Poet Quotes

So some unlucky Engineer Does all the fit Materials compound, That are in Art or Nature found; Will glorious Fire-Works prepare.

To you, comrades, near and far, to you, other suns.
in other worlds, to all your souls on fire,
to all you burning fires,
to you burnished spirits
who light this untamed darkness called life, and death,
to you all who are sacrificed for the sake of light,
Greetings.

Yeghishe Charents

And also there's a little star
So white a virgin's it must be:—
Perhaps the lamp my love in heaven
Hangs out to light the way for me.

Clear and simple in white and gold, Meadows blossom, of sunlit spaces, - The field is full as it well can hold And white with the drift of the ox-eye daisies!

Dora Read Goodale

The first men that our Saviour dear
Did choose to wait upon him here,
Blest fishers were; and fish the last
Food was, that he on earth did taste:
I therefore strive to follow those
Whom he to follow him hath chose.

The terrible newly imported American doctrine that everyone ought to do something.

You think you got something big to say? Something momentous? Or is it what you had to memorize in order to escape the men with lightning in their eyes?

Oft as by chance, a little while apart The pall of empty, loveless hours withdrawn, Sweet Beauty, opening on the impoverished heart, Beams like a jewel on the breast of dawn.

How many have died without having given even one kiss to their chimera!

Théophile Gautier

There are fools who seek to understand the secrets of nature.

Even
After
All this time
The Sun never says to the Earth, "You owe me." Look
What happens
With a love like that,
It lights the whole sky.

Daniel Ladinsky

Didn't I seize the fire of ideas and make them leap, tear, fly, sing

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
And some are treasured for their markings –
They cause the eyes to melt
Or the body to shriek without pain.

Goodbye,
you who are, for me, the postmarks again
of shattered towns--Xenia, Burnt Cabins,
Hornell--
their loneliness
given away in poems, only their solitude kept.

The fool that eats till he is sick must fast till he is well.

George Walter Thornbury

'Qui procul hinc', the legend's writ,—
The frontier-grave is far away—
'Qui ante diem periit:
Sed miles, sed pro patria.'

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

Paul Moon James

By the power of eloquence old truth receives a new habit; though its essence be the same, yet its visage is so altered that it may currently pass and be accepted as a novelty.

Michael Wigglesworth

At length corruption, like a general flood (So long by watchful ministers withstood), Shall deluge all; and avarice, creeping on, Spread like a low-born mist, and blot the sun.

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

My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns;
Love is the fire and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns;
The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals;
The metal in this furnace wrought are men's defiled souls.

Robert Southwell

Oh, a wondrous bird is the pelican!
His beak holds more than his belican.
He takes in his beak
Enough food for a week.
But I'll be darned if I know how the helican.

Dixon Lanier Merritt

It has the original mouth but remains wordless;
It is surrounded by a magnificent mound of hair.
Sentient beings can get completely lost in it
But it is also the birthplace of all the Buddhas of the ten thousand worlds.

Art is interested in life at the moment when the ray of power is passing through it.

Boris Pasternak

The doctor looked wise: — "A slow fever," he said: Prescribed sudorifics, — and going to bed. "Sudorifics in bed," exclaim'd Will, "are humbugs! I've enough of them there, without paying for drugs!"

George Colman the Younger