Walter de La Mare
All day long the door of the sub-conscious remains just ajar; we slip through to the other side, and return again, as easily and secretly as a cat.
Too late for fruit, too soon for flowers.
A lost but happy dream may shed its light upon our waking hours, and the whole day may be infected with the gloom of a dreary or sorrowful one; yet of neither may we be able to recover a trace.
As long as I live I shall always be My Self - and no other, Just me.Collection: Self
What a haunting, inescapable riddle life was.Collection: Haunting
Without imagination of the one kind or of the other, mortal existence is indeed a dreary and prosaic business... Illumined by the imagination, our life, whatever its defeats - is a never-ending unforeseen strangeness and adventure and mystery.Collection: Adventure
An hour's terror is better than a lifetime of timidity.Collection: Lifetime
Look thy last on all things lovely, Every hourCollection: Lovely
For beauty with sorrow Is a burden hard to be borne: The evening light on the foam, and the swans, there; That music, remote, forlorn.Collection: Swans
Once a man strays out of the common herd, he's more likely to meet wolves in the thickets than angels.Collection: Angel
After all, what is every man? A horde of ghosts - like a Chinese nest of boxes - oaks that were acorns that were oaks. Death lies behind us, not in front - in our ancestors, back and back until.Collection: Lying
It was a pity thoughts always ran the easiest way, like water in old ditches.Collection: Water
When I lie where shades of darkness Shall no more assail mine eyes.Collection: Lying
He got out of bed and peeped through the blinds. To the east and opposite to him gardens and an apple-orchard lay, and there in strange liquid tranquility hung the morning star, and rose, rilling into the dusk of night the first grey of dawn. The street beneath its autumn leaves was vacant, charmed, deserted.Collection: Morning
What lovely things Thy hand hath made.Collection: Hands
So, blind to Someone I must be.Collection: Blind
Now that cleverness was the fashion most people were clever - even perfect fools; and cleverness after all was often only a bore: all head and no bodyCollection: Fashion
As soon as they're out of your sight, you are out of their mind.Collection: Cat
Lear, Macbeth. Mercutio – they live on their own as it were. The newspapers are full of them, if we were only the Shakespeares to see it. Have you ever been in a Police Court? Have you ever watched tradesmen behind their counters? My soul, the secrets walking in the streets! You jostle them at every corner. There's a Polonius in every first-class railway carriage, and as many Juliets as there are boarding-schools. ... How inexhaustibly rich everything is, if you only stick to life.Collection: School
When music sounds, gone is the earth I know, And all her lovelier things even lovelier grow; Her flowers in vision flame, her forest trees Lift burdened branches, stilled with ecstasies. When music sounds, out of the water rise Naiads whose beauty dims my waking eyes, Rapt in strange dream burns each enchanted face, With solemn echoing stirs their dwelling-place. When music sounds, all that I was I am Ere to this haunt of brooding dust I came; And from Time's woods break into distant song The swift-winged hours, as I hasten along.Collection: Dream
Very old are the woods; And the buds that break Out of the brier's boughs, When March winds wake, So old with their beauty are-- Oh, no man knows Through what wild centuries Roves back the rose.Collection: Men
What is the world, O soldiers? It is I, I, this incessant snow, This northern sky.Collection: Sky
We wake and whisper awhile, But, the day gone by, Silence and sleep like fields Of amaranth lie.Collection: Lying
God has mercifully ordered that the human brain works slowly; first the blow, hours afterwards the bruise.Collection: Blow
Three jolly huntsmen, In coats of red, Rode their horses Up to bed.Collection: Horse
The only catalogue of this world's goods that really counts is that which we keep in the silence of the mind.Collection: Motivational
His are the quiet steeps of dreamland, The waters of no-more-pain; His ram's bell rings 'neath an arch of stars, "Rest, rest, and rest again.Collection: Stars
All but blind In his chambered hole Gropes for worms The four-clawed Mole.Collection: Moles
Hi! handsome hunting man Fire your little gun. Bang! Now the animal is dead and dumb and done. Nevermore to peep again, creep again, leap again, Eat or sleep or drink again. Oh, what fun!Collection: Fun
Oh, pity the poor glutton Whose troubles all begin In struggling on and on to turn What's out into what's in.Collection: Struggle
Dobbin at manger pulls his hay: Gone is another summer's day.Collection: Summer
Do diddle di do, Poor Jim Jay Got stuck fast In Yesterday.Collection: Yesterday
A harvest mouse goes scampering by, With silver claws and silver eye; And moveless fish in the water gleam, By silver reeds in a silver stream.Collection: Eye
A face peered. All the grey night In chaos of vacancy shone; Nought but vast Sorrow was there The sweet cheat gone.Collection: Sweet
Tell them I came, and no one answered, That I kept my word," he said. Never the least stir made the listeners, Though every word he spake Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house From the one man left awake: Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup, And the sound of iron on stone, And how the silence surged softly backward, When the plunging hoofs were gone.Collection: Men
But beauty vanishes; beauty passes; However rare rare it be; And when I crumble, who will remember This lady of the West Country?Collection: Country
Poor tired Tim! It's sad for him He lags the long bright morning through, Ever so tired of nothing to do.Collection: Morning
His brow is seamed with line and scar; His cheek is red and dark as wine; The fires as of a Northern star Beneath his cap of sable shine. His right hand, bared of leathern glove, Hangs open like an iron gin, You stoop to see his pulses move, To hear the blood sweep out and in. He looks some king, so solitary In earnest thought he seems to stand, As if across a lonely sea He gazed impatient of the land. Out of the noisy centuries The foolish and the fearful fade; Yet burn unquenched these warrior eyes, Time hath not dimmed, nor death dismayed.Collection: Lonely