Top 15 Alfred Noyes Quotes

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.

The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
The road was a ribbon of moonlight, over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding — Riding — riding — The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.

One kiss, my bonny sweetheart; I'm after a prize tonight,
But I shall be back with the yellow gold before the morning light.
Yet if they press me sharply, and harry me through the day,
Then look for me by moonlight,
Watch for me by moonlight,
I'll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way.

I'll come to thee by moonlight,
though hell should bar the way.

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

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

...love lies hidden in every rose...

Stand like a beaten anvil, when thy dream
Is laid upon thee, golden from the fire.
Flinch not, though heavily through that furnace-gleam
The black forge-hammers fall on thy desire.

Demoniac giants round thee seem to loom.
'Tis but the world-smiths heaving to and fro.
Stand like a beaten anvil. Take the doom
Their ponderous weapons deal thee, blow on blow.

Needful to truth as dew-fall to the flower
Is this wild wrath and this implacable scorn.
For every pang, new beauty, and new power,
Burning blood-red shall on thy heart be born.

Stand like a beaten anvil. Let earth's wrong
Beat on that iron and ring back in song.

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.

Heart of my heart, we are one with the wind, One with the clouds
that are whirled o'er the lea, One in many, O broken and blind, One as
the waves are at one with the sea! Ay! when life seems scattered apart,
Darkens, ends as a tale that is told, One, we are one, O heart of my
heart, One, still one, while the world grows old.

Love is in the greenwood, dawn is in the skies, And Marian is waiting with a glory in her eyes.

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

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.

We, that like foemen meet the past Because we bring the future, know We only fight to achieve at last
A great re-union with our foe; Re-union in the truths that stand When all our wars are rolled away; Re-union of the heart and hand
And of the prayers wherewith we pray; Re-union in the common needs, The common strivings of mankind; Re-union of our warring creeds
In the one God that dwells behind.

A thousand creeds and battle-cries, A thousand warring social schemes, A thousand new moralities,
And twenty thousand thousand dreams! Each on his own anarchic way, From the old order breaking free, — Our ruined world desires, you say, License, once more, not Liberty.