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- The greater cats with golden eyes
Stare out between the bars.
Deserts are there, and different skies,
And night with different stars.
Victoria Sackville-West, The Greater Cats
- Fancy grows colder as the silvery hair
Tells the advancing winter of out life.
Sir Walter Scott, Macduff's Cross, Prelude
- Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife!
To all the sensual world proclaim,
One crowded hour of glorious strife
Is worth an age without a name.
Sir Walter Scott
- O! many a shaft at random sent
Finds mark the archer little meant!
And many a word, at random spoken,
May soothe or wound a heart that's broken.
Sir Walter Scott
- Let us probe the silent places, let us seek what luck betide us;
Let us journey to a lonely land I know.
There's a whisper on the night-wind, there's a star agleam to guide us,
And the Wild is calling, calling . . . let us go.
Robert Service, The Call of the Wild
- A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;
The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune;
Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,
And watching his luck was his light-o'-love, the lady that's known as Lou.
Robert Service, The Shooting of Dan McGrew
- I remember the color of music
and how forever
all the trembling bells of you
were mine.
Anne Sexton, "The Bells," 27-30
- Today is made of yesterday . . . .
Anne Sexton, "The Lost Ingredient," 21
- I refuse to remember the dead.
And the dead are bored with the whole thing.
Anne Sexton, "A Curse Against Elegies," 19-20
- I promise you love. Time will not take away that.
Anne Sexton, "The Fortress," 60
- A writer is essentially a spy.
Anne Sexton, "The Black Art," 7
- But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.
Anne Sexton, "Wanting to Die," 7-9
- I say Live, Live because of the sun,
the dream, the excitable gift.
Anne Sexton, "Live," 119-120
- "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias
- Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mutability
- The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind . . . .
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mont Blanc
- And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea
If to the human mind's imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mont Blanc
- The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats among us . . . .
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Hymn to Intellectual Beauty
- I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind
- If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley, "Ode to the West Wind
- Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity . . . .
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais
- We look before and after,
And pine for what is not;
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Cloud (1820)
- The fountains mingle with the river,
And the rivers with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things, by a law divine,
In one another's being mingle--
Why not I with thine?
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Love's Philosophy
- Sceptre and crown
Must tumble down,
And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crooked scythe and spade.
James Shirley, The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses, "Dirge," 5-8
- A year there is a lifetime,
And a second but a day,
And an older world will meet you
Each morn you come away.
Dianne Sigerson Shorter, The Wind on the Hills
- But what they fought each other for,
I could not well make out;
But everybody said," quoth he,
"That 'twas a famous victory.
Richard Southey, The Battle of Blenheim
- Time and place give best advice,
Out of season, out of price.
Robert Southwell, St. Peter's Complaint
- The noble heart, that harbours virtuous thought,
And is with child of glorious great intent,
Can never rest, until it forth have brought
Th'eternal brood of glory excellent."
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, I, v, 1
- Ay me, how many perils do enfold
The righteous man, to make him daily fall?
Were not, that heavenly grace doth him uphold,
And steadfast truth acquite him out of all?
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, I, viii, 1
- What man is he, that boasts of fleshly might,
And vain assurance of mortality,
Which all so soon, as it doth come to fight,
Against spiritual foes, yields by and by,
Or from the field most cowardly doth fly?
Ne let the man ascribe it to his skill,
That thorough grace hath gained victory.
If any strength we have, it is to ill,
But all the good is God's, both power and eke will."
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, I, x, 1
- So let us love, dear love, like as we ought,
Love is the lesson which the Lord us taught.
Edmund Spenser, Amoretti, 68, 13-14
- Dark is my day, whiles her fair light I miss,
And dead my life that wants such lively bliss.
Edmund Spenser, Amoretti, 89, 13-14
- Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my Song.
Edmund Spenser, Prothalamion, 18
- One must have a mind of winter. . . .
Wallace Stevens, "The Snow Man," 1
- the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.
Wallace Stevens, "The Snow Man," 13-15
- If sex were all, then every trembling hand
Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished for words.
Wallace Stevens, Le Monocle de Mon Oncle, 111-112
- Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Wallace Stevens, "The Emperor of Ice-Cream," 7-8
- I had as lief be embraced by the porter at the hotel
As to get no more from the moonlight
Than your moist hand.
Wallace Stevens, "Two Figures in Dense Violet Night," 1-3
- Beauty is momentary in the mind--
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.
Wallace Stevens, "Peter Quince at the Clavier," 51-53
- I am, in any case,
A most inappropriate man
In a most inappropriate place.
Wallace Stevens, "Sailing After Lunch," 8-10
- She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang.
Wallace Stevens, "The Idea of Order at Key West," 37-38
- Politic man ordained
Imagination as the fateful sin.
Wallace Stevens, "Academic Discourse at Havana," 52-53
- They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
Wallace Stevens, "The Man with the Blue Guitar," 3-6
- Description is revelation.
Wallace Stevens, "Description Without Place," 121
- 'Here he lies where he longed to be;
Here is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.'
Robert Louis Stevenson, Requiem
- Joy may be a miser,
But sorrow's purse is free.
Richard Henry Stoddard, Persian Song
- For, by old proverbs it appears,
That walls have tongues, and hedges ears.
Jonathan Swift
- So, Nat'ralists observe, a Flea
Hath smaller Fleas that on him prey,
And these have smaller yet to bite 'em,
And so proceed ad infinitum. . . .
Jonathan Swift, "On Poetry: A Rapsody," 337-340
- And the best and the worst of this is
That neither is most to blame
If you've forgotten my kisses
And I've forgotten your name.
A. C. Swinburne, An Interlude, 53-56
- It is not much that a man can save
On the sands of life, in the straits of time . . . .
A. C. Swinburne, The Triumph of Time
- From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
A. C. Swinburne, The Garden of Persephone, 81-88
- Who hath given man speech? or who hath set therein
A thorn for peril and a snare for sin?
For in the word his life is and his breath,
And in the word his death . . . .
A. C. Swinburne, A. C. Swinburne, Atalanta in Calydon, "Third Chorus," 1-4
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