Irish Poet Quotes

Padraic Colum
William Allingham
Thomas Parnell
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington
Patrick Kavanagh
Samuel Ferguson
Francis Ledwidge

Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect.

One way of looking at poetic periods is to notice what contemporary interests and knowledge penetrate the best verse written at the time and what moods are permitted in treating of these matters.

Imagine how they stood there, what they stood with
that their possessions may become our power.
Cardboard. Iron. Their hardships parcelled in them.

Eavan Boland
Eavan Boland
But every road is tough to me
That has no friend to cheer it.

The length of a meeting rises with the square of the number of people present.

I am travelling from one April to another.
It is the same train between the same embankments.
Gorse fires are smoking, but primroses burn
And celandines and white may and gorse flowers.

An age being mathematical, these flowers Of linear stalks and spheroid blooms were prized.

Padraic Colum
Padraic Colum
When Spring came on with fresh delight
To cheer the soul, and charm the sight
While every easy breezes, softer rain
And warmer suns salute the plain

Thomas Parnell
Thomas Parnell
Meningitis. It was a word you had to bite on to say it. It had a fright and a hiss in it.

O, she walked unaware of her own increasing beauty
That was holding men's thoughts from market or plough,

Heaven above is softer blue
Earth around is sweeter green;
Something lives in every hue
Christless eyes have never seen
Birds with gladder songs o'erflow
Flowers with deeper beauties shine. Since I know, as now I know, I am His, and He is mine.

As I heard the sweet lark sing
In the clear air of the day.

Samuel Ferguson
Samuel Ferguson
Over the mountains,
And over the waves,
Over the fountains,
And under the graves;
Over the floods that are deepest,
Which do Neptune obey;
Over the rocks that are steepest,
Love will find out the way.

Come, let us make love deathless, thou and I,
Seeing that our footing on the Earth is brief-
Seeing that her multitudes sweep out to die
Mocking at all that passes their belief.

The young don't know what age is, and the old forget what youth was.

Who dreads to the dust returning?
Who shrinks from the sable shore,
Where the high and haughty yearning
Of the soul can sting no more?

Where am I coming from? Where am I going? A fusillade of question marks.

Of all the stages in a woman's life, none is so dangerous as the period between her acknowledgment of a passion for a man, and the day set apart for her nuptials.

A wind-vane changeable huff-puff
Always is a woman.

What passes for love is imperfect knowledge. Not knowing, initially, allows faithlessness to dress up as its opposite; casts the inarticulate as enigmatic, the selfish as forgetful, the angry as impassioned.

University students are rarely able to cope with universals and death is the most embarrassing universal.

When I had curls
I knew more girls.
I do more reading
Now my hair is receding.

Nature-study if it is to be possible must begin, and if it is to be fruitful must end, in something which is not strictly the study of nature, but which we call Philosophy.

I was like one who, having discovered the ancient Eden still existing in all its primitive glory, should resolve to enjoy it in solitude, and never betray to mortal the secret of its locality. The rod of my life was bent at this moment. I destined myself to be a microscopist.

Fitz James O'Brien
Fitz James O'Brien
Far as distress the soul can wound
'Tis pain in each degree;
Bliss goes but to a certain bound,
Beyond is agony.