Ah, woe is me! Winter is come and gone. But grief returns with the revolving year.
The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.
Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.
I wield the flail of the lashing hail, And whiten the green plains under; And then again I dissolve it in rain, And laugh as I pass in thunder.
A dream has power to poison sleep.
Oh lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
The young moon has fed Her exhausted horn With the sunset’s fire.
Before man can be free, and equal, and truly wise, he must cast aside the chains of habit and superstition; he must strip sensuality of its pomp, and selfishness of its excuses, and contemplate actions and objects as they really are.
I arise from dreams of thee In the first sweet sleep of night, when the winds are breathing low, and the stars are shining bright.
I love snow, snow, and all the forms of radiant frost.
Away, away, from men and towns, To the wild wood and the downs, – To the silent wilderness, Where the soul need not repress Its music.
There Is No God. This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken.
Nothing in the world is single, All things by a law divine, In one spirit meet and mingle-Why not I with thine?
All love is sweet Given or returned. Common as light is love, And its familiar voice wearies not ever.
All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially.
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being. Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.
Rise like Lions after slumber In unvanquishable number- Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you Ye are many-they are few.
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Joy, once lost, is pain.