JRR Tolkien Poetry

AT THE GREY HAVENS
Day is ended, dim my eyes,
But journey long before me lies.
Farewell, friends! I hear the call.
The ship's beside the stony wall.
Foam is white and waves are grey;
beyond the sunset leads my way.
Foam is salt, the wind is free;
I hear the rising of the sea.

Farewell, friends! The sails are set,
the wind is east, the moorings fret.
Shadows long before me lie,
beneath the ever-bending sky,
but islands lie behind the Sun
that i shall raise ere all is done;
lands there are to west of West,
where night is quiet and sleep is rest.

Guided by the Lonely Star,
beyond the utmost harbour-bar,
I'll find the heavens fair and free,
and beaches of the Starlit Sea.
Ship my ship! I seek the West,
and fields and mountains ever blest.
Farewell to Middle-earth at last.
I see the star above my mast!
-JRR Tolkien


THE LITTLE HOUSE OF LOST PLAY (Mar Vanwa Tyaliéva)
We knew that land once, You and I,
and once we wandered there
in the long days now long gone by,
a dark child and a fair.
Was it on the paths of firelight thought
in winter cold and white,
or in the blue-spun twilit hours
of little early tucked-up beds
in drowsy summer night,
that you and I in Sleep went down
to meet each other there,
your dark hair on your white nightgown
and mine was tangled fair?

We wandered shyly hand in hand,
small footprints in the golden sand,
and gathered pearls and shells in pails,
while all about the nightingales
were singing in the trees.
We dug for silver with our spades,
and caught the sparkle of the seas,
then ran ashore to greenlit glades,
and found the warm and winding lane
that now we cannot find again,
between tall whispering trees.

The air was neither night nor day,
an ever-eve of gloaming light,
when first there glimmered into sight
the Little House of Play.
New-built it was, yet very old,
white, and thatched with straws of gold,
and pierced with peeping lattices
that looked toward the sea;
and our own children's garden-plots
were there: our own forgetmenots,
red daisies, cress and mustard,
and radishes for tea.
There all the borders, trimmed with box,
were filled with favourite flowers, with phlox,
with lupins, pinks, and hollyhocks,
beneath a red may-tree;
and all the gardens full of folk
that their own little language spoke,
but not to You and Me.

For some had silver watering-cans
and watered all their gowns,
or sprayed each other; some laid plans
to build their houses, little towns
and dwellings in the trees.
And some were clambering on the roof;
some crooning lonely and aloof;
some dancing round the fairy-rings
all garlanded in daisy-strings,
while some upon their knees
before a little white-robed king
crowned with marigold would sing
their rhymes of long ago.
But side by side a little pair
with heads together, mingled hair,
went walking to and fro
still hand in hand; and what they said,
ere Waking far apart them led,
that only we now know.
-JRR Tolkien


ONCE UPON A DAY (by Tom Bombadil)
Once upon a day on the fields of May
there was snow in the summer where the blossom lay;
the buttercups tall sent up their light
in a stream of gold, and wide and white
there opened in the green grass-skies
the earth-stars with their steady eyes
watching the Sun climb up and down.
Goldberry was there with a wild-rose crown,
Goldberry was there in a lady-smock
blowing away a dandelion clock,
stooping over a lily-pool
and twiddling the water green and cool
to see it sparkle round her hand:
once upon a time in elvish land.

Once upon a night in the cockshut light
the grass was grey but the dew was white;
shadows were dark, and the Sun was gone,
the earth-stars shut, but the high stars shone,
one to another winking their eyes
as they waited for the Moon to rise.
Up he came, and on leaf and grass
his white beams turned to twinkling glass,
and silver dripped from stem and stalk
down to where the lintips walk
through the grass-forests gathering dew.
Tom was there without boot or shoe,
with moonshine wetting his big, brown toes:
once upon a time, the story goes.

Once upon a moon on the brink of June
a-dewing the lintips went too soon.
Tom stopped and listenes, and down he knelt:
"Ha! Little lads! So it was you I smelt?
What a mousy smell! Well, the dew is sweet,
so drink it up, but mind my feet!"
The lintips laughed and stole away,
but old Tom said: "I wish they'd stay!
The only things that won't talk to me,
say what they do or what they be.
I wonder what they have got to hide?
Down from the Moon maybe they slide,
or come in star-winks, I don't know:"
once upon a time and long ago.

THE SEA-BELL (FRODO'S DREME)
I walked by the sea, and there came to me,
as a star-beam on the wet sand,
a white shell like a sea-bell;
trembling it lay in my hand.
In my fingers shaken I heard waken
a ding within, by a harbour bar
a buoy swinging, a call ringing
over endless seas, faint now and far.

Then I saw a boat silently float
on the night-tide, empty and grey.
'It is later than late! Why do we wait?'
I leapt in and cried: 'Bear me away!'

