Alfred Tennyson Quotes

Me only cruel immortality
Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream
The ever-silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.

All precious things discovered late
To those that seek them issue forth,
For Love in sequel works with Fate,
And draws the veil from hidden worth

Long sleeps the summer in the seed.

Verse CIV

He often lying broad awake, and yet Remaining from the body, and apart In intellect and power and will, hath heard Time flowing in the middle of the night, And all things creeping to a day of doom.

Ce que croit ma raison, quoi qu'il puisse arriver,
Et ce que sent mon cœur en sa douleur amère,
C'est que mieux vaut l'amour suivi d'un deuil austère
Que la paix de celui qui ne sut pas aimer.

A kind of waking trance I have frequently had, quite from boyhood, when
I have been all alone. This has generally come upon me thro’ repeating my own name two or three times to myself silently, till all at once, as it were
out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality
itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a
confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the weirdest of the weirdest,
utterly beyound words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility,
the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only
true life.

Our wills are ours, to make them thine.

=Lost Hope= You cast to ground the hope which once was mine, But did the while your harsh decree deplore, Embalming with sweet tears the vacant shrine, My heart, where Hope had been and was no more. So on an oaken sprout A goodly acorn grew; But winds from heaven shook the acorn out, And filled the cup with dew.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnished, not to shine in use.

But thy strong Hours indignant work’d their wills,
And beat me down and marr’d and wasted me,
And tho’ they could not end me, left me maim’d
To dwell in presence of immortal youth,
Immortal age beside immortal youth,
And all I was, in ashes.
- Tithonus

What happiness to reign a lonely king,
Vext — O ye stars that shudder over me,
O earth that soundest hollow under me,
Vext with waste dreams? for saving I be joined
To her that is the fairest under heaven,
I seem as nothing in the mighty world,
And cannot will my will, nor work my work
Wholly, nor make myself in mine own realm
Victor and lord. But were I joined with her,
Then might we live together as one life,
And reigning with one will in everything
Have power on this dark land to lighten it,
And power on this dead world to make it live.

O tell her, Swallow, thou that knowest each,
That bright and fierce and fickle is the South,
And dark and true and tender is the North.

"He does not love me for my birth Nor for my lands so broad and fair; He loves me for my own true worth, And that is well," said Lady Clare.

Let what is broken so remain. The Gods are hard to reconcile: ‘Tis hard to settle order once again. There is confusion worse than death, Trouble on trouble, pain on pain, Long labour unto aged breath, Sore task to hearts worn out with many wars And eyes grow dim with gazing on the pilot-stars.

She howl’d aloud, “I am on fire within.
There comes no murmur of reply.
What is it that will take away my sin,
And save me lest I die?