Longing and Absence
Thomas Gray
For who to dumb forgetfulness a prey, This pleasing anxious being e’er resign’d, Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day, Nor cast one longing ling’ring look behind?
Alexander Pope
Oh name forever sad! forever dear! Still breath’d in sighs, still usher’d with a tear.
Matthew Arnold
But often in the world’s most crowded streets, But often, in the din of strife, There rises an unspeakable desire After the knowledge of our buried life.
John Donne
Our two souls therefore which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet A breach, but an expansion, Like gold to airy thinness beat.
William Wordsworth
What fond and wayward thoughts will slide Into a lover’s head! “O mercy!” to myself I cried, “If Lucy should be dead!”
Khalil Gibran
When you part from your friend, you grieve not; For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.
Mark Twain
It will take mind and memory months and possibly years to gather together the details, and thus learn and know the whole extent of the loss.
John Donne
Dull sublunary lovers’ love (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit Absence, because it doth remove Those things which elemented it.
William Cowper
What peaceful hours I once enjoy’d! How sweet their memory still! But they have left an aching void The world can never fill.
W. S. Gilbert
It’s a song of a merryman, moping mum, Whose soul was sad, and whose glance was glum, Who sipped no sup, and who craved no crumb, As he sighed for the love of a lady.
