British Poet Quotes

A female mind like a rude fallow lies;
No seed is sown, but weeds spontaneous rise.
As well might we expect, in winter, spring,
As land untilled a fruitful crop should bring.

Anne Ingram, Viscountess Irvine

Even the simplest poem
May destroy your immunity to human emotions.
All poems must carry a Government warning. Words
Can seriously affect your heart.

I've wandered east, I've wandered west,
Through mony a weary way;
But never, never can forget
The love o' life's young day!

William Motherwell

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

Paul Moon James

And Life is Colour and Warmth and Light
And a striving evermore for these;
And he is dead, who will not fight;
And who dies fighting has increase.

Julian Grenfell

Forget. Memory is pain trying to resurrect itself.

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.

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

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

There are some secrets which scarcely admit of being disclosed even to ourselves.

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

Oh, the gallant fisher's life,
It is the best of any
'Tis full of pleasure, void of strife,
And 'tis beloved of many.

Time's stern tide, with cold Oblivion's wave, Shall soon dissolve each fair, each fading charm.

A slow psalm of two nations
Mourning a common pain
—Hebrew and Arabic mingling
Their silver-rooted vine;
Olives and roses falling
To sweeten Palestine.

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

Then we shall rise
And view ourselves with clearer eyes
In that calm region where no night
Can hide us from each other's sight.

Great minds against themselves conspire, and shun the cure they most desire.

I know I could enchain him with a smile:
And lead him captive with a gentle word,
I scorn my look should ever man beguile,
Or other speech, than meaning to afford.

Elizabeth Tanfield Cary

LUCIFER: Only the chemistry of love can make Two atoms one.

American diplomacy. It's like watching somebody trying to do joinery with a chainsaw.

James Hamilton-Paterson

For years a secret shame destroyed my peace—
I'd not read Eliot, Auden or MacNeice.
But then I had a thought that brought me hope—
Neither had Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope.

Justin Richardson (poet)

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.

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.

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

What men have done can still be done
And shall be done today.