Walter de la Mare Quotes

44 Sourced Quotes

It's a very odd thing—
As odd as can be—
That whatever Miss T. eats
Turns into Miss T.

Walter de la Mare
But beauty vanishes; beauty passes;
However rare—rare it be;
And when I crumble, who will remember
This lady of the West Country?

Walter de la Mare
All but blind
In his chambered hole
Gropes for worms
The four-clawed Mole.

Walter de la Mare
"Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word," he said.

Walter de la Mare
Poor tired Tim! It's sad for him
He lags the long bright morning through,
Ever so tired of nothing to do.

Walter de la Mare
His are the quiet steeps of dreamland,
The waters of no-more-pain;
His ram's bell rings 'neath an arch of stars,
Rest, rest, and rest again.

Walter de la Mare
For beauty with sorrow
Is a burden hard to be borne:
The evening light on the foam, and the swans, there;
That music, remote, forlorn.

Walter de la Mare
Do diddle di do,
Poor Jim Jay
Got stuck fast
In Yesterday.

Walter de la Mare
Who said "Peacock Pie"?
The old king to the sparrow:
Who said "Crops are ripe"?
Rust to the harrow.

Who said, "Ay, mum's the word"?
Sexton to willow.
Who said, "Green dusk for dream?"
Moss for a pillow.

Who said, "All Time's delight
Hath she for narrow bed;
Life's troubled bubble broken"?—
That's what I said.

Walter de la Mare
Now that cleverness was the fashion most people were clever - even perfect fools; and cleverness after all was often only a bore: all head and no body

Walter de la Mare
Three jolly huntsmen,
In coats of red,
Rode their horses
Up to bed.

Walter de la Mare
A harvest mouse goes scampering by,
With silver claws and silver eye;
And moveless fish in the water gleam,
By silver reeds in a silver stream.

Walter de la Mare
It was a pity thoughts always ran the easiest way, like water in old ditches.

Walter de la Mare
Ann, Ann!
Come! quick as you can!
There's a fish that talks
In the frying-pan.

Walter de la Mare
Dobbin at manger pulls his hay:
Gone is another summer's day.

Walter de la Mare
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Aye, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Walter de la Mare
A face peered. All the grey night
In chaos of vacancy shone;
Nought but vast sorrow was there—
The sweet cheat gone.

Walter de la Mare
How shall I know that the end of things is coming?
The drummers will be drumming; the fiddlers at their thrumming;
Nuns at their beads; the mummers at their mumming;
Heaven's solemn Seraph stoopt weary o'er his summing;
The palsied fingers plucking, the way-worn feet numbing –
And the end of things coming.

Walter de la Mare
The seeds I sowed — For weeks unseen — Have pushed up pygmy Shoots of green; So frail you'd think The tiniest stone Would never let A Glimpse be shown.

Walter de la Mare
And some win peace who spend
The skill of words to sweeten despair
Of finding consolation where
Life has but one dark end.

Walter de la Mare
Wide are the meadows of night And daisies are shining there, Tossing their lovely dews, Lustrous and fair, And through these sweet fields go, Wanderers amid the stars — Venus, Mercury, Uranus, Neptune, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars.

Walter de la Mare
When I lie where shades of darkness Shall no more assail mine eyes.

Walter de la Mare
Some one came knocking
At my wee, small door;
Some one came knocking,
I'm sure—sure—sure.

Walter de la Mare
Wonderful lovely there she sat,
Singing the night away,
All in the solitudinous sea
Of that there lonely bay.

Walter de la Mare
"Is anybody there?" said the Traveler,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest's ferny floor.

Walter de la Mare
Behind the blinds I sit and watch
The people passing—passing by;
And not a single one can see
My tiny watching eye.

Walter de la Mare
He got out of bed and peeped through the blinds. To the east and opposite to him gardens and an apple-orchard lay, and there in strange liquid tranquility hung the morning star, and rose, rilling into the dusk of night the first grey of dawn. The street beneath its autumn leaves was vacant, charmed, deserted.

Walter de la Mare
He is crazed with the spell of far Arabia,
They have stolen his wits away.

Walter de la Mare
'What is the world, O soldiers?
It is I,
I, this incessant snow,
This northern sky.

Walter de la Mare
Oh, no man knows
Through what wild centuries
Roves back the rose.

Walter de la Mare