Algernon Charles Swinburne
In fierce March weather White waves break tether, And whirled together At either hand, Like weeds uplifted, The tree-trunks rifted In spars are drifted, Like foam or sand.Collection: Weed
The delight that consumes the desire, The desire that outruns the delight.Collection: Desire
Wherever there is a grain of loyalty there is a glimpse of freedom.Collection: Loyalty
In the world of dreams, I have chosen my part. To sleep for a season and hear no word Of true love's truth or of light love's art, Only the song of a secret bird.Collection: Dream
Love is more cruel than lust.Collection: Love Is
In hawthorn-time the heart grows light.Collection: Heart
There is no such thing as a dumb poet or a handless painter. The essence of an artist is that he should be articulate.Collection: Artist
When fate has allowed to any man more than one great gift, accident or necessity seems usually to contrive that one shall encumber and impede the other.Collection: Fate
When I hear that a personal friend has fallen into matrimonial courses, I feel the same sorrow as if I had heard of his lapsing into theism — a holy sorrow, unmixed with anger.Collection: Marriage
For the crown of our life as it closes Is darkness, the fruit thereof dust; No thorns go as deep as a rose's, And love is more cruel than lust. Time turns the old days to derision, Our loves into corpses or wives; And marriage and death and division Make barren our lives.Collection: Time
Marvellous mercies and infinite love.Collection: Love
Faith speaks when hope is disassembled; faith lives when hope dies dead.Collection: Hope
The tadpole poet will never grow into anything bigger than a frog; not though in that stage of development he should puff and blow himself till he bursts with windy adulation at the heels of the laureled ox.Collection: Blow
Thou has conquered, O pale Galilean.Collection: Christianity
Despair the twin-born of devotion.Collection: Despair
Sleep; and if life was bitter to thee, pardon, If sweet, give thanks; thou hast no more to live; And to give thanks is good, and to forgive.Collection: Gratitude
The highest spiritual quality, the noblest property of mind a man can have, is this of loyalty ... a man with no loyalty in him, with no sense of love or reverence or devotion due to something outside and above his poor daily life, with its pains and pleasures, profits and losses, is as evil a case as man can be.Collection: Loyalty
Time turns the old days to derision, Our loves into corpses or wives.Collection: Time
To have read the greatest works of any great poet, to have beheld or heard the greatest works of any great painter or musician, is a possession added to the best things of life.Collection: Greatness
Change lays her hand not upon the truth.Collection: Hands
On the mountains of memory by the world's wellsprings, in all man's eyes, where the light of life of him is on all past things, death only dies.Collection: Memories
Then star nor sun shall waken, Nor any change of light: Nor sound of waters shaken, Nor any sound or sight: Nor wintry leaves nor vernal; Nor days nor things diurnal; Only the sleep eternal In an eternal night.Collection: Stars
White rose in red rose-garden Is not so white; Snowdrops, that plead for pardon And pine for fright Because the hard East blows Over their maiden vows, Grow not as this face grows from pale to bright.Collection: Blow
Love lies bleeding in the bed whereover Roses lean with smiling mouths or pleading: Earth lies laughing where the sun's dart clove her: Love lies bleeding.Collection: Lying
For winter's rains and ruins are over... And in Green under wood and cover Blossum by blossom the spring begins.Collection: Spring
God's own hand Holds fast all issues of our deeds: with him The end of all our ends is, but with us Our ends are, just or unjust: though our works Find righteous or unrighteous judgment, this At least is ours, to make them righteous.Collection: Hands
Though one were fair as roses His beauty clouds and closes.Collection: Beauty
Before the beginning of years There came to the making of man Time with a gift of tears, Grief with a glass that ran, Pleasure with pain for leaven, Summer with flowers that fell, Remembrance fallen from heaven, And Madness risen from hell, Strength without hands to smite, Love that endures for a breath; Night, the shadow of light, And Life, the shadow of death.Collection: Life
Heart's ease of pansy, pleasure or thought, Which would the picture give us of these? Surely the heart that conceived it sought Heart's ease.Collection: Flower
Change lays not her hand upon truth.Collection: Truth
She knows not loves that kissed her She knows not where. Art thou the ghost, my sister, White sister there, Am I the ghost, who knows? My hand, a fallen rose, Lies snow-white on white snows, and takes no care.Collection: Art
There lived a singer in France of old By the tideless dolorous midland sea. In a land of sand and rain and gold There shone one woman, and none but she.Collection: Love
As a god self-slain on his own strange altar, Death lies dead.Collection: Lying
Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;/ We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of deathCollection: World
But now, you are twain, you are cloven apart Flesh of his flesh, but heart of my heart.Collection: Heart
A little soul scarce fledged for earth Takes wing with heaven again for goal, Even while we hailed as fresh from birth A little soul.Collection: Wings
Who knows but on their sleep may rise Such light as never heaven let through To lighten earth from Paradise?Collection: Sleep
Is not Precedent indeed a King of men? A Word from the Psalmist.Collection: Kings
There was a poor poet named Clough, Whom his friends all united to puff, But the public, though dull, Had not such a skull As belonged to believers in Clough.Collection: Friendship
The more congenial page of some tenth-rate poeticule worn out with failure after failure and now squat in his hole like the tailless fox, he is curled up to snarl and whimper beneath the inaccessible vine of song.Collection: Song