Quotes by British Authors - Page 746

Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.
John Keats
When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy, And the dimpling stream runs laughing by; When the air does laugh with our merry wit, And the green hill laughs with the noise of it.
George Gordon Byron
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
Thomas Hardy
Now therefore, while the youthful hue Sits on thy skin like morning dew, And while thy willing soul transpires At every pore with instant fires, Now let us sport us while we may, And now, like amorous birds of prey, Rather at once our time devour Than languish in his slow-chapped power.Let us roll all our strength and all Our sweetness up into one ball, And tear our pleasures with rough strife Thorough the iron gates of life: Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run.
Andrew Marvell
There's in my mind a...turbulent moon-ridden girlor old woman, or both,dressed in opals and rags, feathersand torn taffeta,who knows strange songsbut she is not kind.
Denise Levertov
From quiet homes and first beginning,Out to the undiscovered ends,There's nothing worth the wear of winning,But laughter and the love of friends.
Hilaire Belloc
World is suddener than we fancy it.
Louis MacNeice
I sit in my treeI sing like the birdsMy beak is my penMy songs are my poems.
David Almond
Let Him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Till Human voices wake us, and we drown.
T.S Eliot
All the rest is silenceOn the other side of the wall;And the silence ripeness,And the ripeness all.
W.H. Auden
Clear, unscalable, aheadRise the Mountains of Instead,From whose cold, cascading streamsNone may drink except in dreams.
W.H. Auden
True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'dWhat oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd;Something whose truth convinced at sight we find,That gives us back the image of our mind.As shades more sweetly recommend the light,So modest plainness sets off sprightly wit.
Alexander Pope
I have been here before, But when or how I cannot tell: I know the grass beyond the door, The sweet keen smell, The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Silver hidden in the gold,Young man hidden in the old,Laughing lord with weeping eyes,Bring king and ring before sunrise! -Hilarion, The Great and Terrible Quest
Margaret Lovett
Loneliness clarifies. Here silence standsLike heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken, Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken, Luminously-peopled air ascends; And past the poppies bluish neutral distance Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence: Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.
Philip Larkin
There’s gold, and it’s haunting and haunting; It’s luring me on as of old; Yet it isn’t the gold that I’m wanting So much as just finding the gold. It’s the great, big, broad land ’way up yonder, It’s the forests where silence has lease; It’s the beauty that thrills me with wonder, It’s the stillness that fills me with peace.
Robert W. Service
One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.
William Wordsworth
What is the colour of Christmas?Red? The red of the toyshops on a dark winter’s afternoon,Of Father Christmas and the robin’s breast?Or green?Green of holly and spruce and mistletoe in the house, dark shadow of summer in leafless winter?One might plainly add a romance of white, fields of frost and snow;thus white, green, red- reducing the event to the level of a Chianti bottle. But many will say that the significant colour is gold, gold of fire and treasure, of light in the winter dark; and this gets closer, For the true colour of Christmas is Black.Black of winter, black of night, black of frost and of the east wind, black of dangerous shadows beyond the firelight.I am not sure who wrote this. I got it from page nine of “A Book of Christmas” by William Sansom. Google didn’t help. It is rather true I think, that the true color of Christmas is black. For like the author said in succeeding sentences “The table yellow with electric light, the fire by which stories are told, the bright spangle of the tree- they all blazé out of shadow and out of a darkness of winter
William Sansom
High FlightOh! I have slipped the surly bonds of EarthAnd danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirthof sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred thingsYou have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swungHigh in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flungMy eager craft through footless halls of air....Up, up the long, delirious, burning blueI’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.Where never lark, or even eagle flew —And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trodThe high untrespassed sanctity of space,- Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
John Gillespie Magee Jr.
For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see,Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.
Alfred Tennyson
I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.
Jeanette Winterson
I do think the barsThat kept my spirit in are burst - that IAm sailing with thee through the dizzy sky!How beautiful thou art!
John Keats
Poetry makes nothing happen.
W.H. Auden
contemporary poetry is a kind of Reykjavik, a place where accessibility and intelligence have been fighting a Cold War by proxy for the last half-century.
