Poets From England

"Your dreamers may dream it The shadow of a dream, Your sages may deem it A bubble on the stream; Yet our kingdom draweth nigher With each dawn and every day, Through the earthquake and the fire "Love will find out the way.""

"You ask me how it's possible for me to carry on. I wonder if I look like someone who looks like it's possible to carry on."

"Enough of dreams! No longer mock The burdened hearts of men! Not on the cloud, but on the rock Build thou thy faith again;O range no more the realms of air, Stoop to the glen-bound streams; Thy hope was all too like despair: Enough, enough of dreams."

"Bloody music. I hate the way it infiltrates."

"You either do it quietly and describe the Indian community in half a dozen poems or you think sod it, and go all out. The most Indian way I could think of was to do monologues and voices."

"Poetry…is an espresso shot of thought and public poetry is as necessary as it ever was."

"I didn’t want to write it in OED English…As I was writing more and more I was aware that I was having it filtered through to me from various languages, various religions, various countries, and so in a sense I wanted to present it from this Western, global perspective, to try and capture something multicultural."

"I chose to rewrite it in poetry because the original Ramayana was in poetry- the fact is, it’s sort of been corrupted into prose. In its original form it was an epic poem rather like the Iliad or works of that sort. Rather than traditional poetry, it was a verse novel, without a traditional structure. What I most wanted to do was to preserve the essential musicality of the lines. Especially as the Ramayana like so many stories, was based on a fundamentally oral tradition."

"Poetry was a meeting of mind and heart, I felt at one with poetry itself. I like the concentrated language, the play with form, and the way you can muck around with words in a way that you can’t in a novel. Poetry allows you to be intense, because to some degree people expect it."

"Look We Have Coming to Dover!"

"All the girls say they love me all their mums say I'm lovely — ever since I lived in the clouds."

"To rescue mankind from that domination by the irrational which leads to war could surely be a more exultant fight than war itself, a fight capable of enlarging the souls of men and women...niting them in one dedicated community whose common purpose transcends the individual."

"“Oh, life!” I silently petitioned the future... if I do finally decide to marry G. and have a family — and I’m not absolutely certain, yet, that I really want to do either — please grant that I have only daughters; I’m afraid, in the world as it is, to have a son. Our generation is condemned, condemned, and the League, and all that it stands for, is only a brittle toy in the hands of ruthless, primeval forces!”"

"How fortunate we were who still had hope, I did not then realise; I could not know how soon the time would come when we should have no more hope, and yet be unable to die. Roland’s letters—the sensitive letters of the newly baptised young soldier, so soon to be hardened by the protective iron of remorseless indifference to horror and pain — made the struggle to concentrate no easier, for they drove me to a feverish searching into fundamental questions to which no immediate answers were forthcoming."

"When I think how suddenly, instantly, a chance bullet may put an end to that brilliant life, may cut it off in its youth and mighty promise, faith in the ‘increasing purpose’ of the ages grows dim."

"We should never be at the mercy of Providence if only we understood that we ourselves are Providence."

"I am writing this in front of an open casement window overlooking the sea. The sky is cloudless, and the russet sails of the fishing smacks flame in the sun. It is summer but it is not war; and I dare not look at it. It only makes me angry with myself for being here — and with the others for being content to be here. When men whom I have once despised as effeminate are being sent back wounded from the front, when nearly everyone I know is either going or has gone, can I think of this with anything but rage and shame?"

"It is harder now the spring days are beginning to come... to keep the thought of war before one’s mind - especially here, where there is always a kind of dreamy spell which makes one feel that nothing poignant and terrible can ever come near. Winter departs so early here... ”"

"Sometimes... I’ve wished I’d never met you — that you hadn’t come to take away my impersonal attitude towards the War and make it a cause of suffering to me as it is to thousands of others. But if I could choose not to have met you, I wouldn’t do it — even though my future had always to be darkened by the shadow of death....[He asked me] "Would you like me any less if I was, say, minus an arm?..." My reply need not be recorded. It brought the tears so near to the surface again that I picked up the coat which I had thrown off, and abruptly said I would lake it upstairs which I did the more promptly when I suddenly realised that he was nearly crying too."

"When the Great War broke out, it came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans. To explain the reason for this egotistical view of history’s greatest disaster, it is necessary to go back a little... p. 17"

"The fact that his highly respected old friend regarded the presence of women at Oxford as in no way remarkable undoubtedly caused him to revise his opinion on the whole subject of the higher education of daughters."

