109 quotes
Instruct me how to thank thee! Oh, to shoot
My soul's full meaning into future years,
That they should lend it utterance, and salute
Love that endures, from life that disappears!
Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)
You forget too much
That every creature, female as the male,
Stands single in responsible act and thought,
As also in birth and death.
Aurora Leigh (1856)
The works of women are symbolical.
We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight,
Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir,
To put on when you’re weary.
Aurora Leigh (1857)
The essence of all beauty, I call love,
The attribute, the evidence, and end,
The consummation to the inward sense
Of beauty apprehended from without,
I still call love.
A worthless woman! mere cold clay
As all false things are! but so fair,
She takes the breath of men away
Who gaze upon her unaware:
I would not play her larcenous tricks
To have her looks!
How he sleepeth! having drunken
Weary childhood's mandragore,
From his pretty eyes have sunken
Pleasures to make room for more—
Sleeping near the withered nosegay which he pulled the day before.
Thank God, bless God, all ye who suffer not
More grief than ye can weep for. That is well—
That is light grieving!
Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand
Henceforward in thy shadow.
Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)
Therefore to this dog will I,
Tenderly not scornfully,
Render praise and favour!
With my hand upon his head,
Is my benediction said
Therefore, and for ever.
Poems (1844)
I seek no copy now of life's first half:
Leave here the pages with long musing curled,
And write me new my future's epigraph,
New angel mine, unhoped for in the world!
Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)
Speak low to me, my Saviour, low and sweet
From out the hallelujahs, sweet and low,
Lest I should fear and fall, and miss thee so
Who art not missed by any that entreat.
Poems (1844)
Unless you can muse in a crowd all day
On the absent face that fixed you;
Unless you can love, as the angels may,
With the breadth of heaven betwixt you;
Unless you can dream that his faith is fast,
Through behoving and unbehoving;
Unless you can die when the dream is past—
Oh, never call it loving!
And Marlowe, Webster, Fletcher, Ben,
Whose fire-hearts sowed our furrows when
The world was worthy of such men.
Poems (1844)
God's prophets of the Beautiful,
These Poets were.
Vision of Poets (1844)
Capacity for joy
Admits temptation.
Aurora Leigh (1856)
That he, in his developed manhood, stood
A little sunburnt by the glare of life;
While I... it seemed no sun had shone on me.
Aurora Leigh (1857)
What is art
But life upon the larger scale, the higher,
When, graduating up in a spiral line
Of still expanding and ascending gyres,
It pushed toward the intense significance
Of all things, hungry for the Infinite?
Art's life—and where we live, we suffer and toil.
Aurora Leigh (1856)
And I charged you with extortions
On the nobler fames of old,—
Ay, and sometimes thought your Porsons
Stained the purple they would fold.
By thunders of white silence.
The face, which, duly as the sun,
Rose up for me with life begun,
To mark all bright hours of the day
With hourly love, is dimmed away —
And yet my days go on, go on.
Last Poems (1862)