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- Say what thou wilt, the young are happy never.
Give me blessed Age, beyond the fire and fever,--
Past the delight that shatters, the hope that stings,
And eager fluttering of life's ignorant wings.
Sir William Watson, Epigram
- Vain the ambition of kings
Who seek by trophies and dead things
To leave a living name behind,
And weave but nets to catch the wind.
John Webster
- "A planet doesn't explode of itself," said dryly
The Martian astronomer, gazing off into the air--
"That they were able to do it is proof that highly
Intelligent beings must have been living there."
John Hall Wheelcock, from Earth
- I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good as belongs to you.
Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself, Lines 1-3
- I resist any thing better than my own diversity,
Breathe the air but leave plenty after me,
And am not stuck up, and am in my place.
Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself, Lines 349-351
- I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,
And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,
And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.
Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself, Lines 425-427
- Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,
Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking, and breeding,
No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them,
No more modest than immodest.
Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself, Lines 497-500
- I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself, Lines 1332-1333
- A great city is that which has the greatest men and women,
if it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the world.
Walt Whitman, from Song of the Broad-Axe
- For all the sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: "It might have been!"
John Greenleaf Whittier, from Maud Muller
- "Shoot, if you must, this old grey head,
But spare your country's flag," she said.
John Greenleaf Whittier, from Barbara Frietchie
- O man bowed down with labor,
O woman young yet old,
O heart opressed in the toiler's breast
And crushed by the power of gold--
Keep on with your weary battle against triumphant might;
No question is ever settled until it is settled right.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Quoted by William Jennings Bryan in the 1896 US Presidential Campaign
- To a praiseful eye
Should it not be enough of fresh and strange
That trees grow green, and moles can course in clay,
And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day?
Richard Wilbur, from "Praise in Summer," 11-14
- For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.
Oscar Wilde, from The Ballad of Reading Gaol
- Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
Oscar Wilde, from The Ballad of Reading Gaol
- I know not whether Laws be right
Or whethr Laws be wrong;
All that we know who lie in jail
Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year,
A year whose days are long.
Oscar Wilde, from The Ballad of Reading Gaol
- But this I know that every Law
That men have made for Man,
Since first Man took his brother's life,
And the sad world began,
But straws the wheat and saves the chaff
With a most evil fan.
Oscar Wilde, from The Ballad of Reading Gaol
- I tried to put
Truth in a cage.
William Carlos Williams, from "The Fool's Song," 4-5
- What have I left undone
that I should have undertaken?
William Carlos Williams, from "Portrait of the Author," 14-15
- no ideas but in things--
William Carlos Williams, from "Paterson," 5
- Nothing is more certain than the flower. . . .
William Carlos Williams, from "Two Aspects of April," 1
- It is miraculous
that flower should rise
by flower
alike in loveliness. . . .
William Carlos Williams, from "The Crimson Cyclamen," 17-20
- the desolate, dark weeks
when nature in its barrenness
equals the stupidity of man.
William Carlos Williams, from "These," 1-3
- when I cannot write I'm a sick man and want to die.
William Carlos Williams, from "The Cure," 3-4
- Out of fear lest the flower be broken
the rose puts out its thorns.
William Carlos Williams, from "To All Gentleness," 11-12
- The radiant mind
addressed by tufts of flocking pear blossoms
proposes new profundities to the soul
William Carlos Williams, from "Aigeltinger," 4-6
- It is in the minds
of the righteous
that death crows loudest.
William Carlos Williams, from "The Light Shall Not Enter," 1-3
- No defeat is made up entirely of defeat--since
the world it opens is always a place
formerly
unsuspected . . . .
William Carlos Williams, from "The Descent," 14-17
- What power has love but forgiveness?
William Carlos Williams, from "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," Book III
- Eternity is here.
There is no other place.
Ivor Winters, from A Song in Passing, 9-10
- We must live free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold
That Milton held.
William Wordsworth, from It is not to be thought of
- Until the Mystery
Of all this world is solved, well may we envy
The worm, that, underneath a stone whose weight
Would crush the lion's paw with mortal anguish,
Doth lodge, and feed, and coil, and sleep in safety.
Wiliam Wordsworth, from The Borderers, Act IV
- Tis Nature's law
That none, the meanest of created things,
Of forms created the most vile and brute,
The dullest or most noxious, should exist
Divorced from good--a spirit and pulse of good,
A life and soul, to every mode of being
Inseparably linked.
Wiliam Wordsworth, from The Old Cumberland Beggar 73-79
- Sweet is the lore that Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:--
We murder to dissect.
Wiliam Wordsworth, from The Tables Turned 25-28
- While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
Wiliam Wordsworth, from Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey 47-49
- For I have learned
To look on Nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity . . . .
Wiliam Wordsworth, from Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey 88-91
- And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me wih the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man. . . .
Wiliam Wordsworth, from Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey 93-99
- There is a comfort in the strength of love;
'Twill make a thing endurable, which else
Would overset the brain, or break the heart . . . .
Wiliam Wordsworth, from Michael: A Pastoral Poem 448-450
- Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade
Of that which once was great, is passed away.
Wiliam Wordsworth, from On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic 13-14
- But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.
Wiliam Wordsworth, from Ode: Intimations of Immortality 17-18
- Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
Wiliam Wordsworth, from Ode: Intimations of Immortality 56-57
- Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar . . . .
Wiliam Wordsworth, from Ode: Intimations of Immortality 58-61
- What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower. . . .
Wiliam Wordsworth, from Ode: Intimations of Immortality 176-179
- The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
Wiliam Wordsworth, from The World is Too Much with Us, 1-4
- Virtue is the roughest way,
But proves at night a Bed of Down.
Sir Henry Wotton, from On the sudden restraint of the Earl of Somerset
- How happy is he born and taught
The serveth not another's will;
Whose armour is his utmost thought,
And simple truth his utmost skill!
Sir Henry Wotton, from Character of a Happy Life, 1614
- A beauty masked, like the sun in eclipsed,
Gathers together more gazers than if it shined out.
Wycherly, from The Country Wife, Act III, Scene i
- In masks outrageous and austere
The years go by in single file;
But none has merited my fear,
And none has quite escaped my smile.
Elinor Wylie, from Let No Charitable Hope
- The portent passed; his fate was cast,
Sea-farer, desert-ranger.
Tearless I smiled on that fearless child
Dipping his foot in Danger.
Elinor Wylie, from The Child on the Curbstone
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