Algernon Charles Swinburne Quotes
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When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces, The mother of months in meadow or plain Fills the shadows and windy places With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain.
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His speech is a burning fire.
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Dream that the lips once breathlessMight quicken if they would;Say that the soul is deathless;Dream that the gods are good;Say March may wed September,And time divorce regret;But not that you remember,And not that I forget.
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Forget that I remember And dream that I forget.
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Time found our tired love sleeping,And kissed away his breath;But what should we do weeping,Though light love sleep to death?We have drained his lips at leisure,Till there's not left to drainA single sob of pleasure,A single pulse of pain.
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I have no remedy for fear; there growsNo herb of help to heal a coward heart.
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Despair the twin-born of devotion.
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Rhyme is the native condition of lyric verse in English; a rhymeless lyric is a maimed thing.
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It is long since Mr. Carlyle expressed his opinion that if any poet or other literary creature could really be 'killed off by one critique' or many, the sooner he was so despatched the better; a sentiment in which I for one humbly but heartily concur.
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Ah, ah, thy beauty! like a beast it bites,Stings like an adder, like an arrow smites.
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His life is a watch or a vision Between a sleep and a sleep.
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Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.
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I can truly say with Shelley I have been fortunate in friendships: that I have been no less fortunate in my enemies than in my friends.
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Wilt thou fear that, and fear not my desire?
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In the change of years, in the coil of things, In the clamour and rumour of life to be, We, drinking love at the furthest springs, Covered with love as a covering tree, We had grown as gods, as the gods above, Filled from the heart to the lips with love, Held fast in his hands, clothed warm with his wings, O love, my love, had you loved but me!
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If love were what the rose is,And I were like the leaf,Our lives would grow togetherIn sad or singing weather,Blown fields or flowerful closes,Green pasture or gray grief;If love were what the rose is,And I were like the leaf.
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The more congenial page of some tenth-rate poeticule worn out with failure after failure and now squat in his hole like the tailless fox, he is curled up to snarl and whimper beneath the inaccessible vine of song.
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The loves and hours of the life of a man, They are swift and sad, being born of the sea. Hours that rejoice and regret for a span, Born with a man's breath, mortal as he; Loves that are lost ere they come to birth, Weeds of the wave, without fruit upon earth. I lose what I long for, save what I can, My love, my love, and no love for me!
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To wipe off the froth of falsehood from the foaming lips of inebriated virtue, when fresh from the sexless orgies of morality and reeling from the delirious riot of religion, may doubtless be a charitable office.
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A crown and justice? Night and day Shall first be yoked together.
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The tadpole poet will never grow into anything bigger than a frog; not though in that stage of development he should puff and blow himself till he bursts with windy adulation at the heels of the laureled ox.
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What sentence shall be given on mine? Of man, As ill or well God means me, well or ill Shall judgment pass upon me : but of God, If God himself be righteous or be God, Who being unrighteous were but god of hell, The sentence given shall judge me just...
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God's own hand Holds fast all issues of our deeds: with him The end of all our ends is, but with us Our ends are, just or unjust: though our works Find righteous or unrighteous judgment, this At least is ours, to make them righteous. Go.
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A blatant Bassarid of Boston, a rampant Maenad of Massachusetts.