Nick Hornby
Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
Julian Barnes
The fountains mingle with the river,And the rivers with the ocean; The winds of heaven mix forever,With a sweet emotion; Nothing in the world is single;All things by a law divine In one another's being mingle:— Why not I with thine? See! the mountains kiss high heaven, And the waves clasp one another; No sister flower would be forgiven If it disdained its brother; And the sunlight clasps the earth, And the moonbeams kiss the sea:— What are all these kissings worth, If thou kiss not me?
Percy Bysshe Shelley
What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare?
W.H. Davies
Secretly, deep down, everybody on Earth believes they can write poetry, apart from the members of the Poets' Guild, who know they can't.
K.J. Parker
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom.
W.H. Auden
Sometimes it feels like someone else is wearing my body.
Warsan Shire
She was a Phantom of delightWhen first she gleam'd upon my sight;A lovely Apparition, sentTo be a moment's ornament:Her eyes as stars of twilight fair;Like twilight's, too, her dusky hair;But all things else about her drawnFrom May-time and the cheerful dawn;A dancing shape, an image gay,To haunt, to startle, and waylay.
William Wordsworth
To the sea, to the sea! The white gulls are crying,The wind is blowing, and the white foam is flying.West, west away, the round sun is falling, Grey ship, grey ship, do you hear them calling, The voices of my people that have gone before me? I will leave, I will leave the woods that bore me;For our days are ending and our years failing.I will pass the wide waters lonely sailing.Long are the waves on the Last Shore falling,Sweet are the voices in the Lost Isle calling,In Eressea, in Elvenhome that no man can discover,Where the leaves fall not: land of my people forever!
J.R.R. Tolkien
I wish I was either in your arms full of faith, or that a Thunder bolt would strike me.
John Keats
Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
W.H. Auden
I have no doubt at all the Devil grins,As seas of ink I spatter. Ye gods, forgive my "literary" sins --The other kind don't matter.
Robert W. Service
The eye--it cannot choose but see;We cannot bid the ear be still;Our bodies feel, where'er they be,Against or with our will.
William Wordsworth
she thought it was the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly, were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly.
Jane Austen
I could not love thee, Dear, so much, Loved I not Honour more.
Richard Lovelace
You are her mother.Why did you not warn her,hold her like a rotting boatand tell her that men will not love herif she is covered in continents,if her teeth are small colonies,if her stomach is an islandif her thighs are borders?What man wants to lie downand watch the world burnin his bedroom?Your daughter ’s face is a small riot,her hands are a civil war,a refugee camp behind each ear,a body littered with ugly things.But God,doesn’t she wearthe world well?
Warsan Shire
Into my heart an air that killsFrom yon far country blows:What are those blue remembered hills,What spires, what farms are those?That is the land of lost content,I see it shining plain,The happy highways where I wentAnd cannot come again.
A.E. Housman
In the dark I rest,unready for the light which dawnsday after day,eager to be shared.Black silk, shelter me.I needmore of the night before I openeyes and heartto illumination. I must stillgrow in the dark like a rootnot ready, not ready at all.
Denise Levertov
Will you walk into my parlour?" said the Spider to the Fly
Mary Howitt
there anybody there?' said the Traveller,Knocking on the moonlit door;And his horse in the silence champed the grassesOf the forest's ferny floor.And a bird flew up out of the turret,Above the Traveller's head:And he smote upon the door again a second time;'Is there anybody there?' he said.But no one descended to the Traveller;No head from the leaf-fringed sillLeaned over and looked into his grey eyes,Where he stood perplexed and still.But only a host of phantom listenersThat dwelt in the lone house thenStood listening in the quiet of the moonlightTo that voice from the world of men:Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,That goes down to the empty hall,Hearkening in an air stirred and shakenBy the lonely Traveller's call.And he felt in his heart their strangeness,Their stillness answering his cry,While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,'Neath the starred and leafy sky;For he suddenly smote on the door, evenLouder, and lifted his head:--'Tell them I came, and no one answered,That I kept my word,' he said.Never the least stir made the listeners,Though every word he spakeFell echoing through the shadowiness of the still houseFrom the one man left awake:Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,And the sound of iron on stone,And how the silence surged softly backward,When the plunging hoofs were gone.
Walter de la Mare
Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
T.S Eliot
I went to the Garden of Love, And saw what I never had seen: A Chapel was built in the midst, Where I used to play on the green. And the gates of this Chapel were shut, And 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door; So I turn'd to the Garden of Love, That so many sweet flowers bore. And I saw it was filled with graves, And tomb-stones where flowers should be: And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds, And binding with briars, my joys & desires.
