poets-from-england

"Auribus immensis quondam donatus asellus institit ut caudam posset habere parem. cauda suo capiti quia se conferre nequibat, altius ingemuit de brevitate sua, mon quia longa satis non esset ad utilitatem. ante tamen quam sic apocopata foret, consuluit medicos, quia quod natura nequibat, artis ab officio posse putabat eos.Cui Galienus ait: "satis est bipedalis asello cauda; quid ulterius poscis, inepte, tibi? sufficit ista tibi, nam quo productior esset, sordidior fieret proximiorque luto. hac nisi contentus fueris, dum forte requiris prolongare nimis, abbreviabis eam. quod natura dedit non sit tibi vile, sed illud inter divitias amplius esse puta. crede mihi, vetus est tibi cauda salubrior ista natibus innata quam foret illa nova.""

""Lest that by any means When I have preached to others I myself Should be a castaway." If some one now Would take that text and preach to us that preach — * * * Yes I preach to others And am—I know not what—a castaway? No, but a man who feels his heart asleep, As he might feel his hand or foot. The limb Will not awake without a little shock, A little pain perhaps, a nip or blow, And that one gives and feels the waking pricks. But for one's heart I know not. I can give No shock to make mine prick."

"You are, and haue beene feared ouer all, England's an Ile, of stoute and hardie men: Be stronge in faith, your foes downe right shall fall, For one of you, in armes shall vanquish ten."

"Anglia cui mater fuerat, cui Gallia nutrix, Matri nutricem praefero mente meam. Six utriusque tamen meritis praeconia justis Attribuo, niteant ut probitate pares."

"At Morning Prayers the Master helves For children less fortunate than ourselves, And the loudest response in the room is when Timothy Winters roars 'Amen!'So come one angel, come on ten: Timothy Winters says 'Amen Amen amen amen amen.' Timothy Winters, Lord. Amen."

"Leisurely,They beckon to me from the other bank. I hear them call, 'See where the stream-path is! Crossing is not as hard as you might think.'I had not thought that it would be like this."

"They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock: My father, twenty-five, in the same suit Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack Still two years old and trembling at his feet.My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat, Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass. Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light."

"Timothy Winters comes to school With eyes as wide as a football-pool, Ears like bombs and teeth like splinters: A blitz of a boy is Timothy Winters."

"Henry is thinking of his lute and of backgammon, Elizabeth follows the waving song, the mystery, Proud in her red wig and green jewelled favours; They sit in their white lawn sleeves, as cool as history."

"O are you the boy Who would wait on the quay With the silver penny And the apricot tree?"

"My dream is of a British statesman who could say to his countrymen: "You are sick of war, weary of entanglements. There are some who would have you renounce both. I offer you instead a heavier load of foreign responsibilities, a risk of new war. Because that is the only road to lasting peace. Since the War, British policy has been shuffling, timid, ignoble. Be bold at last, and give a lead to Europe, by offering to form with France and whatever other European states will join, a League within the League, of nations pledged to submit all disputes to the League, but pledged also to fight without hesitation in defence of any member of the group who is attacked. If Germany will join, so much the better; though Germany as she is never will. If America, better still; for the present America is a broken reed. All the more honor for us to accept a responsibility if she refuses."The way will not be easy. We shall often regret the day we pledged ourselves to bear taxation in peace and face death in war for interests and frontiers not our own. But no interest is more really our own than the reign of law between nations."That is little likely to happen. Only an Abraham Lincoln takes risks of that sort with a nation. But this is not because the ordinary politician is wiser; it is because the ordinary politician does not realize the latent force of idealism, all the stronger with the decay of the religions which gave it other outlets, ready in the world of to-day for any leader with the courage to use it; and so easily abused accordingly by the rulers of Moscow and Berlin."

"Art she had none, yet wanted none: For Nature did that want supply."

"Considering what was to come, the much-abused 'theft' of the sculptures from the Acropolis by Lord Elgin was an undoubted blessing, though it was carelessly carried out, especially in removing the Caryatid from the Erechtheum; it would none the less be a graceful act for England to return them now to Athens."

"In The Waste Land Mr. Eliot has shown that he can at moments write real blank verse; but that is all. For the rest he has quoted a great deal, he has parodied and imitated. But the parodies are cheap and the imitations inferior."

