You think it horrible that lust and rage Should dance attention upon my old age; They were not such a plague when I was young; What else have I to spur me into song?
For he would be thinking of love Till the stars had run away And the shadows eaten the moon.
I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth.
I kiss you and kiss you, With arms around my own, Ah, how shall I miss you, When, dear, you have grown.
Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.
One should say before sleeping: I have lived many lives. I have been a slave and a prince. Many a beloved has sat upon my knee and I have sat upon the knees of many a beloved. Everything that has been shall be again.
The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life, or of the work And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
True love is a discipline in which each divines the secret self of the other and refuses to believe in the mere daily self.
Tis the eternal law, That first in beauty should be first in might.
Style, personality – deliberately adopted and therefore a mask – is the only escape from the hot-faced bargainers and money-changers.
For how can you compete Being honour bred, with one Who, were it proved he lies, Were neither shamed in his own Nor in his neighbour’s eyes?
It’s certain there are trout somewhere – And maybe I shall take a trout – but I do not seem to care.
Come near, that no more blinded by man’s fate, I find under the boughs of love and hate, In all poor foolish things that live a day, Eternal beauty wandering on her way.
Though leaves are many, the root is one.
Many times man lives and dies Betweeen his two eternities, That of race and that of soul, And ancient Ireland knew it all. Whether man die in his bed Or the rifle knocks him dead.
When Walt Whitman writes in seeming defiance of tradition, he needs tradition for his protection, for the butcher and the baker and the candlestick-maker grow merry over him when they meet his work by chance.
Shakespeare cared little for the State, the source of all our judgments, apart from its shows and splendours, its turmoils and battles, its flamings out of the uncivilized heart.
All things can tempt me from this craft of verse: One time it was a woman’s face, or worse – The seeming needs of my fool-driven land; Now nothing but comes readier to the hand Than this accustomed toil.
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
But bear in mind your lover’s wage Is what your looking-glass can show, And that he will turn green with rage At all that is not pictured there.