Algernon Charles Swinburne Quotes

• Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is dark till the dawn of the day that we die.
• A crown and justice? Night and day Shall first be yoked together.
• 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.
• His speech is a burning fire.
• His life is a watch or a vision Between a sleep and a sleep.
• When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces, The mother of months in meadow or plain Fills the shadows and windy places With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain.
• Wilt thou fear that, and fear not my desire?
• Ah, ah, thy beauty! like a beast it bites, Stings like an adder, like an arrow smites.
• 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 death.
• If love were what the rose is, And I were like the leaf, Our lives would grow together In sad or singing weather, Blown fields or flowerful closes, Green pasture or gray grief; If love were what the rose is, And I were like the leaf.
• Despair the twin-born of devotion.
• She hath wasted with fire thine high places, She hath hidden and marred and made sad The fair limbs of the Loves, the fair faces Of gods that were goodly and glad. She slays, and her hands are not bloody; She moves as a moon in the wane, White-robed, and thy raiment is ruddy, Our Lady of Pain.
• Villon, our sad bad glad mad brother's name.
• Forget that I remember And dream that I forget.
• Time found our tired love sleeping, And kissed away his breath; But what should we do weeping, Though light love sleep to death? We have drained his lips at leisure, Till there's not left to drain A single sob of pleasure, A single pulse of pain.
• Dream that the lips once breathless Might quicken if they would; Say that the soul is deathless; Dream that the gods are good; Say March may wed September, And time divorce regret; But not that you remember, And not that I forget.
• It is long since Mr. Carlyle expressed his opinion that if any poet or other literary creature could really be 'killed off by one critique' or many, the sooner he was so despatched the better; a sentiment in which I for one humbly but heartily concur.
• A blatant Bassarid of Boston, a rampant Maenad of Massachusetts.
• To wipe off the froth of falsehood from the foaming lips of inebriated virtue, when fresh from the sexless orgies of morality and reeling from the delirious riot of religion, may doubtless be a charitable office.
• 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.
• 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.
• At the door of life by the gate of breath, There are worse things waiting for men than death.
• And lo, between the sundawn and the sun His day's work and his night's work are undone: And lo, between the nightfall and the light, He is not, and none knoweth of such an one.
• Ah, yet would God this flesh of mine might be Where air might wash and long leaves cover me; Where tides of grass break into foam of flowers, Or where the wind's feet shine along the sea.
• Marvellous mercies and infinite love.
• Our way is where God knows And Love knows where: We are in Love's hand to-day.
• From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be That no man lives forever, That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea.
• For in the days we know not of Did fate begin Weaving the web of days that wove Your doom.
• I remember the way we parted, The day and the way we met; You hoped we were both broken-hearted And knew we should both forget.
• And the best and the worst of this is That neither is most to blame, If you have forgotten my kisses And I have forgotten your name.
• Change lays not her hand upon truth.
• Stately, kindly, lordly friend Condescend Here to sit by me.
• Not with dreams, but with blood and with iron, Shall a nation be moulded at last.
• Who knows but on their sleep may rise Such light as never heaven let through To lighten earth from Paradise?
• A baby's feet, like sea-shells pink Might tempt, should heaven see meet, An angel's lips to kiss, we think, A baby's feet.
• Like rose-hued sea-flowers toward the heat, They stretch and spread and wink Their ten soft buds that part and meet.
• The sweetest flowers in all the world- A baby's hands.
• Though our works Find righteous or unrighteous judgment, this At least is ours, to make them righteous.
• My loss may shine yet goodlier than your gain When Time and God give judgment.
• Is not Precedent indeed a King of men?
• Fear that makes faith may break faith.
• There grows No herb of help to heal a coward heart.
• The thorns he spares when the rose is taken; The rocks are left when he wastes the plain; The wind that wanders, the weeds wind-shaken, These remain.
• Though one were fair as roses His beauty clouds and closes.
• Gone deeper than all plummets sound.
• Ah that such sweet things should be fleet, Such fleet things sweet!
• Those eyes the greenest of things blue The bluest of things grey.
• Mr. Swinburne : expresses in verse what he finds in books as passionately as a poet expresses what he finds in life.
• Swinburne was perpetually talking shop: the bookish spirit in which he looked on nature and mankind, with his head full of his own trade, is essentially the same as the spirit in which The Tailor and Cutter annually criticises the portraits in the Royal Academy, interested, not in the artist, not in the subject, but in the cut of the subject's clothes.
• Mr. Swinburne is already the Poet Laureate of England. The fact that his appointment to this high post has not been degraded by official confirmation renders his position all the more unassailable. He whom all poets love is the Laureate Poet always.
• I attempt to describe Mr. Swinburne; and lo! the Bacchanal screams, the sterile Dolores sweats, serpents dance, men and women wrench, wriggle and foam in an endless alliteration of heated and meaningless words, the veriest garbage of Baudelaire flowered over with the epithets of the Della Cruscans.

algernon charles swinburne