Quotes to inspire and reflect

What have you done, you there Weeping without cease, Tell me, yes you, what have you done With all your youth? 3

The long sobs Of the violins Of autumn Pierce my heart With monotonous languor. 1

There is weeping in my heart Like the rain falling on the city. 2

I am gall, I am heartburn.

I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond.

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. What hours, O what black hours we have spent This night.

Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief, More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.

World-mothering air, air wild, Wound with thee, in thee isled, Fold home, fast fold thy child.

Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man In me or, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

I say that we are wound With mercy round and round As if with air.

How to keep—is there any any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or catch or key to keep Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty… from vanishing away?

What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame.

It is the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for.

Margaret, are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving?

When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers, Didst fettle for the great gray drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!

Felix Randal the farrier, O he is dead then? My duty all ended, Who have watched his mold of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome, Pining, pining.

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behavior Of silk-sack clouds! Has wilder, willful-wavier Meal-drift molded ever and melted across skies?

All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.

Glory be to God for dappled things.

Brute beauty and valor and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle!

I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy!

The achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring— When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush.

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies! O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!

Thou mastering me God! giver of breath and bread; World’s strand, sway of the sea; Lord of living and dead; Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh, And after it almost unmade, what with dread, Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh? Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

And I have asked to be Where no storms come, Where the green swell is in the havens dumb, And out of the swing of the sea.

Elected Silence, sing to me And beat upon my whorlèd ear, Pipe me to pastures still and be The music that I care to hear.

Mark how my fame rings out from zone to zone: A thousand critics shouting: “He’s unknown!”

To men a man is but a mind. Who cares What face he carries or what form he wears? But woman’s body is the woman. O Stay thou, my sweetheart, and do never go.

This is the weather the shepherd shuns,

And meadow rivulets overflow, And drops on gate bars hang in a row, And rooks in families homeward go,

Only a man harrowing clods In a slow silent walk With an old horse that stumbles and nods Half asleep as they stalk. Only thin smoke without flame From the heaps of couch grass: Yet this will go onward the same Though dynasties pass. Yonder a maid and her wight Come whispering by; War’s annals will cloud into night Ere their story die.

Ah, no; the years, the years; Down their chiseled names the raindrop plows.

That night your great guns, unawares, Shook all our coffins as we lay, And broke the chancel window-squares, We thought it was the Judgment Day.

We two kept house, the Past and I, The Past and I; Through all my tasks it hovered nigh, Leaving me never alone.

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me, Saying that now you are not as you were When you had changed from the one who was all to me, But as at first, when our day was fair.

What of the faith and fire within us Men who march away Ere the barn cocks say Night is growing gray, Leaving all that here can win us.

And as the smart ship grew In stature, grace, and hue, In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

A local cult called Christianity.

Yes; quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down You’d treat if met where any bar is, Or help to half-a-crown.

What of the Immanent Will and its designs? It works unconsciously as heretofore, External artistries in circumstance.

So little cause for carolings Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things Afar or nigh around, That I could think there trembled through His happy good-night air Some blessed hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware.

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, In blast-beruffled plume.

I leant upon a coppice gate When Frost was specter-gray, And Winter’s dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day.