Algernon Swinburne Quotations

Where might is, the right is:/ Long purses make strong swords./ Let weakness learn meekness:/ God save the House of Lords!

Maiden, and mistress of the months and stars/ Now folded in the flowerless fields of heaven.

I am tired of tears and laughter,/ And men that laugh and weep;/ Of what may come hereafter/ For men that sow and reap.

I am that which began:/ Out of me the years roll;/ Out of me God and man;/ I am equal and whole;/ God changes, and man, and the form of them bodily; I am the soul.

I have lived long enough, having seen one thing, that love hath an end;/ Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend.

For winter's rains and ruins are over,/ And all the season of snows and sins;/ The days dividing lover and lover,/ The light that loses, the night that wins.

He weaves, and is clothed with derision;/ Sows, and he shall not reap;/ His life is a watch or a vision/ Between a sleep and a sleep.

Here, where the world is quiet;/ Here, where all trouble seems/ Dead winds' and spent waves' riot/ In doubtful dreams of dreams.

I will go back to the great sweet mother,/ Mother and lover of men, the sea.

Pale, beyond porch and portal,/ Crowned with calm leaves, she stands,/ Who gathers all things mortal/ With cold immortal hands.

Time turns the old days to derision, Our loves into corpses or wives; And marriage and death and division Make barren our lives

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.

A creed is a rod,/ And a crown is of night:/ But this thing is God:/ To be man with thy might,/ To grow straight in the strength of thy spirit, and live out thy life as the light.

A little soul for a little bears up this corpse which is man.

Before the beginning of years/ There came to the making of man/ Time with a gift of tears,/ Grief with a glass that ran.

Change in a trice. The lilies and languors of virtue. For the raptures and roses of vice;

Come down and redeem us from virtue,/ Our Lady of Pain.