14 Harold Monro Quotes

Harold Monro quotes

1. O cool glad pasture; living tree, tall corn, Great cliff, or languid sloping sand, cold sea, Waves: river curving; you, eternal flowers, Give me content, while I can think of you: Give me your living breath! Back to your rampart, Death!

2. Cupid has offered his arrows for Jesus to try; He has offered his bow for the game. But Jesus went weeping away, and left him there wondering why.

3. The children eat and wriggle and laugh, The two old ladies stroke their silk; But the cat is grown small and thin with desire, Transformed to a creeping lust for milk.

4. His poetry, as a whole, is more nearly the real right thing than any of the poetry of a somewhat older generation than mine except Mr. Yeats's.

1. What I saw was just one eye In the dawn as I was going: A bird can carry all the sky In that little button glowing. Never in my life I went So deep into the firmament.

2. To the acquisition of the rare quality of politeness, so much of the enlightened understanding is necessary that I cannot but consider every book in every science, which tends to make us wiser, and of course better men, as a treatise on a more enlarged system of politeness.

3. The public, as a whole, does not demand or appreciate the pure expression of beauty. Its cultured members expect to find in poetry, if anything, repose from material and nervous anxiety; an apt or chiselled phrase strokes the appetites and tickles the imagination. The more general public merely enjoys its platitudes and truisms jerked on to the understanding in line and rhyme; truth put into metre sounds overwhelmingly true.

4. O gentle vision in the dawn: My spirit over faint cool water glides, Child of the day, To thee; And thou art drawn By kindred impulse over silver tides The dreamy way To me.

5. The white saucer like some full moon descends / At last from the clouds of the table above.

6. When the tea is brought at five o'clock And all the neat curtains are drawn with care, The little black cat with bright green eyes Is suddenly purring there.

7. “Here is the soundless cypress on the lawn: It listens, listens. Taller trees beyond Listen. The moon at the unruffled pond Stares. And you sing, you sing. That star-enchanted song falls through the air From lawn to lawn down terraces of sound, Darts in white arrows on the shadowed ground; And all the night you sing. My dreams are flowers to which you are a bee As all night long I listen, and my brain Receives your song, then loses it again In moonlight on the lawn. Now is your voice a marble high and white, Then like a mist on fields of paradise, Now is a raging fire, then is like ice, Then breaks, and it is dawn.”

8. “Overheard on a Saltmarsh" Nymph, nymph, what are your beads? Green glass, goblin. Why do you stare at them? Give them me. No. Give them me. Give them me. No. Then I will howl all night in the reeds, Lie in the mud and howl for them. Goblin, why do you love them so? They are better than stars or water, Better than voices of winds that sing, Better than any man's fair daughter, Your green glass beads on a silver ring. Hush, I stole them out of the moon. Give me your beads, I want them. No. I will howl in the deep lagoon For your green glass beads, I love them so. Give them me. Give them. No.”

9. “The white saucer like some full moon descends At last from the clouds of the table above; She sighs and dreams and thrills and glows, Transfigured with love. She nestles over the shining rim, Buries her chin in the creamy sea; Her tail hangs loose; each drowsy paw Is doubled under each bending knee. A long, dim ecstasy holds her life; Her world is an infinite shapeless white, Till her tongue has curled the last holy drop, Then she sinks back into the night, Draws and dips her body to heap Her sleepy nerves in the great arm-chair, Lies defeated and buried deep Three or four hours unconscious there.”

10. “Do you not feel me near? I'm bending forward on the wind of thought, Sailing toward you on the lake of mind. O share this moment which may not be brought Ever to life again, once left behind.”