59 Walter de la Mare Quotes

Walter de la Mare quotes

1. Slowly, silently, now the moon Walks the night in her silver shoon.

2. 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.

3. Here lies a most beautiful lady, Light of step and heart was she; I think she was the most beautiful lady That ever was in the West Country.

4. But beauty vanishes; beauty passes; However rare-rare it be; And when I crumble, who will remember This lady of the West Country?

5. Look thy last on all things lovely, Every hour-let no night Seal thy sense in deathly slumber Till to delight Thou hast paid thy utmost blessing.

6. 'Who knocks?' 'I, who was beautiful, Beyond all dreams to restore, I from the roots of the dark thorn am hither, And knock on the door.'

7. A face peered. All the grey night In chaos of vacancy shone; Nought but vast sorrow was there- The sweet cheat gone.

8. Do diddle di do, Poor Jim Jay Got stuck fast In Yesterday.

9. It's a very odd thing&mdas; As odd as can be- That whatever Miss T. eats Turns into Miss T.

10. Three jolly huntsmen, In coats of red, Rode their horses Up to bed.

11. 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!

12. Wonderful lovely there she sat, Singing the night away, All in the solitudinous sea Of that there lonely bay.

13. 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.

14. Some one came knocking At my wee, small door; Some one came knocking, I'm sure-sure-sure.

15. Softly along the road of evening, In a twilight dim with rose, Wrinkled with age, and drenched with dew Old Nod, the shepherd, goes.

16. 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.'

17. We wake and whisper awhile, But, the day gone by, Silence and sleep like fields Of amaranth lie.

18. Oh, no man knows Through what wild centuries Roves back the rose.

19. Old Rover in his moss-greened house Mumbles a bone, and barks at a mouse.

20. Dobbin at manger pulls his hay: Gone is another summer's day.

21. All but blind In his chambered hole Gropes for worms The four-clawed Mole.

22. So, blind to Someone I must be.

23. What lovely things Thy hand hath made.

24. 'Bunches of grapes,' says Timothy; 'Pomegranates pink,' says Elaine; 'A junket of cream and a cranberry tart For me,' says Jane.

25. 'A bumpity ride in a wagon of hay'

26. Poor tired Tim! It's sad for him He lags the long bright morning through, Ever so tired of nothing to do.

27. 'What is the world, O soldiers? It is I, I, this incessant snow, This northern sky.

28. 'Is anybody there?' said the Traveler, Knocking on the moonlit door; And his horse in the silence chomped the grasses Of the forest's ferny floor.

29. 'Tell them I came, and no one answered, That I kept my word,' he said.

30. 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: Aye, 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.

31. Who said 'Peacock Pie'? The old king to the sparrow: Who said 'Crops are ripe'? Rust to the harrow. Who said, 'Ay, mum's the word'? Sexton to willow. Who said, 'Green dusk for dream?' Moss for a pillow. Who said, 'All Time's delight Hath she for narrow bed; Life's troubled bubble broken'?- That's what I said.

32. The delicate, invisible web you wove The inexplicable mystery of sound.

33. Or when the lawn Is pressed by unseen feet, and ghosts return Gently at twilight, gently go at dawn, The sad intangible who grieve and yearn...

1. As long as I live I shall always be My Self - and no other, Just me.

2. An hour's terror is better than a lifetime of timidity.

3. Once a man strays out of the common herd, he's more likely to meet wolves in the thickets than angels.

4. It was a pity thoughts always ran the easiest way, like water in old ditches.

5. Too late for fruit, too soon for flowers.

6. The only catalogue of this world's goods that really counts is that which we keep in the silence of the mind.

7. 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.

8. Oh, pity the poor glutton Whose troubles all begin In struggling on and on to turn What's out into what's in.

9. 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.

10. God has mercifully ordered that the human brain works slowly; first the blow, hours afterwards the bruise.

11. 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.

12. What a haunting, inescapable riddle life was.

13. 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.

14. When I lie where shades of darkness Shall no more assail mine eyes.

15. As soon as they're out of your sight, you are out of their mind.

16. 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.

17. And some win peace who spend The skill of words to sweeten despair Of finding consolation where Life has but one dark end.

18. 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.

19. 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.

20. 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.

21. 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...

22. “It is very seldom that one encounters what would appear to be sheer unadulterated evil in a human face; an evil, I mean, active, deliberate, deadly, dangerous. Folly, heedlessness, vanity, pride, craft, meanness, stupidity - yes. But even Iagos in this world are few, and devilry is as rare as witchcraft. ("Bad Company")”

23. “Poor sleepers should endeavor to compose themselves. Tampering with empty space, stirring up echoes in pitch-black pits of darkness is scarcely sedative. ("Out Of The Deep")”

24. “Thinking is like a fountain. Once it gets going at a certain pressure, well, it almost impossible to turn it off. And, my hat! what odd things come up with the water! ("Out Of The Deep")”

25. “I believe in the devil, in the Powers of Darkness, Lawford, as firmly as I believe he and they are powerless – in the long run. They – what shall we say? - have surrendered their intrinsicality. You can just go through evil, as you can go through a sewer, and come out on the other side. A loathsome process too.”

26. “There was still an hour or two of daylight - even though clouds admitted only a greyish light upon the world, and his Uncle Timothy's house was by nature friendly to gloom. ("Out Of The Deep")”