Quotes

For men may come and men may go, But I go on forever.

I come from haunts of coot and hern, I make a sudden sally And sparkle out among the fern, To bicker down a valley.

Cannon to right of them, Cannon to left of them, Cannon in front of them Volley’d and thunder’d.

Into the jaws of death, Into the mouth of hell Rode the six hundred.

Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die.

Someone had blundered.

“Forward, the Light Brigade!” Was there a man dismay’d?

Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward, All in the valley of death Rode the six hundred.

O iron nerve to true occasion true, O fall’n at length, that tower of strength Which stood four-square to all the winds that blew.

Speak no more of his renown. Lay your earthly fancies down, And in the vast cathedral leave him. God accept him, Christ receive him.

Bury the Great Duke With an empire’s lamentation.

The last great Englishman is low.

One God, one law, one element, And one far-off divine event, To which the whole creation moves.

He clasps the crag with crooked hands; Close to the sun in lonely lands, Ring’d with the azure world he stands. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls.

Wearing all that weight Of learning lightly like a flower.

Love is and was my lord and king.

Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease, Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky!

He seems so near, and yet so far.

There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds.

Fresh from brawling courts And dusty purlieus of the law.

So many worlds, so much to do, So little done, such things to be.

O Sorrow, wilt Thou live with me No casual mistress, but a wife.

Nature, red in tooth and claw.

The great world’s altar-stairs, That slope through darkness up to God.

So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life.

But what am I? An infant crying in the night: An infant crying for the light: And with no language but a cry.

Hold thou the good; define it well; For fear divine Philosophy Should push beyond her mark, and be Procuress to the Lords of Hell.

Oh yet we trust that somehow good Will be the final goal of ill.

And Time, a maniac scattering dust, And Life, a Fury slinging flame.

Do we indeed desire the dead Should still be near us at our side?

How fares it with the happy dead?

Be near me when my light is low.

I do but sing because I must, And pipe but as the linnets sing.

’Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all. 3

And from his ashes may be made The violet of his native land.

But, for the unquiet heart and brain A use in measured language lies; The sad mechanic exercise, Like dull narcotics numbing pain.

I sometimes hold it half a sin To put in words the grief I feel; For words, like Nature, half reveal And half conceal the Soul within.

Let knowledge grow from more to more, But more of reverence in us dwell; That mind and soul, according well, May make one music as before.

Our little systems have their day.

Believing where we cannot prove.

Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars, And all thy heart lies open unto me.

Sweet is every sound, Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet; Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn, The moan of doves in immemorial elms, And murmuring of innumerable bees.

Ask me no more: thy fate and mine are seal’d: I strove against the stream and all in vain: Let the great river take me to the main: No more, dear love, for at a touch I yield; Ask me no more.

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white; Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk; Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font: The firefly wakens: waken thou with me.

Man for the field and woman for the hearth: Man for the sword and for the needle she: Man with the head and woman with the heart: Man to command and woman to obey; All else confusion.

Man is the hunter; woman is his game.