70 quotes
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)
I thought how sadly beauty of inscape was unknown and buried away from simple people and yet how near at hand it was if they had eyes to see it and it could be called out everywhere again.
A great work by an Englishman is like a great battle won by England. It is an unfading bay tree.
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)
I say that we are wound
With mercy round and round
As if with air.
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)
The poetical language of an age should be the current language heightened, to any degree heightened and unlike itself, but not...an obsolete one.
It seems then that it is not the excellence of any two things (or more) in themselves, but those two things as viewed by the light of each other, that makes beauty.
No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)
That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)
Hope had grown grey hairs,
Hope had mourning on,
Trenched with tears, carved with cares,
Hope was twelve hours gone.
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)
You do not mean by mystery what a Catholic does. You mean an interesting uncertainty: the uncertainty ceasing, interest ceases also...
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim.
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)
Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb:
It is the shut, the curfew sent
From there where all surrenders come
Which only makes you eloquent.
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)
I say more, the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
Christ — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.
The best ideal is the true
And other truth is none.
All glory be ascribed to
The holy Three in One.
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)
Searching nature I taste self but at one tankard, that of my own being.
My own heart let me have more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hoürs we have spent
This night!
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)
I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour.
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)
Do you know, a horrible thing has happened to me. I have begun to doubt Tennyson.