It bore me away, wetted with spray,
wrapped in a mist, wound in a sleep,
to a forgotten strand in a strange land.
In the twilight beyond the deep
I heard a sea-bell swing in the swell,
dinging, dinging, and the breakers roar
on the hidden teeth of a perilous reef;
and at last I came to a long shore.
White it glimmered, and the sea simmered
with star-mirrors in a silver net;
cliffs of stone pale as ruel-bone
in the moon-foam were gleaming wet.
Glittering sand slid through my hand,
dust of pearl and jewel-grist,
trumpets of opal, roses of coral,
flutes of green and amethyst.
But under cliff-eaves there were glooming caves,
weed-curtained, dark and grey;
a cold air stirred in my hair,
and the light waned, as I hurried away.

Down from a hill ran a green rill;
its water I drank to my heart's ease.
Up its fountain-stair to a country fair
of ever-eve I came, far from the seas,
climbing into meadows of fluttering shadows:
flowers lay there like fallen stars,
and on a blue pool, glassy and cool,
like floating moons the nenuphars.
Alders were sleeping, and willows weeping
by a slow river of rippling weeds;
gladdon-swords guarded the fords,
and green spears, and arrow-reeds.

There was echo of song all the evening long
down in the valley; many a thing
running to and fro: hares white as snow,
voles out of holes; moths on the wing
with lantern-eyes; in quiet surprise
brocks were staring out of dark doors.
I heard dancing there, music in the air,
feet going quick on the green floors.
But whenever I came it was ever the same:
the feet fled, and all was still;
never a greeting, only the fleeting
pipes, voices, horns on the hill.

Of river-leaves and the rush-sheaves
I made me a mantle of jewel-green,
a tall wand to hold, and a flag of gold;
my eyes shone like the star-sheen.
With flowers crowned I stood on a mound,
and shrill as a call at cock-crow
proudly I cried: 'Why do you hide?
Why do none speak, wherever I go?
Here now I stand, king of this land,
with gladdon-sword and reed-mace.

Answer my call! Come forth all!
Speak to me words! Show me a face!'

Black came a cloud as a night-shroud.
Like a dark mole groping I went,
to the ground falling, on my hands crawling
with eyes blind and my back bent.
I crept to a wood: silent it stood
in its dead leaves, bare were its boughs.
There must I sit, wandering in wit,
while owls slept in their hollow house.
For a year and a day there must I stay:
beetles were tapping in the old trees,
spiders were weaving, in the mould heaving
puffballs loomed about my knees.

At last there came light in my long night,
and I saw my hair hanging grey.
'Bent though I be, I must find the sea!
I have lost myself, and I know not the way,
but let me be gone!' Then I stumbled on;
like a hunting bat shadow was over me;
in my ears dinned a withering wind,
and with ragged briars I tried to cover me.
My hands were torn and my knees worn,
and years were heavy upon my back,
when the rain in my face took a salt taste,
and I smelled the smell of sea-wrack.

Birds came sailing, mewing, wailing;
I heard voices in cold caves,
seals barking, and rocks snarling,
and in spout-holes the gulping of waves.
Winter came fast; into a mist I passed,
to land's end my years I bore;
snow was in the air, ice in my hair,
darkness was lying on the last shore.

There still afloat waited the boat,
in the tide lifting, its prow tossing.
Weary I lay, as it bore me away,
the waves climbing, the seas crossing,
passing old hulls clustered with gulls
and great ships laden with light,
coming to haven, dark as a raven,
silent as snow, deep in the night.

Houses were shuttered, wind round them muttered,
roads were empty. I sat by a door,
and where drizzling rain poured down a drain
I cast away all that I bore:
in my clutching hand some grains of sand,
and a sea-shell silent and dead.
Never will my ear that bell hear,
never my feet that shore tread
Never again, as in sad lane,
in blind alley and in long street
ragged I walk. To myself I talk;
for still they speak not, men that I meet.
-JRR Tolkien

A. E. Housman Poetry

My dreams are of a field afar
And blood and smoke and shot.
There in their graves my comrades are,
In my grave I am not.

I too was taught the trade of man
And spelt the lesson plain;
But they, when I forgot and ran,
Remembered and remain.
-A. E. Housman


I did not lose my heart in summer's even,
When roses to the moonrise burst apart:
When plumes were under heel and lead was flying,
In blood and smoke and flame I lost my heart.

I lost it to a soldier and a foeman,
A chap that did not kill me, but he tried;
That took the sabre straight, and took it striking
And laughed and kissed his hand to me and died.
-A. E. Housman


Here dead lie we because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young.
-A. E. Housman


Oh, when I was in love with you
Then I was clean and brave,
And miles around the wonder grew
How well did I behave.

And now the fancy passes by
And nothing will remain,
And miles around they'll say that I
Am quite myself again.
-A. E. Housman


You smile upon your friend to-day,
To-day his ills are over;
You hearken to the lover's say,
And happy is the lover.

