British Poet Quotes

War is only glorious when you buy it in the Daily Mail and enjoy it at the breakfast table. It goes splendidly with bacon and eggs. Real war is the final limit of damnable brutality, and that's all there is in it.

G. A. Studdert Kennedy

I shall not say why and how I became, at the age of fifteen, the mistress of the Earl of Craven.

Harriette Wilson

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.

It normally happens that if you put two words together, or two syllables together, one of them will attract more weight, more emphasis, than the other. In other words, most so-called spondees can be read as either iambs or trochees.

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

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

John Drinkwater

We would be strangers in the Capitol;
this is our country also, no-where else;
and we shall not be outcast on the world.

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

The weightless mosquito touches
her tiny shadow on the stone,
and with how like, how infinite
a lightness, man and shadow meet.
They fuse. A shadow is a man
when the mosquito death approaches.

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

My dear Isa, I now sit down on my botom to answer all your kind and beloved letters which you was so good as to write to me.

Marjory Fleming

Foolish eyes, thy streams give over,
Wine, not water, binds the lover:
At the table then be shining,
Gay coquette, and all designing.

He gets at the substance of a book directly; he tears out the heart of it.

Of Samuel Johnson

Woman, a pleasing but a short-lived flower,
Too soft for business and too weak for power:
A wife in bondage, or neglected maid:
Despised, if ugly; if she's fair, betrayed.

How sweet is harmless solitude!
What can its joys control?
Tumults and noise may not intrude,
To interrupt the soul.

'Tis hard we should be by the men despised,
Yet kept from knowing what would make us prized;
Debarred from knowledge, banished from the schools,
And with the utmost industry bred fools.

Lady Mary Chudleigh

In the gloaming, Oh my darling!
When the lights are dim and low,
And the quiet shadows falling
Softly come and softly go.

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

I saw a man this morning
Who did not wish to die;
I ask and cannot answer
If otherwise wish I.

Patrick Shaw-Stewart

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

Phineas Fletcher

I loved thee once. I'll love no more,
Thine be the grief, as is the blame;
Thou art not what thou wast before,
What reason I should be the same?

then bite the tongue out by the root…
and chew, never swallow.
This is not sex, remember;
you are eating the sea.

Robin Robertson

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

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.

But women who have lost their Faith Are angels who have lost their wings, And always have a nasty breath Of chemistry, and horrid things That go off when a lecturer rings His bell.

Walter Chalmers Smith