"We are Diana’s virgin train, Descended of no mortal strain: Our bows and arrows are our goods, Our palaces the lofty woods. * * * If you ask where such wights do dwell, In what blest clime, that so excel, The poets only that can tell."

"What ever happy region is thy place, Cease thy celestial song a little space; (Thou wilt have time enough for hymns divine, Since Heav'n's eternal year is thine.)"

"Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find A thousand regions in your mind Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be Expert in home-cosmography."

"And where that ye come in playne or in place: I shall you tell whyche ben bestys of en chace: One of theym is the bucke: a nother is the doo: The foxe and the marteron: and the wylde roo: And ye shall my dere chylde other bestys all: Where so ye theym fynde Rascall ye shall them call."

"A faythfulle frende wold I fayne finde, To fynde hym there he myghte be founde; But now is the worlde wext so unkynde, Yet frenship is fall to the grounde; (Now a frende I have founde) That I woll nother banne ne curse, But of all frendes in felde or towne, Ever, gramercy, myn own purse."

"When I survey the bright Celestial sphere; So rich with jewels hung, that Night Doth like an Ethiop bride appear:My soul her wings doth spread And heavenward flies, Th' Almighty's mysteries to read In the large volumes of the skies."

"From an abbess disposed to turn author, we might more reasonably have expected a manual of meditations for the closet, or select rules for making salves, or distilling strong waters. But the diversions of the field were not thought inconsistent with the character of a religious lady of this eminent rank, who resembled an abbot in respect of exercising an extensive manorial jurisdiction, and who hawked and hunted in common with other ladies of distinction...The second of these treatises is written in rhyme. It is spoken in her own person; in which, being otherwise a woman of authority, she assumes the title of dame. I suspect the whole to be a translation from the French and Latin...The barbarism of the times strongly appears in the indelicate expressions which she often uses; and which are equally incompatible with her sex and profession."

"Ye blushing virgins happy are In the chaste nunnery of her breasts— For he'd profane so chaste a fair, Whoe'er should call them Cupid's nests."

"The bloody wolf, the wolf does not pursue; The boar, though fierce, his tusk will not embrue In his own kind, Bears, not on bears do prey: Then art thou, man, more savage far than they."

"I willingly accept Cassandra's fate, To speak the truth, although believ'd too late."

"Let's number out the hours by blisses, And count the minutes by our kisses."

"A writer should remember that about his Muse there is a great deal of the Siren. He should view his mental offspring as relentlessly as a Spartan father — if it is not perfectly sound, let it be cast out."

"It seems to me as natural and necessary to keep notes, however brief, of one's reading, as logs of voyages or photographs of one's travels. For memory, in most of us, is a liar with galloping consumption."

"The more populous the world and the more intricate its structure, the greater must be its fundamental insecurity. A world-structure too elaborately scientific, if once disrupted by war, revolution, natural cataclysm or epidemic, might collapse into a chaos not easily rebuilt."

"Paris may pass in gas and flame and blood — We shall sit safe behind our sundering flood. Berlin may build a Holier Inquisition — It will but mean an extra-late edition. Hitler be hailed through all a wrecked Ukraine — We shall just read, and turn to golf again. For God, the day our guardian seas He took, Gave us the broad breast of a Beaverbrook; Round us, though fails the Channel — never fear! — Still lie the stainless depths of Rothermere."

"Among the maggots that breed in the corruption of poetry one of the commonest is the bookworm. When Athens had decayed and Alexandria sprawled, the new giant-city, across the Egyptian sands; when the Greek world was filling with libraries and emptying of poets, growing in erudition as its genius expired, then first appeared, as pompous as Herod and as worm-eaten, that Professorenpoesie which finds in literature the inspiration that life gives no more, which replaces depth by muddiness, beauty by echoes, passion by necrophily."

