127 quotes
Forget that I remember
And dream that I forget.
Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866)
Time, thy name is sorrow, says the stricken
Heart of life, laid waste with wasting flame
Ere the change of things and thoughts requicken,
Time, thy name.
To have read the greatest works of any great poet, to have beheld or heard the greatest works of any great painter or musician, is a possession added to the best things of life.
If love were what the rose is,
And I were like the leaf,
Our lives would grow together
In sad or singing weather,
Blown fields or flowerful closes,
Green pasture or grey grief;
If love were what the rose is,
And I were like the leaf.
Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866)
Ah, ah, thy beauty! like a beast it bites,
Stings like an adder, like an arrow smites.
Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866)
What shall be done for sorrow
With love whose race is run?
Where help is none to borrow,
What shall be done?
There lived a singer in France of old
By the tideless dolorous midland sea.
In a land of sand and ruin and gold
There shone one woman, and none but she.
Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866)
Who questions with a snake if the snake sting?
Who reasons of the lightning if it burn?
While these things are, deadly will these things be;
And so the curse that comes of cursed faith.
Bothwell: A Tragedy (1874)
For in the days we know not of
Did fate begin
Weaving the web of days that wove
Your doom.
Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866)
And the best and the worst of this is
That neither is most to blame,
If you have forgotten my kisses
And I have forgotten your name.
Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866)
Though one were fair as roses
His beauty clouds and closes.
Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866)
Marvellous mercies and infinite love.
Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866)
Change lays not her hand upon truth.
Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866)
Sweet Love, that art so bitter.
Dream that the lips once breathless
Might quicken if they would;
Say that the soul is deathless;
Dream that the gods are good;
Say March may wed September,
And time divorce regret;
But not that you remember,
And not that I forget.
Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866)
God's own hand
Holds fast all issues of our deeds: with him
The end of all our ends is, but with us
Our ends are, just or unjust: though our works
Find righteous or unrighteous judgment, this
At least is ours, to make them righteous. Go.
Marino Faliero (1885)
Not from without us, only from within,
Comes or can ever come upon us light
Whereby the soul keeps ever truth in sight.
No truth, no strength, no comfort man may win,
No grace for guidance, no release from sin,
Save of his own soul's giving.
Astrophel and Other Poems (1894)
Love laid his sleepless head
On a thorny rose bed:
And his eyes with tears were red,
And pale his lips as the dead.
A little soul scarce fledged for earth
Takes wing with heaven again for goal,
Even while we hailed as fresh from birth
A little soul.
"Not a child: I call myself a boy,"
Says my king, with accent stern yet mild;
Now nine years have brought him change of joy—
"Not a child."