Edmund Blunden Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

To-day's house makes tomorrow's road;
I knew these heaps of stone
When they were walls of grace and might,
The country's honour, art's delight
That over fountain'd silence show'd
Fame's final bastion.

Edmund Blunden
Tired with dull grief, grown old before my day,
I sit in solitude and only hear
Long silent laughters, murmurings of dismay,
The lost intensities of hope and fear;
In those old marshes yet the rifles lie,
On the thin breastwork flutter the grey rags,
The very books I read are there—and I
Dead as the men I loved, wait while life drags.

Edmund Blunden
All things they have in common being so poor,
And their one fear, Death's shadow at the door.

Edmund Blunden
I have been young, and now am not too old;
And I have seen the righteous forsaken,
His health, his honour and his quality taken.
This is not what we were formerly told.

Edmund Blunden
Then is not Death at watch Within those secret waters? What wants he but to catch Earth's heedless sons and daughters?

Edmund Blunden
Its wounded length from those sad streets of war
Into green places here, that were my own;
But now what once was mine is mine no more,
I seek such neighbours here and I find none.
With such strong gentleness and tireless will
Those ruined houses seared themselves in me,
Passionate I look for their dumb story still,
And the charred stub outspeaks the living tree.

Edmund Blunden
When I was young I hoped that one day I should be able to go into a post office to buy a stamp without feeling nervous and shy: now I realize that I never shall.

Edmund Blunden
At Quincy's moat the squandering village ends,
And there in the almshouse dwell the dearest friends
Of all the village, two old dames that cling
As close as any trueloves in the spring.

Edmund Blunden
Cricket to us, like you, was more than play,
It was a worship in the summer sun.

Edmund Blunden
Mastery in poetry consists largely in the instinct for not ruining or smothering or tinkering with moments of vision.

Edmund Blunden
This was my country and it may be yet,
But something flew between me and the sun.

Edmund Blunden
I am for the woods against the world,
But are the woods for me?

Edmund Blunden