Skip to content

Quotes from Poems and Ballads: First Series — Algernon Charles Swinburne

1837–1909 England

← All quotes by Algernon Charles Swinburne

49 quotes

The loves and hours of the life of a man,
They are swift and sad, being born of the sea.

Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866)

Our way is where God knows
And Love knows where:
We are in Love's hand to-day.

Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866)

It is not much that a man can save
On the sands of life, in the straits of time,
Who swims in sight of the great third wave
That never a swimmer shall cross or climb.

Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866)

I will say no word that a man might say
Whose whole life's love goes down in a day;
For this could never have been; and never,
Though the gods and the years relent, shall be.

Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866)

Wilt thou fear that, and fear not my desire?

Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866)

Yea, is not even Apollo, with hair and harpstring of gold,
A bitter God to follow, a beautiful God to behold?

Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866)

I shall remember while the light lives yet
And in the night time I shall not forget.

Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866)

Till life forget and death remember,
Till thou remember and I forget.

Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866)

Ah beautiful passionate body
That never has ached with a heart!

Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866)

At the door of life, by the gate of breath,
There are worse things waiting for men than death;
Death could not sever my soul and you,
As these have severed your soul from me.

Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866)

Change in a trice
The lilies and languors of virtue
For the raptures and roses of vice.

Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866)

Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;
We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.

Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866)

I have put my days and dreams out of mind,
Days that are over, dreams that are done.
Though we seek life through, we shall surely find
There is none of them clear to us now, not one.

Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866)

I shall sleep, and move with the moving ships,
Change as the winds change, veer in the tide.

Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866)

Pale, beyond porch and portal,
Crowned with calm leaves, she stands
Who gathers all things mortal
With cold immortal hands.

Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866)

Ah that such sweet things should be fleet,
Such fleet things sweet!

Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866)

Those eyes the greenest of things blue
The bluest of things grey.

Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866)

We shift and bedeck and bedrape us,
Thou art noble and nude and antique.

Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866)

Forget that I remember
And dream that I forget.

Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866)

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)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Algernon Charles Swinburne (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.