British Poet Quotes

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

The spiritual element, the really important part of religion, has no concern with Time and Space, temporary mundane laws, or conduct.

Richard Le Gallienne
Richard Le Gallienne
The works of nature will bear a thousand views and reviews: the more frequently and narrowly we look into them, the more occasion we shall have to admire their beauty.

Francis Atterbury
Francis Atterbury
The Night has a thousand eyes,
And the Day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun. The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.

there are sufferers with guns movin breeze through the trees there are people waging war in the heat and hunger of the streets.

Linton Kwesi Johnson
Linton Kwesi Johnson
The lesson is that dying men must groan;
And poets groan in rhymes that please the ear.

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

To be so closely caught up in the teeth of things that they kill you, no matter how infinitesimally kill you, is, truly, to be a poet: and to be a poet in fact it is additionally necessary that you should possess the tongues and instruments with which to record this series of infinitesimal deaths.

George Barker
George Barker
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.

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.

The church of the elect, which is partly militant on earth, and partly triumphant in heaven, resembles a city built on both sides of a river. There is but the stream of death between grace and glory. Death, to God's people, is but a ferry-boat.

Augustus Toplady
Augustus Toplady
In your deep floods
Drown all my faults and fears;
Not let His eye
See sin, but through my tears.

Pig sit still in the strainer
I must have my Pig tea

Cats, no less liquid than their shadows,
Offer no angles to the wind.
They slip, diminished, neat, through loopholes
Less than themselves.

What is this that roareth thus?
Can it be a Motor Bus?
Yes, the smell and hideous hum
Indicat Motorem Bum!…
How shall wretches live like us
Cincti Bis Motoribus?
Domine, defende nos
Contra hos Motores Bos!

Under this stone, Reader, survey
Dead Sir John Vanbrugh's house of clay.
Lie heavy on him, Earth! for he
Laid many heavy loads on thee!

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
Frances Ridley Havergal
I liked having some time to myself. Our family was such a close one, you could get smothered. Of course, we didn't always agree with one another. Sometimes I quarreled with my brother and sisters, but I couldn't remember hating anyone for more than five minutes.

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

Without you ghost ferries would cross the Mersey manned by skeleton crews

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.

Spring sits and shivers at the porch of light : April goes weeping on her road to May.

Or to some coffee-house I stray
For news, the manna of a day.

Too late I stayed,—forgive the crime!
Unheeded flew the hours;
How noiseless falls the foot of time
That only treads on flowers.

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.