"Many honest folk feel it hard to deny the Sudetens self-determination, if they want to belong to the Reich. But then, can we deny it to the Czech areas among the Sudetens? Then what about Sudeten pockets in the Czech areas? Self-determination must stop somewhere. In politics, as in physics, you come to a point where you cannot go on splitting things. You cannot have self-determination by villages. You may split Czechoslovakia now. In a few years it will be one again. Only it will be German. That is all.What would our own answer be, supposing we were expected on racial grounds to hand over to Berlin our coastal counties from Essex to Northumberland? We should reply that any nation must defend itself against a step which would make it impossible to defend itself.You cannot by any juggling with frontiers abolish racial minorities in Europe. And you cannot totally ignore geography. It follows that where you cannot move mountains you must move men. If the Sudetens are irrevocably set on being in the Reich let them go to the Reich instead of expecting the Reich to come to them. The Germans are the later comers in Bohemia. There are precedents for such an exodus. Good Aryans may disdain to copy Moses, but within these fifteen years just such an exchange of minorities has cured, as nothing else could have cured, the secular hate of Greek and Turk. If a small, poor and barren state like Greece could absorb between one and two million refugees it is absurd to pretend that a great country like Germany, which Hitler has set flowing with milk and honey, could not do as much and more. And if the Czechs can give a home to the persecuted refugees of the Axis, so much the better.This seems to me justice. The alternative is to admit the Trojan Horse into Prague. That may be the sort of fool's wisdom called "expediency"; it is the line of least resistance; but at least let us not cant about its honesty.Undoubtedly Hitler will object. He has other aims. It is not oppression he minds; the loudest yelps about persecution come from the persecutor of the Jews. Czechoslovakia lies on the flank of the German drive to the Black Sea. Therefore, Hitler will not hear reason.A question that vitally affects all Europe should be discussed by Europe. If Hitler foams at the mere mention of the League, let it be a European conference. Only let it give full weight to those smaller Powers which have often a more disinterested sense of decency than their great neighbours. If Hitler refuses he puts himself at once in the wrong. The verdict of such a conference may not convince him; but if he cannot reason, he can count."

"Most of us know accurately only what we constantly relearn; memory is a dipsomaniac, needing to be perpetually refreshed."

"A skill once acquired — for example, the power to speak and write and enjoy one’s own language, or another — is less easily lost, more quickly recovered, than mere accumulations of facts. And it seems to me more important to go out into life able to think straight and communicate clearly than even to know — and remember — the contents of every English book since Caedmon. Then, like Medea, even if you lose everything else, you can still feel 'Myself remains'. Whereas stuffed geese, even if stuffed with the Universe, remain geese."

"On nights when the moon creeps shrouded up the sky And hedge and holt lie glimmering ghostly grey, A voice still whispers in me, far away – A good night, this, for wiring – and suddenly There rises from the dead that shadowy hell, The barbed-wire rasps, uncoiling through my hand, The flares dance flickering over no-man's-land, A dull machine-gun raps from La Boisselle. Then fades the phantom, and once more I know Our spider-webs of wire are rust by now, Our battlefields reconquered by the plough, And hands that worked with mine, dust long ago."

"It is unlikely that many of us will be famous, or even remembered. But not less important than the brilliant few that lead a nation or a literature to fresh achievements, are the unknown many whose patient efforts keep the world from running backward; who guard and maintain the ancient values, even if they do not conquer new; whose inconspicuous triumph it is to pass on what they inherited from their fathers, unimpaired and undiminished, to their sons. Enough, for almost all of us, if we can hand on the torch, and not let it down; content to win the affection, if it may be, of a few who know us and to be forgotten when they in their turn have vanished. The destiny of mankind is not governed wholly by its 'stars'."

"Criticism is not a science whose elements can be mass-taught to adolescents — it is a difficult art, at which even adults are seldom a notable success. With the young the result is often that they either just regurgitate the judgements they have been taught, or else, if they have a natural and healthy rebelliousness, the opposite of what they have been taught. Thence it is possible to arrive by easy stages at the happy notion, not uncommon among 'intellectuals', that taste consists of distaste, and that the loftiest of pleasures is that of feeling displeased; and thus to end by enjoying almost nothing in literature except one’s own opinions, while oneself incapable of writing a living sentence."

"And how is clarity to be acquired? Mainly by taking trouble; and by writing to serve people rather than to impress them."

"It is, I believe, personality above all that sets Virgil and Horace higher than Catullus and Ovid; Chaucer than Dryden; Shakespeare than his contemporaries. Many Elizabethans could write at times blank verse as enchanting as his; but he alone could conceive a Hamlet or an Imogen."

