"I gave up on new poetry myself thirty years ago, when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens on a hostile world."
        - Russell Baker

There is a schoolteacher in my town and he looks like Bugs Bunny,
He's a mass murderer and I'm not being funny.
        - Paul Durcan

My soul, there is a country far beyond the stars,
Where stands a winged sentry all skilful in the wars:
There, above noise and danger Sweet Peace sits crowned with smiles
If thou canst get but thither, there grows the flow'r of Peace,
The Rose that cannot wither, thy fortress and thy ease.
Thy God, thy life, thy cure.
        - "Peace", Henry Vaughan (1622-1695)

"If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field that is forever England.
There shall be in that rich earth a richer dust concealed.
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware."
        - Rupert Brooke, "The Soldier"

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; —on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
...
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
        - Matthew Arnold, "Dover Beach"

When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you'll remember. For you need not so.
Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.
Say only this, "They are dead." Then add thereto,
"yet many a better one has died before."
Then, scanning all the overcrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
Great death has made all this for evermore.
        - Charles Sorley, "When You See Millions Of The Mouthless Dead" (1915)

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand ;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets ;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
        - Epitaph on a Tyrant, by WH Auden

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence :
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.
        - The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.
        - John Masefield, "Sea Fever"

I had seen flowers come in stony places
And kind things done by men with ugly faces,
And the gold cup won by the worst horse at the races,
So I trust, too.
        - John Masefield , "Epilogue", on the surprises of life

She dwelt among the untrodden ways beside the springs of Dove,
A maid whom there were none to praise and very few to love.
A violet by a mossy stone half hidden from the eye;
Fair as a star, when only one is shining in the sky.

        - Byron

Give me a look, give me a face, that makes simplicity a grace;
Robes loosely flowing, hair as free,-- Such sweet neglect more taketh me
Than all the adulteries of art: They strike mine eyes, but not my heart.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me :
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.

        - WH Auden, "The Age of Anxiety", 1947.

~

Then out spoke brave Horatius, the Captain of the Gate :
"To every man upon this earth, Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better, than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers, and the temple of his Gods!"

- Homer, "The Odyssey"

Certainly there are lots of things that money won't buy, but it's very funny - Have you ever tried to buy them without money ?

        - Liam Aungier, "Ganymede in Marble"

Great wits are sure to Madness near allied
And thin partitions do their bounds divide;
David for him his tuneful harp had strung,
And Heav'n had wanted one Immortal Song,
But wild Ambition loves to slide, not stand,
And Fortunes Ice prefers to Vertues Land.

No ! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be ;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince ; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous ;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse ;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous - Almost, at times, the Fool.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

- TS Eliot, "Burnt Norton"

Out of Ireland have we come,
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start.
I carry from my mother's womb
A fanatic heart.

-WB Yeats

I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And is anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
        - WB Yeats, "The Stolen Child"

I think it better that in times like these
A poet's mouth be silent, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
Or an old man upon a winter's night.
        - William Butler Yeats, "On being asked for a War Poem"

O the mind has mountains; cliffs of fall, frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.
Hold them cheap may who ne'er hung there.
     - GM Hopkins, "No Worst There Is None"

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"Tis better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven."

"Those whom reason hath equaled, force hath made supreme..."

"The mind is it's own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell, and a hell of heaven."

"Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste brought death into the world, and all our woe."

"Who overcomes by force, hath overcome but half his foe."

"A grateful mind by owing owes not, but still pays, at once indebted and discharg'd. "

"Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers."

"Some say no evil thing that walks by night, in fog or fire, by lake or moorish fen, blue meagre hag, or stubborn unlaid ghost that breaks his magic chains at curfew time, no goblin, or swart fairy of the mine, hath hurtful power o'er true virginity."

"The leaf was darkish, and had prickles on it, but in another country, as he said, bore a bright golden flow'r, but not in this soil; Unknown, and like esteem'd, and the dull swain treads on it daily with his clouted shoon."

"Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise to scorn delights, and live laborious days;"

"Such sights as youthful poets dream on summer eves by haunted stream."

        - William Wordsworth, writing in 1802 long after Milton's death

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For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these,
"It might have been!"

No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

        - John Donne

Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime,
And departing, leave behind us footprints on the sands of time.

        - Thomas Darcy McGee, Irish emigrant to Canada

~

There sinks the nebulous star we call the sun.

Say first, of God above or man below, what can we reason but from what we know?

Hope springs eternal in the human breast:

In pride, in reasoning pride, our error lies; All quit their sphere, and rush into the skies. Pride still is aiming at the blest abodes: Men would be angels, angels would be gods. Aspiring to be gods, if angels fell, Aspiring to be angels, men rebel.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.

For forms of government let fools contest; Whate'er is best administer'd is best. For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight;

Honour and shame from no condition rise;
Act well your part, there all the honour lies.

She who never answers till a husband cools;
Or if she rules him, never shows she rules.

Who shall decide when doctors disagree,
and soundest casuists doubt, like you and me?

 One science only will one genius fit: So vast is art, so narrow human wit.

A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.

Words are like leaves; and where they most abound,
much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.

All seems infected that th' infected spy,
as all looks yellow to the jaundic'd eye.

To err is human, to forgive divine

For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

Not hate, but glory, made these chiefs contend;
And each brave foe was in his soul a friend.

It is not strength, but art, obtains the prize,
and to be swift is less than to be wise.
'T is more by art than force of num'rous strokes.

The long historian of my country's woes.

"There is always the delicate question of how common common sense should be... I am not suggesting that modern English poetry must be concerned with psychoanalysis or with the concentration camps or with the hydrogen bomb... I am not suggesting, in fact, that it must be anything... I am, however, suggesting that it drop the pretence that life, give or take a few social distinctions, is the same as ever, that gentility, decency and all the other social totems will eventually muddle through."
        - Al Alvarez

All the parts of the universe I have an interest in: the earth serves me to walk upon; the sun to light me; the stars have their influence upon me.
        - Montaigne, "Apology for Raimond Sebond"

There's plenty of pain here - but it don't kill. There's plenty of suffering here, but it don't last. You see, happiness ain't a thing in itself - it's only a contrast with something that ain't pleasant.
        - Mark Twain ,"Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven".

"When all the world dissolves, and every creature shall be purified,
all places shall be hell that are not heaven."

- Stephen Harvey (circa 1627): Juvenal, Satire ix.

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The wombat lives across the seas, among the far Antipodes.
He may exist on nuts and berries, or then again, on missionaries;
His distant habitat precludes conclusive knowledge of his moods.
But I would not engage the wombat in any form of mortal combat.

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