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.

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

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
What is it our mammas bewitches
To plague us little boys with breeches?

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

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

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

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 country wears their going like a scar,
Today their relatives save to support and
Send others in planes for the new diaspora.

It is only the happy who are hard, Gilles. I think perhaps it is better for the world if - if one has a broken heart. One is quick to recognise it, elsewhere. And one has time to think about other people, if there is nothing left to hope for any more.

Some of us made it
To the forest edge, but many of us did not
Make it, although their unborn children did—
Such as you whom the camp commandant branded
Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols. Jesus, break his fall:
There—but for the clutch of luck—go we all.

Love, I thought to myself abstractedly. Not 'This is love' or 'Is this love?' Not a sentence, not a certainty, not a thought with moving parts or direction. Just love, all of it, as it is. Whether it's enough or not. Wthether it's real or we're making it up. However shoddy it gets, or bent out of shape. It's still extraordinary. However foolish, however vain. However badly it ends. Love.

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.

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

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

But he lay like a warrior taking his rest,
With his martial cloak around him.

Charles Wolfe
Charles Wolfe
The wild geese—the wild geese,—'tis long since they flew,
O'er the billowy ocean's bright bosom of blue.

Human nature is a mystic duality, half animal, half angel; a worm, a God; and the contrast and strife between the two natures is never so marked as in the gifted.

When the clouds shake their hyssops, and the rain
Like holy water falls upon the plain,
'Tis sweet to gaze upon the springing grain
And see your harvest born.
And sweet the little breeze of melody
The blackbord puffs upon the budding tree,
While the wild poppy lights upon the lea
And blazes 'mid the corn.

Francis Ledwidge
Francis Ledwidge
I was most incorrigibly devoted to versifying, and all my spouse's wholesome admonitions had no manner of effect on me; in short, I believe this scribbling itch is an incurable disease...

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

Samuel Ferguson
Samuel Ferguson
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.

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 man is original when he speaks the truth that has always been known to all good men.

Patrick Kavanagh
Patrick Kavanagh
Women and birds are able to see without turning their heads, and that is indeed a necessary provision for they are both surrounded by enemies.