'Tis late to hearken, late to smile,
But better late than never;
I shall have lived a little while
Before I die for ever.
-A. E. Housman

C.S. Lewis Quotes

A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.
C. S. Lewis

Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
C. S. Lewis

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
C. S. Lewis

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
C. S. Lewis

Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good.
C. S. Lewis

Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
C. S. Lewis

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man just a cleverer devil.
C. S. Lewis

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
C. S. Lewis

Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.
C. S. Lewis

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: What! You too? I thought I was the only one.
C. S. Lewis

If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.
C. S. Lewis

It is hard to have patience with people who say, "There is no death" or "Death doesn't matter." There is death. And whatever is, matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.
C. S. Lewis

It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.
C. S. Lewis

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
C. S. Lewis

The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.
C. S. Lewis

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Oh, all right then- have it your way!'
C. S. Lewis

Mortal lovers must not try to remain at the first step; for lasting passion is the dream of a harlot and from it we wake in despair.
C. S. Lewis, 'The Pilgrim's Regress'

Every poem can be considered in two ways--as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes.
C. S. Lewis, A preface to "Paradise Lost"

Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
C. S. Lewis

If we discover a desire within us that nothing in this world can satisfy, also we should begin to wonder if perhaps we were created for another world.
C. S. Lewis,

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey "people." People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war...Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest....
C. S. Lewis

People often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God." That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic--on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg--or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
C. S. Lewis

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than minority of them - never become conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?
C. S. Lewis

We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.
C. S. Lewis

I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labor camps. In those, we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.
C. S. Lewis

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, and irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.
C. S. Lewis

No one ever told me grief felt so much like fear.
C. S. Lewis

The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law that overarches rulers and ruled alike.
C. S. Lewis

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.
C.S. Lewis,

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art...It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
C. S. Lewis

We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.
C.S. Lewis

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.
C. S. Lewis

I believe in God like I believe in the sun, not because I can see it, but because of it all things are seen.
C. S. Lewis

A pleasure is not full grown until it is remembered.
C. S. Lewis

A great many of those who 'debunk' traditional... values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process.
C. S. Lewis

This year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practice ourselves the kind of behavior we expect from other people.
C. S. Lewis

It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous.
C. S. Lewis

Whenever you find a man who says he doesn't believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later.
C. S. Lewis

Pride is a spiritual Cancer: It eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.
C. S. Lewis

When you reach the thing you were desiring, if it doesn't satisfy you, it was not what you were desiring.
C. S. Lewis

You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You do have a body.
C. S. Lewis

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
C. S. Lewis

Nothing is beautiful except the abnormal; and nothing is abnormal until we have grasped the norm.
C. S. Lewis

Oscar Wilde Quotes

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
Oscar Wilde

A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
Oscar Wilde

I am not young enough to know everything.
Oscar Wilde

Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.
Oscar Wilde

It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.
Oscar Wilde

Whenever people agree with me, I always feel I must be wrong.
Oscar Wilde

But what is the difference between literature and journalism?
...Journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. That is all.
Oscar Wilde

Biography lends to death a new terror.
Oscar Wilde

I love acting. It is so much more real than life.
Oscar Wilde

Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event.
Oscar Wilde

Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.
Oscar Wilde

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
Oscar Wilde

One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.
Oscar Wilde

One's real life is often the life that one does not lead.
Oscar Wilde

One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.
Oscar Wilde

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Oscar Wilde

Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing.
Oscar Wilde

To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity.
Oscar Wilde

We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.
Oscar Wilde

It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.
Oscar Wilde

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
Oscar Wilde

Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.
Oscar Wilde

Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
Oscar Wilde

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
Oscar Wilde

One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.
Oscar Wilde

America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.
Oscar Wilde

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
Oscar Wilde

There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
Oscar Wilde

I can resist anything but temptation.
Oscar Wilde

The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself.
Oscar Wilde

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
Oscar Wilde

When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.
Oscar Wilde

There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.
Oscar Wilde

We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.
Oscar Wilde

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Oscar Wilde

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.
Oscar Wilde

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.
Oscar Wilde

Wisdom comes with winters.
Oscar Wilde

Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.
Oscar Wilde

At twilight, nature is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets.
Oscar Wilde

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
Oscar Wilde

Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons.
Oscar Wilde

The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
Oscar Wilde

Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.
Oscar Wilde

The public has an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.
Oscar Wilde

In the world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
Oscar Wilde

Beauty is a form of genius--is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon.
Oscar Wilde

Nothing is so aggravating as calmness.
Oscar Wilde

It is only by not paying one's bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.
Oscar Wilde

Society produces rogues, and education makes one rogue cleverer than another.
Oscar Wilde

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
Oscar Wilde

Action: the last resource of those who know not how to dream.
Oscar Wilde

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
Oscar Wilde

Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.
Oscar Wilde

There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.
Oscar Wilde

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
Oscar Wilde

Bore: a man who is never unintentionally rude.
Oscar Wilde

Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.
Oscar Wilde

He hadn't a single redeeming vice.
Oscar Wilde

Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there.
Oscar Wilde

The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.
Oscar Wilde

Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.
Oscar Wilde

Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.
Oscar Wilde