexico's heritage. His long poem Piedra del sol/Sun Stone (1957) uses contrasting images, centring on the Aztec Calendar Stone (representing the Aztec universe), to symbolize the loneliness of individuals and their search for union with others. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. In 1962 Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India, but resigned in 1968 in protest against the Mexican government's killing of 200 student demonstrators on the eve of the Olympic Games. In 1971 he founded the monthly magazine Plural (later called Vuelta), which he used to analyse socialism and liberalism, urging Mexico to become independent of communist and US influences. His publications include Collected Poems: 1957–87 (1988) and One Earth, Four or Five Worlds/Tiempo Nublado (1984). Born in Mexico City, Paz studied at the National University of Mexico, but left in 1936 to set up a school to help poor children in rural Yucatán. In 1937 he fought in the Spanish Civil War, in a Republican brigade commanded by David Siqueiros. After a time as a left-wing journalist and Mexican diplomat 1946–51, he concentrated on writing.)

The Best Poem Of Octavio Paz

No More Clichés

Beautiful face
That like a daisy opens its petals to the sun
So do you
Open your face to me as I turn the page.

Enchanting smile
Any man would be under your spell,
Oh, beauty of a magazine.

How many poems have been written to you?
How many Dantes have written to you, Beatrice?
To your obsessive illusion
To you manufacture fantasy.

But today I won't make one more Cliché
And write this poem to you.
No, no more clichés.

This poem is dedicated to those women
Whose beauty is in their charm,
In their intelligence,
In their character,
Not on their fabricated looks.

This poem is to you women,
That like a Shahrazade wake up
Everyday with a new story to tell,
A story that sings for change
That hopes for battles:
Battles for the love of the united flesh
Battles for passions aroused by a new day
Battle for the neglected rights
Or just battles to survive one more night.

Yes, to you women in a world of pain
To you, bright star in this ever-spending universe
To you, fighter of a thousand-and-one fights
To you, friend of my heart.

From now on, my head won't look down to a magazine
Rather, it will contemplate the night
And its bright stars,
And so, no more clichés.

Octavio Paz Comments

Alex Gomez 21 June 2009

I do not know too much about this man, but there is a charter school named after him in Chicago and I attended my first year of schooling there, so he must have been a very influential figure through his words.

48 51 Reply
Narendran Vr 15 November 2004

A great poet, and also associated with India, Paz have great influence on contemporary Indian poetry.Poets like K, G.Sankara Pillai have imitated Paz to a great extent.Often misquoted and mis=understood as a marxist poet although a school he do not belongs to, Paz put forward the magical experience of poetry of fine quality and great human values.His poems have a personal touch and a nature to talk to the inner profiles.

32 44 Reply
Sayeed Abubakar 28 December 2012

A great poet of the world. He is one of my favorite poems since my university life. I did not know then that my lot will lead me to his country. I feel now happy that my beloved Alma Lorena Lopez Velazquez is a nymph of his country.

32 43 Reply
Gazi Saiful islam 05 January 2014

From world literature scene Octavio Paz is my favorite, I just start to translate Paz's poem. One week ago I already translate these as: Across, As One Listens To The Rain, Axis, Between Going and Coming, Brotherhood, Counterparts, Last Dawn, No More Clichés, Passage, Spaces, The Street, The Bridge etc from poemhunter.com. I think next year I can publish a book on Paz and his Peoms.

22 25 Reply
Andrés Paz Otero 25 September 2018

I love this guy is amazing

5 3 Reply
Alfredo Torres 26 August 2020

I had a great boss and teacher, who’s name was Art.

0 0 Reply
Soran M. H 21 December 2019

he is great poet, my first favorite modern poet, his works are different and amazing

10 0 Reply
Imnotwritingmyname 18 May 2019

I love Octavio Paz! I had him for a spanish project and in my opinion he is the best South American poet ever!

8 0 Reply
jayro dyer 05 April 2019

how about publishing poems in the language they were written?

10 0 Reply
Charlie Jade 14 November 2018

Nice! Love his poem(s) ! Octavio Paz is an amazing guy, just doing an assignment for school, thought he was boring. But after reading these, it was awesome! I know take him as an inspirer.

6 2 Reply

Octavio Paz Quotes

"Art" is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers.... What we call art is a game.

Man does not speak because he thinks; he thinks because he speaks. Or rather, speaking is no different than thinking: to speak is to think.

If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.

Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.

Technology is not an image of the world but a way of operating on reality. The nihilism of technology lies not only in the fact that it is the most perfect expression of the will to power ... but also in the fact that it lacks meaning.

Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.

Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason.

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