Alfred Noyes Quotes

Then — in that day — we shall not meet Wrong with new wrong, but right with right; Our faith shall make your faith complete When our battalions re-unite. Forward! — what use in idle words? — Forward, O warriors of the soul! There will be breaking up of swords
When that new morning makes us whole.

The vox angelica replied — The shadows flee away! Our house-beams were of cedar. Come in, with boughs of may! The diapason deepened it — Before the darkness fall, We tell you He is risen again! Our God hath burst His prison again! The Lord of Life is risen again; and Love is Lord of all.

Thou whose deep ways are in the sea, Whose footsteps are not known, To-night a world that turned from Thee Is waiting — at Thy Throne. The towering Babels that we raised Where scoffing sophists brawl, The little Antichrists we praised — The night is on them all.

Carol, every violet has Heaven for a looking-glass! Every little valley lies Under many-clouded skies; Every little cottage stands Girt about with boundless lands; Every little glimmering pond Claims the mighty shores beyond; Shores no seaman ever hailed, Seas no ship has ever sailed. All the shores when day is done Fade into the setting sun, So the story tries to teach More than can be told in speech.

The universe is neither centered on earth nor the sun. It is centered on God.

Never since Drake and Raleigh won
Our freedom of the seas,
Have sons of Britain dared and done
More valiantly than these.

Oh, grown-ups cannot understand,
And grown-ups never will,
How short the way to fairyland
Across the purple hill.

The modern world was not alive to the tremendous Reality that encompassed it. We were surrounded by an immeasurable abyss of darkness and splendor. We built our empires on a pellet of dust revolving around a ball of fire in unfathomable space. Life, that Sphynx, with the human face and the body of a brute, asked us new riddles every hour. Matter itself was dissolving under the scrutiny of Science; and yet, in our daily lives, we were becoming a race of somnambulists, whose very breathing, in train and bus and car, was timed to the movement of the wheels; and the more perfectly, and even alertly, we clicked through our automatic affairs on the surface of things, the more complete was our insensibility to the utterly inscrutable mystery that anything should be in existence at all.

Memory, out of the mist, in a long slow ripple
Breaks, blindly, against the shore.

He bowed his head. He stood so still, They bowed their heads as well. And softly from the organ-loft The song began to swell. Come up with blood-red streamers, The reeds began the strain. The vox humana pealed on high, The Spring is risen again!

Soundlessly, shadow with shadow, we wrestled together,
Till the grey dawn.

Come and look for Peterkin, poor little Peterkin. No one would believe us if we told them what we know, Or they wouldn't grieve for Peterkin, merry little Peterkin...

And still on a winter's night, they say, when the wind is in the trees,
When the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
When the road is a gypsy's ribbon looping the purple moor,
The highwayman comes riding — Riding — riding — The highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn-door.

Over the cobbles he clatters and clangs in the dark inn-yard,
He taps with his whip on the shutters, but all is locked and barred,
He whistles a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
But the landlord's black-eyed daughter — Bess, the landlord's daughter — Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.

A shadow leaned over me, whispering, in the darkness,
Thoughts without sound; Sorrowful thoughts that filled me with helpless wonder And held me bound.

Mystery: Time and Tide shall pass, I am the Wisdom Looking-Glass. This is the Ruby none can touch: Many have loved it overmuch; Its fathomless fires flutter and sigh, Being as images of the flame That shall make earth and heaven the same When the fire of the end reddens the sky, And the world consumes like a burning pall, Till where there is nothing, there is all.