"Beside the grey sea-shingle, here at the cross-roads' meeting, I, Hermes, stand and wait, where the windswept orchard grows. I give, to wanderers weary, rest from the road and greeting: Cool and unpolluted from my spring the water flows."

"I throw my apple towards you. If you will love me, take it And give me in repayment your own maidenhead: If your will is what I would not, yet keep it still; and make it A lesson of how swiftly all loveliness is fled."

"I came one-half hour early. My watch [had] gone on a rampage. Lucas [is] a gray-haired man of about 60, [with] finely chiseled features, markedly piercing blue eyes — a look of intelligence and elegance about him — but the elegance is all in his face, not in his clothes. We talked about Bloomsbury. So much of what Lucas said was in quotations — English, French, and German — that I cannot remember or reproduce it. One emphasis he made was that Bloomsbury was a jungle — that the society of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Duncan Grant, Clive and Vanessa Bell, and Lytton Strachey was far from being in the ordinary sense a happy family. They were intensely and rudely critical of each other. They were the sort of people who would read letters addressed to others. In real crises they could be generous, but in ordinary affairs of life they were anything but kind. He kept insisting that Dickinson and Forster were not really in Bloomsbury. They were softhearted and kind. Bloomsbury was certainly not that. Lucas stayed out of this “jungle.” Also, they tormented each other with endless love affairs. Strachey was openly homosexual — a surprising thing in view of his later relationship with Carrington. Lucas went to Cambridge in 1913 [and] after one year went to war. Returned in 1919. Strachey and the rest were coming into their fame. The notoriety of Eminent Victorians was partly a chance of time and place—the frantic 20s were to assist him no end."

"Where so ever ye fare by fryth or by fell: My dere chylde take hede how Trystam doo you tell. How many manere bestys of venery there were: Lysten to your dame and she shall you lere. Four manere of bestis of venere there are: The fyrste of theym is the harte: the seconde is the hare: The boore is one of tho: the wulfe and not one mo."

"I aske this question, which ben the meanes and the causes that enduce a man in to a merry spyryte: truly to my best dyscrecon it semeth good dysportes and honest gamys in whom a man joyeth without any repentance after. Thenne followeth it that gode dysportes and honest gamys ben cause of mannys fayr aege and longe life. And therefore now woll I chose of foure good dysportes and honest gamys, that is to wyte; of huntynge: hawkynge: fysshynge: and foulynge. The beste to my symple dyscrecon whyche is fysshynge: called anglynge, with a rodde and a lyne and an hoke: and thereof to treate as my symple wytte may suffice."

"Also ye shall not be ravenous in takyng of your sayd game as to moche at one tyme...whyche lyghtly be occasyon to dystroye your owne dysporte and other mennys also. As whan ye have suffycyent mese ye sholde coveyte nomore as at that tyme. Also ye shall besye yourselfe to nourysh the game in all that ye maye: and to destroye all such thynges as ben devourers of it."

"Like as the armèd knyght Appoynted to the fielde, With thys world wyll I fyght, And fayth shall be my shielde."

"Christopher Dare...asked me, wherefore I said, I had rather to read five lines in the Bible, than to hear five Masses in the Temple: I confessed that I said no less: not for the dispraise of either the Epistle or the Gospel, but because the one did greatly edifie me, and the other nothing at all."

"Vitality of mind and body; the activity to employ and maintain them; the zest and curiosity that they can animate; freedom to travel widely in nature and art, in countries of the world and countries of the mind; human affections; and the gift of gaiety – these seem to me, then, the main causes of happiness. I am surprised to find how few and simple they are."

"Although beneath this grave-mound thy white bones now are lying, Surely, my huntress Lycas, the wild things dread thee still. The memory of thy worth tall Pêlion keeps undying, And the looming peak of Ossa, and Cithæron’s lonely hill."

"More rich, more noble I will ever hold The Muse's laurel, than a crown of gold."

"Time is a feather'd thing, And, whilst I praise The sparklings of thy looks and call them rays, Takes wing, Leaving behind him as he flies An unperceivèd dimness in thine eyes."