Quotes by poets

Tennyson, grieving the sudden death of his closest friend, decides that the pain of losing someone is better than never having loved them. It was written about friendship and death, not a breakup.

The opening of the poem that shaped the modern American Santa Claus: a jolly, round St. Nicholas who arrives on Christmas Eve in a sleigh pulled by eight reindeer and comes down the chimney.

Shallow knowledge makes people overconfident; only deep study makes them humble and wise. Pope's advice is to learn deeply or not at all.

The first line of Keats's long poem Endymion: beautiful things never lose their power to delight us, and their loveliness grows over time instead of fading.

The urn tells us that beauty and truth are the same thing, and that this is the only wisdom people need. Whether Keats himself believed it, or is letting the urn speak for itself, is still debated.

Latin for “seize the day,” or more literally “pluck the day” like ripe fruit. Horace tells a friend to enjoy today instead of worrying about a future no one can know.

In Frost's poem, a farmer's neighbor repeats an old saying while they rebuild the stone wall between them. The speaker doubts it. The poem asks the question instead of answering it.

Old age is not a decline to dread but the goal that youth was preparing for. Browning's speaker invites a listener to grow old with him because the later years complete the life.

Dickinson pictures hope as a small bird that lives in the soul, sings without stopping through every storm, and never asks for anything in return.

The poet lists the ways she loves her husband: as deeply as her soul can reach, in everyday needs, freely, purely, with all her life, and, if God allows, even more after death.

Telemachus, whose father Odysseus left for war when he was a baby, says he has only his mother's word for who his father is. No child can be completely sure.

Latin for “a healthy mind in a healthy body.” Juvenal says that if you must pray for something, pray for these, not for wealth, power or a long life.

Donne, seriously ill and hearing a funeral bell, reflects that every person is part of humanity, so every death diminishes us all. The same passage ends with “for whom the bell tolls.”

People who once ran their own government now only want two things, free food and entertainment. Rulers who supply both can keep power without being questioned.

Latin for “Who will guard the guards themselves?” Today it asks who keeps the powerful honest when they are the ones meant to keep everyone else in line.

The poet asks the New Year's bells to ring away the old year's grief, quarrels and injustice and to ring in kindness, truth and peace.

Her beauty is like a clear, starry night, a perfect balance of dark and light, and it comes as much from a calm, good mind as from her face.

The song asks whether old friends should be forgotten, and answers no. “Auld lang syne” means roughly “old long since,” or “the good old days,” and the singers drink a cup of kindness to them.

Latin for “time flees,” the source of the English saying “time flies.” Virgil's fuller line adds that the time lost can never be recovered.

The best part of a good person's life is not their big achievements but the small, everyday kindnesses that nobody records and they themselves forget.

Burns, having wrecked a mouse's nest with his plough, tells her that the best plans of mice and men often go wrong, and that he is worse off than her because he worries about the past and the future.

The person we are as children shapes the adult we become. Wordsworth hopes his grown-up self will keep the wonder he felt as a child seeing a rainbow.

Mothers shape the next generation, so their influence on the world is greater than any king's or general's. The poem praises motherhood as the strongest force for good.

Everyone makes mistakes; forgiving them is what lifts us toward the divine. Pope wrote it to urge critics to be generous to struggling writers.

A traveler picks one of two paths that were “really about the same,” then imagines telling the story years later as if the choice made all the difference. It is a poem about how we tell stories about our choices.

Parents bring children into the world and love them, but do not own them. Children have their own thoughts and their own future, and a parent's job is to send them forward, like a bow sending an arrow.