British Poet Quotes

The words you spoke were frenzied prayers to chemistry..

Carol Ann Duffy

Let brisker youths their active nerves prepare
Fit their light silken wings and skim the buxom air.

Richard Owen Cambridge

My mother bids me bind my hair
With bands of rosy hue,
Tie up my sleeves with ribbons rare,
And lace my bodice blue.

Like beauteous flowers which vainly waste their scent
Of odours in unhaunted deserts.

William Chamberlayne

Spring is come home with her world-wandering feet, And all things are made young with your desires.

Francis Thompson

A fine morning's killing, ay! All their necks wrung - all dead birds! Once they could fly - fly and swim! Fly and swim! All dead now - and sold cheap in the open market!

Wouldst thou view the Lion's den? Search afar from haunts of men — Where the reed-encircled rill, Oozes from the rocky hill, By its verdure far descried 'Mid the desert brown and wide.

Should we miss but a tree where we used to be playing,
Or find the wood cut where we sauntered a-Maying,—
If the yew-seat's away, or the ivy's a-wanting,
We hate the fine lawn and the new-fashioned planting.
Each thing called improvement seems blackened with crimes,
If it tears up one record of blissful old times.

Susanna Blamire

Who owns this landscape?
The millionaire who bought it or
the poacher staggering downhill in the early morning
with a deer on his back?

And this was your Cradle? Why, surely, my Jenny,
Such cozy dimensions go clearly to show
You were an exceedingly small pickaninny,
Some nineteen or twenty short summers ago.

Frederick Locker-Lampson

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
And some are treasured for their markings –
They cause the eyes to melt
Or the body to shriek without pain.

Cricket is an ancient pastime; it ripened sweetly, it has endured noblt.

When the voice of Christ speaks through the Word, then you will arise, and leave all, and follow Him.

Robert Murray M'Cheyne

There's a fount about to stream, There's a light about to beam, There's a warmth about to glow, There's a flower about to blow; There's a midnight blackness changing Into gray; Men of thought and men of action, Clear the way.

O yowthe allas why wilt thow nat enclyne,
And un-to reuled reform bowe thee?
Syn resoun is the verray streighte lyne
Þat ledith folk un-to felicitee.

It takes more than a short holiday to get a real love of Nature; such a love as makes trees like human companions, and green the colour we look for everywhere we go.

The name is history.
The thick Miljacka flows
Under its bridges through a canyon's breadth
Fretted with minarets and plump with domes,
Cupped in its mountains, caught on a drawn breath.

Anthony Thwaite

A prowde hert in a beggers brest,
A fowle visage with gay temples of atyre,
Horrible othes with an holy prist,
A justice of juges to selle and lete to hyre,
A knave to comande and have an empire,
To yeve a jugement of that never was wrought,
To preche of pees and sette eche man on fyre,
It may wele ryme but it accordith nought.

As I go musing through this mournful land
Soothed by the pine-tree's solemn harmony,
Thy well-loved image comes and walks by me.
I seem to hold thee by the gentle hand
And talk of things I dimly understand,
That thy dear spirit set to mine may be
As to an intricate lock the simple key.

Poetry is a second translation of the soul's feeling; it must be rendered into thought, and thought must change its nebulous robe of semi-wording into definite language, before it reaches another heart. Music is a first translation of feeling, needing no second, but entering the heart direct.

Frances Ridley Havergal

There are so many kinds of awful men One can't avoid them all. She often said She'd never make the same mistake again: She always made a new mistake instead.

Dawn crept over the Downs like a sinister white animal, followed by the snarling cries of a wind eating its way between the black boughs of the thorns. The wind was the furious voice of this sluggish animal light that was baring the dormers and mullions and scullions of Cold Comfort Farm.

Your worship is your furnaces, Which, like old idols, lost obscenes, Have molten bowels; your vision is Machines for making more machines.

Gordon Bottomley

It is not, in fact, cookery books that we need half so much as cooks really trained to a knowledge of their duties.

There is practically no difference at all between a family and a nation, except the difference in size. A family is a nation seen through the wrong end of a telescope; a nation is a family seen through the right end of a telescope, and I don't believe it is possible to achieve a happy and successful family life, or a happy and successful national life, unless we bear this simple fact in mind and behave accordingly.