40 quotes
Struggle and turmoil, revel and brawl—
Youth is the sign of them, one and all.
A smoldering hearth and a silent stage—
These are a type of the world of Age.
Chance and Time are ever twain.
What have I done for you,
England, my England?
What is there I would not do,
England, my own?
Poems (1898)
Bland as a Jesuit, sober as a hymn.
A Book of Verses (1888)
Love, which is lust, is the Lamp in the Tomb.
Love, which is lust, is the Call from the Gloom.
Love, which is lust, is the Main of Desire.
Love, which is lust, is the Centric Fire.
Hawthorn and Lavender (1901)
All over the world, the nation, in a dream
Of money and love and sport, hangs at the paps
Of well-being, and so
Goes fattening, mellowing, dozing, rotting down
Into a rich deliquium of decay.
Hawthorn and Lavender (1901)
What is Death
But Life in act? How should the Unteeming Grave
Be victor over thee,
Mother, a mother of men?
For the strife of Love's the abysmal strife,
And the word of Love is the Word of Life.
And they that go with the Word unsaid,
Though they seem of the living, are damned and dead.
Hawthorn and Lavender (1901)
Some starlit garden grey with dew,
Some chamber flushed with wine and fire,
What matters where, so I and you
Are worthy our desire?
Poems (1898)
Valiant in velvet, light in ragged luck,
Most vain, most generous, sternly critical,
Buffoon and poet, lover and sensualist:
A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck,
Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all,
And something of the Shorter-Catechist.
A Book of Verses (1888)
And, forgive and forget
Or canker and fret,
We can be no more
As we were before.
When it ends it ends
With friends.
A Book of Verses (1888)
Life — give me life until the end,
That at the very top of being,
The battle-spirit shouting in my blood,
Out of the reddest hell of the fight
I may be snatched and flung
Into the everlasting lull,
The immortal, incommunicable dream.
Poems (1898)
Life is a smoke that curls—
Curls in a flickering skein,
That winds and whisks and whirls,
A figment thin and vain,
Into the vast inane.
One end for hut and hall.
What is the voice of strange command
Calling you still, as friend calls friend,
With love that cannot brook delay,
To rise and follow the ways that wend
Over the hills and far away.
Or ever the knightly years were gone
With the old world to the grave,
I was a king in Babylon,
And you were a Christian slave.
A Book of Verses (1888)
O Death! O Change! O Time!
Without you, O! the insufferable eyes
Of these poor Might-Have-Beens,
These fatuous, ineffectual yesterdays.
Who but knows
How it goes!
Life's a last year's Nightingale,
Love's a last year's rose.
Failing yet gracious,
Slow pacing, soon homing,
A patriarch that strolls
Through the tents of his children,
The sun as he journeys
His round on the lower
Ascents of the blue,
Washes the roofs
And the hillsides with clarity.
Poems (1898)
Think on the shame of dreams for deeds,
The scandal of unnatural strife,
The slur upon immortal needs,
The treason done to life:
Arise! no more a living lie,
And with me quicken and control
Some memory that shall magnify
The universal Soul.
Poems (1898)
My songs were once of the sunrise:
They shouted it over the bar;
First-footing the dawns, they flourished,
And flamed with the morning star.
My songs are now of the sunset:
Their brows are touched with light,
But their feet are lost in the shadows
And wet with the dews of night.
Hawthorn and Lavender (1901)