Walter de La Mare Quotes
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As long as I live I shall always be My Self - and no other, Just me.
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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.
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Too late for fruit, too soon for flowers.
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Look thy last on all things lovely, Every hour
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What lovely things Thy hand hath made.
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Slowly, silently, now the moon Walks the night in her silver shoon.
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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.
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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.
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But beauty vanishes; beauty passes; However rare rare it be; And when I crumble, who will remember This lady of the West Country?
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So, blind to Someone I must be.
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Oh, pity the poor glutton Whose troubles all begin In struggling on and on to turn What's out into what's in.
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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.
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What a haunting, inescapable riddle life was.
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Three jolly huntsmen, In coats of red, Rode their horses Up to bed.
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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.
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The sandy cat by the Farmer's chair Mews at his knee for dainty fare; Old Rover in his moss-greened house Mumbles a bone, and barks at a mouse. In the dewy fields the cattle lie Chewing the cud 'neath a fading sky; Dobbin at manger pulls his hay: Gone is another summer's day.
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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.
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As soon as they're out of your sight, you are out of their mind.
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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.
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Once a man strays out of the common herd, he's more likely to meet wolves in the thickets than angels.
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And some win peace who spend The skill of words to sweeten despair Of finding consolation where Life has but one dark end.
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All but blind In his chambered hole Gropes for worms The four-clawed Mole.
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We wake and whisper awhile, But, the day gone by, Silence and sleep like fields Of amaranth lie.
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An hour's terror is better than a lifetime of timidity.