British Poet Quotes

Letters, from absent friends, extinguish fear, Unite division, and draw distance near; Their magic force each silent wish conveys, And wafts embodied though, a thousand ways: Could souls to bodies write, death's pow'r were mean, For minds could then meet minds with heav'n between.

What is the life of a man more than the life of a lamb, or any guiltless animal?

Experience enables me to depose to the comfort and blessing that literature can prove in seasons of sickness and sorrow.

I do not write for the public. You are my public and I hope to convert you.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Woods are to us anything but solitudes - they are populous and inexhaustible worlds, where creatures that mock the grasp but not the mind, a matchless phantasmagoria, flit before us; alternately make us merry with their pleasant follies, delight us with their romantic grandeur and beauty, and elevate our hearts with their sublime sentiments.

Columbine, open your folded wrapper, Where two twin turtle-doves dwell! O cuckoopint toll me the purple clapper That hangs in your clear green bell!

And therewith kest I doun myn eye ageyne,
Quhare as I sawe, walking under the tour,
Full secretly new cummyn hir to pleyne,
The fairest or the freschest yonge floure
That ever I sawe, me thoght, before that houre,
For quhich sodayn abate anon astert
The blude of all my body to my hert.

James I of Scotland

And o'er them the lighthouse looked lovely as hope,—
That star of life's tremulous ocean.

Paul Moon James

Art is not self-expression while, for me, 'confessional poetry' is almost a contradiction in terms.

Elizabeth Jennings

I was raised to feel that doing nothing was a sin. I had to learn to do nothing.

Despotism sits nowhere so secure as under the effigy and ensigns of freedom.

Walter Savage Landor

The last cobwebs
of fog in the
black firtrees are flakes
of white ash in the world's hearth.

Denise Levertov

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

Never think that by releasing me you will be free. You would only condemn us to an ultimate hell on earth. You would only free something else to destroy us both.

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.

I need Thy presence every passing hour;
What, but Thy grace, can foil the tempter's power?
Who, like Thyself, my guide and stay can be?
Through cloud and sunshine, oh, abide with me!

Henry Francis Lyte

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.

Why do we like being Irish? Partly because
It gives us a hold on the sentimental English
As members of a world that never was,
Baptized with fairy water

And in a disused shed in Co. Wexford,
Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel,
Among the bathtubs and the washbasins
A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.

The heart is like an instrument whose strings Steal magic music from Life's mystic frets.

Do people who wave at trains Wave at the driver, or at the train itself? Or, do people who wave at trains Wave at the passengers? Those hurtling strangers, The unidentifiable flying faces?

Oft has it been my lot to mark
A proud, conceited, talking spark.

Ah! fraudful malice! how shall wisdom's care Escape the poison of thy gilded snare!

William Julius Mickle

The children eat and wriggle and laugh,
The two old ladies stroke their silk;
But the cat is grown small and thin with desire,
Transformed to a creeping lust for milk.