"It is still difficult to realise that the moment has actually come at last when 1 shall have no peace of mind any more until the War is over."

""Long ago there lived a rich merchant who, besides possessing more treasures than any king in the world, had in his great hall three chairs, one of silver, one of gold, and one of diamonds. But his greatest treasure of ail was his only daughter, who was called Catherine. One day Catherine was sitting in her own room when suddenly the door flew open, and in came a tall and beautiful woman... 'Catherine... which would you rather have a happy youth or a happy old age?... Then Catherine thought... ‘If I say a happy youth, then I shall have to suffer all the rest of my life. No, I will bear trouble now, and have something better to look forward to.’ So she looked up and said : ‘ Give me a happy old age.’...‘ So be it,’ said the lady..."

"All that a pacifist can undertake — but it is a very great deal — is to refuse to kill, injure or otherwise cause suffering to another human creature, and untiringly to order his life by the rule of love though others may be captured by hate."

"It is probably true to say that the largest scope for change still lies in men’s attitude to women, and in women’s attitude to themselves."

"Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity."

"Meek wifehood is no part of my profession; / I am your friend, but never your possession."

"And some to Meccah turn to pray, and I toward thy bed, Yasmin."

"The hour that dreams are brighter and winds colder, The hour that young love wakes on a white shoulder, O Master of the world, the Persian Dawn. That hour, O Master, shall be bright for thee: Thy merchants chase the morning down the sea, The braves who fight thy war unsheathe the sabre, The slaves who work thy mines are lashed to labour, For thee the waggons of the world are drawn— The ebony of night, the red of dawn!"

"I know one husband and wife who, whatever the official reasons given to the court for the break up of their marriage, were really divorced because the husband believed that nobody ought to read while he was talking and the wife that nobody ought to talk while she was reading."

"We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go Always a little further; it may be Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow Across that angry or that glimmering sea,White on a throne or guarded in a cave There lies a prophet who can understand Why men were born: but surely we are brave, Who take the Golden Road to Samarkand."

"When the great markets by the sea shut fast All that calm Sunday that goes on and on: When even lovers find their peace at last, And Earth is but a star, that once had shone."

"When even lovers find their peace at last, And Earth is but a star, that once had shone."

"I have seen old ships sail like swans asleep."

"A ship, an isle, a sickle moon — With few but with how splendid stars."

"We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage: And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die, We Poets of the proud old lineage Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why."

"The poet's business is not to save the soul of man but to make it worth saving."

"I have tried to write the exact truth as I saw and see it about both myself and other people, since a book of this kind has no value unless it is honest... It is not by accident that what I have written constitutes, in effect, the indictment of a civilisation."

"I care not if you bridge the seas, Or ride secure the cruel sky, Or build consummate palaces Of metal or of masonry. But have you wine and music still, And statues and a bright-eyed love, And foolish thoughts of good and ill, And prayers to them who sit above?"

"O friend unseen, unborn, unknown, Student of our sweet English tongue, Read out my words at night, alone: I was a poet, I was young."

"West of these out to seas colder than the Hebrides I must go Where the fleet of stars is anchored and the young Star captains glow."

"One joins the movement in a valueless world, Choosing it, till both hurler and the hurled, One moves as well, always toward, toward."

"Distorting hackneyed words in hackneyed songs He turns revolt into a style, prolongs The impulse to a habit of the time."

"My thoughts are crowded with death and it draws so oddly on the sexual that I am confused confused to be attracted by, in effect, my own annihilation."

"Thus for each blunt-faced ignorant one The great grey rigid uniform combined Safety with virtue of the sun. Thus concepts linked like chainmail in the mind."

"Andrew Motion, published in The Times, 30 October, 2004"

"These seem like bristles, and the hide is tough. No claw or web here: each foot ends in hoof."

"Direct me gods, whose changes are all holy, To where it flickers deep in grass, the moly."

"Bloody men are like bloody buses - You wait for about a year And as soon as one approaches your stop Two or three others appear."

"Thinking we were safe-insanity! We went in to make love. All the same Idiots to trust the little hotel bedroom. Then in the gloom... ...And who does not know that pair of shutters With all the awkward hook on them All screeching whispers?"