Out of our quarrels with others we make rhetoric. Out of our quarrels with ourselves we make poetry. |
People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind. |
Poor men have grown to be rich men, And rich men grown to be poor again, And I am running to Paradise. |
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave |
See how the sacred old flamingoes come, Painting with shadow all the marble steps: Aged and wise, they seek their wonted perches Within the temple, devious walking, made To wander by their melancholy minds. |
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree; But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree. |
Speak, speak, for underneath the cover there The sand is running from the upper glass, And when the last grain's through, I shall be lost. |
Style, personality -- deliberately adopted and therefore a mask -- is the only escape from the hot-faced bargainers and money-changers. |
Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned |
Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns, Amid the rustle of his planted hills, Life overflows without ambitious pains; And rains down life until the basin spills, And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains As though to choose whatever shape it wills. . . . |
Swift has sailed into his rest; Savage indignation there Cannot lacerate his breast. |
Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams, Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round. |
Test every work of intellect or faith, And everything that your own hands have wrought And call those works extravagance of breath That are not suited for such men as come proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb. |
That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees -- Those dying generations -- at their song. |
That William Blake Who beat upon the wall Till Truth obeyed his call. |