180 quotes
I had discovered, early in my researches, that their doctrine was no mere chemical fantasy, but a philosophy they applied to the world, to the elements, and to man himself.
Rosa Alchemica (1914)
Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses. Poets are the policemen of language; they are always arresting those old reprobates the words.
But, dear, cling close to me; since you were gone,
My barren thoughts have chilled me to the bone.
The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910)
The fascination of what's difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart.
The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910)
Come near, that no more blinded hy man’s fate,
I find under the boughs of love and hate,
In all poor foolish things that live a day,
Eternal beauty wandering on her way.
Locke sank into a swoon;
The Garden died;
God took the spinning-jenny
Out of his side.
The Tower (1928)
A bloody and a sudden end,
Gunshot or a noose,
For Death who takes what man would keep,
Leaves what man would lose.
Last Poems (1936)
Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.
Crossways (1889)
This melancholy London. I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air.
Have you made greatness your companion,
Although it be for children that you sigh:
These are the clouds about the fallen sun,
The majesty that shuts his burning eye.
The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910)
To be choked with hate
May well be of all evil chances chief.
If there’s no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.
Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921)
Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free.
The Tower (1928)
And God stands winding His lonely horn,
And time and the world are ever in flight;
And love is less kind than the grey twilight,
And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.
The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)
Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?
For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,
Mournful that no new wonder may betide,
Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,
And Usna's children died.
The Rose (1893)
The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor’s drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night walkers’ song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.
The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming (1919)
Down the mountain walls
From where pan’s cavern is
Intolerable music falls.
Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear,
Belly, shoulder, bum,
Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs
Copulate in the foam.
Last Poems (1936)
All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia.
Last Poems (1936)
Odour of blood when Christ was slain
Made all platonic tolerance vain
And vain all Doric discipline.
The Tower (1928)
O what fine thought we had because we thought
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.
The Tower (1928)