William Blake
Lines Written In Early SpringI heard a thousand blended notes,While in a grove I sate reclined,In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughtsBring sad thoughts to the mind.To her fair works did Nature linkThe human soul that through me ran;And much it grieved my heart to thinkWhat man has made of man.Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;And 'tis my faith that every flowerEnjoys the air it breathes.The birds around me hopped and played,Their thoughts I cannot measure:--But the least motion which they madeIt seemed a thrill of pleasure.The budding twigs spread out their fan,To catch the breezy air;And I must think, do all I can,That there was pleasure there.If this belief from heaven be sent,If such be Nature's holy plan,Have I not reason to lamentWhat man has made of man?
William Wordsworth
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;Conspiring with him how to load and blessWith fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shellsWith a sweet kernel; to set budding more,And still more, later flowers for the bees,Until they think warm days will never cease,For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
John Keats
To wake the soul by tender strokes of art,To raise the genius, and to mend the heart
Alexander Pope
You can never rouse Harris. There is no poetry about Harris- no wild yearning for the unattainable. Harris never "weeps, he knows not why." If Harris's eyes fill with tears, you can bet it is because Harris has been eating raw onions, or has put too much Worcester over his chop.If you were to stand at night by the sea-shore with Harris, and say:"Hark! do you not hear? Is it but the mermaids singing deep below the waving waters; or sad spirits, chanting dirges for white corpses held by seaweed?" Harris would take you by the arm, and say:"I know what it is, old man; you've got a chill. Now you come along with me. I know a place round the corner here, where you can get a drop of the finest Scotch whisky you ever tasted- put you right in less than no time."Harris always does know a place round the corner where you can get something brilliant in the drinking line. I believe that if you met Harris up in Paradise (supposing such a thing likely), he would immediately greet you with:"So glad you've come, old fellow; I've found a nice place round the corner here, where you can get some really first-class nectar.
Jerome K. Jerome
The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.
Ted Hughes
One! two! and through and throughThe vorpal blade went snickersnack!He left it dead, and with its headHe went galumphing back.
Lewis Carroll
Marriage I thinkFor womenIs the best of opiates.It kills the thoughtsThat think about the thoughts,It is the best of opiates.So said Maria.But too long in solitude she'd dwelt,And too long her thoughts had feltTheir strength. So when the man drew near,Out popped her thoughts and covered him with fear.Poor Maria! Better that she had kept her thoughts on a chain,For now she's alone again and all in pain;She sighs for the man that went and the thoughts that stayTo trouble her dreams by night and her dreams by day.
Stevie Smith
A Robin Redbreast in a CagePuts all Heaven in a Rage.A dove house fill’d with doves and pigeonsShudders Hell thro’ all its regions.A Dog starv’d at his Master’s GatePredicts the ruin of the State.A Horse misus’d upon the RoadCalls to Heaven for Human blood.Each outcry of the hunted HareA fiber from the Brain does tear.
William Blake
The rain set early in tonight,The sullen wind was soon awake,It tore the elm-tops down for spite,And did its best to vex the lake:I listened with heart fit to break.When glided in Porphyria; straightShe shut the cold out and the storm,And kneeled and made the cheerless grateBlaze up and all the cottage warm;
Robert Browning
I wander through each chartered street,Near where the chartered Thames does flow;A mark in every face I meet,Marks of weakness, marks of woe.In every cry of every man,In every infant’s cry of fear,In every voice, in every ban,The mind-forged manacles I hear:How the chimney-sweeper’s cryEvery blackening church appals,And the hapless soldier’s sighRuns in blood down palace-walls.But most, through midnight streets I hearHow the youthful harlot’s curseBlasts the new-born infant’s tear,And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse.
William Blake
Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run.
Andrew Marvell
Sweetest smile is made saddest tear-drop!
Edwin Arnold
What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew
Robert Browning
Fare well we call to hearth and hallThough wind may blow and rain may fallWe must away ere break of dayOver the wood and mountain tallTo Rivendell where Elves yet dwellIn glades beneath the misty fellThrough moor and waste we ride in hasteAnd wither then we cannot tellWith foes ahead behind us dreadBeneath the sky shall be our bedUntil at last our toil be spedOur journey done, our errand spedWe must away! We must away!We ride before the break of day!
J.R.R. Tolkien