Alfred Tennyson Quotes

Shall love be blamed for want of faith? ~ Alfred Tennyson

Sooner or later I too may passively take the print
Of the golden age--why not? I have neither hope nor trust;
May make my heart as a millstone, set my face as a flint,
Cheat and be cheated, and die: who knows? we are ashes and dust. ~ Alfred Tennyson

I had liefer twenty years/Skip to the broken music of my brains/Than any broken music thou canst make. ~ Alfred Tennyson

I found Him in the shining of the stars,
I marked Him in the flowering of His fields,
But in His ways with men I find Him not.
I waged His wars, and now I pass and die.
O me! for why is all around us here
As if some lesser god had made the world,
But had not force to shape it as he would,
Till the High God behold it from beyond,
And enter it, and make it beautiful? ~ Alfred Tennyson

More than once when I
Sat all alone, revolving in myself
The word that is the symbol of myself,
The mortal limit of the Self was loosed,
And passed into the nameless, as a cloud
Melts into heaven. I touch'd my limbs, the limbs
Were strange, not mine - and yet no shade of doubt,
But utter clearness, and thro' loss of Self
The gain of such large life as matched with ours
Were sun to spark - unshadowable in words,
Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world ~ Alfred Tennyson

I myself beheld the King
Charge at the head of all his Table Round,
And all his legions crying Christ and him,
And break them; and I saw him, after, stand
High on a heap of slain, from spur to plume
Red as the rising sun with heathen blood,
And seeing me, with a great voice he cried,
"They are broken, they are broken!" for the King,
However mild he seems at home, nor cares
For triumph in our mimic wars, the jousts -
For if his own knight cast him down, he laughs
Saying, his knights are better men than he -
Yet in this heathen war the fire of God
Fills him: I never saw his like: there lives
No greater leader. ~ Alfred Tennyson

Forerun thy peers, thy time, and let
Thy feet, millenniums hence, be set
In midst of knowledge, dream'd not yet. ~ Alfred Tennyson

While he gazed
The beauty of her flesh abashed the boy,
As though it were the beauty of her soul:
For as the base man, judging of the good,
Puts his own baseness in him by default
Of will and nature, so did Pelleas lend
All the young beauty of his own soul to hers ~ Alfred Tennyson

Hateful is the dark-blue sky,
Vaulted o'er the dark-blue sea.
Death is the end of life; ah, why
Should life all labour be? ~ Alfred Tennyson

=The Burial of Love= His eyes in eclipse, Pale cold his lips, The light of his hopes unfed, Mute his tongue, His bow unstrung With the tears he hath shed, Backward drooping his graceful head. Love is dead; His last arrow sped; He hath not another dart; Go--carry him to his dark deathbed; Bury him in the cold, cold heart-- Love is dead. ~ Alfred Tennyson

We needs must love the highest when we see it. ~ Alfred Tennyson

But there was heard among the holy hymns A voice as of the waters, for she dwells Down in a deep‐ calm, whatsoever storms may shake the world ~ Alfred Tennyson

Miltons were, on the whole, the most enthusiastic poet followers. A flick through the London telephone directory would yield about four thousand John Miltons, two thousand William Blakes, a thousand or so Samuel Colleridges, five hundred Percy Shelleys, the same of Wordsworth and Keats, and a handful of Drydens. Such mass name-changing could have problems in law enforcement. Following an incident in a pub where the assailant, victim, witness, landlord, arresting officer and judge had all been called Alfred Tennyson, a law had been passed compelling each namesake to carry a registration number tattooed behind the ear. It hadn't been well received
few really practical law-enforcement measures ever are. ~ Jasper Fforde

And while he waited in the castle court,
The voice of Enid, Yniol's daughter, rang
Clear through the open casement of the hall,
Singing; and as the sweet voice of a bird,
Heard by the lander in a lonely isle,
Moves him to think what kind of bird it is
That sings so delicately clear, and make
Conjecture of the plumage and the form;
So the sweet voice of Enid moved Geraint;
And made him like a man abroad at morn
When first the liquid note beloved of men
Comes flying over many a windy wave
To Britain, and in April suddenly
Breaks from a coppice gemmed with green and red,
And he suspends his converse with a friend,
Or it may be the labour of his hands,
To think or say, 'There is the nightingale;'
So fared it with Geraint, who thought and said,
'Here, by God's grace, is the one voice for me. ~ Alfred Tennyson

Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of hell. ~ Alfred Tennyson

He learns that the form, in its current form, was originally called a formulary, and was invented by an Englishman named Charles Babbage, the same man who invented both an early kind of computer and the cow catcher, a device attached to the front of locomotives to clear debris from train tracks. He learns that Babbage once wrote to Alfred Tennyson to correct two lines from one of Tennyson's poems, which Babbage felt lacked scientific accuracy. This, thinks Jonas, tells you everything you need to know about both the man and the invention of forms. ~ Stephen Dau

God gives us Love, something to love, God lends us. ~ Alfred Tennyson

Long sleeps the summer in the seed.

Verse CIV ~ Alfred Tennyson

Time...a maniac scattering dust. ~ Alfred Tennyson

Let me go: take back thy gift:
Why should a man desire in any way
To vary from the kindly race of men,
Or pass beyond the goal of ordinance
Where all should pause, as is most meet for all?
...Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears,
And make me tremble lest a saying learnt,
In days far-off, on that dark earth, be true?
'The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.'
- Tithonus ~ Alfred Tennyson

Know ye not then the Riddling of the Bards?
Confusion, and illusion, and relation,
Elusion, and occasion, and evasion? ~ Alfred Tennyson

The stream will cease to flow;
The wind will cease to blow;
The clouds will cease to fleet;
The heart will cease to beat;
For all things must die. ~ Alfred Tennyson

The Flower

Once in a golden hour
I cast to earth a seed.
Up there came a flower,
The people said, a weed.

To and fro they went
Thro' my garden-bower,
And muttering discontent
Cur'd me and my flower.

Then it grew so tall
It wore a crown of light,
But thieves from o'er the wall
Stole the seed by night.

Sow'd it far and wide
By every town and tower,
Till all the people cried,
"Splendid is the flower."

Read my little fable:
He that runs may read.
Most can raise the flowers now,
For all have got the seed.

And some are pretty enough,
And some are poor indeed;
And now again the people
Call it but a weed. ~ Alfred Tennyson

Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds,
At last he beat his music out.
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.


He fought his doubts and gather'd strength,
He would not make his judgment blind,
He faced the spectres of the mind
And laid them: thus he came at length


To find a stronger faith his own;
And Power was with him in the night,
Which makes the darkness and the light,
And dwells not in the light alone, ~ Alfred Tennyson

Montenegro (1877)

THEY rose to where their sovereign eagle sails,
They kept their faith, their freedom, on the height,
Chaste, frugal, savage, arm'd by day and night
Against the Turk; whose inroad nowhere scales
Their headlong passes, but his footstep fails,
And red with blood the Crescent reels from fight
Before their dauntless hundreds, in prone flight
By thousands down the crags and thro' the vales.
O smallest among peoples! rough rock-throne
Of Freedom! warriors beating back the swarm
Of Turkish Islam for five hundred years,
Great Tsernogora! never since thine own
Black ridges drew the cloud and brake the storm
Has breathed a race of mightier mountaineers.
Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1880 ~ Alfred Tennyson

My religious beliefs also defied convention, leaning towards agnosticism and pandeism. ~ Alfred Tennyson

She saw the snowy poles of moonless Mars, That marvellous round of milky light Below Orion, and those double stars Whereof the one more bright

Is circled by the other ~ Alfred Tennyson

I know not if I know what true love is,
But if I know, then, if I love not him,
I know there is none other I can love ~ Alfred Tennyson

brief is life but love is long ~ Alfred Tennyson

Who is wise in love, love most, say least. ~ Alfred Tennyson

Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea,
Thy tribute wave deliver:
No more by thee my steps shall be,
For ever and for ever.

Flow, softly flow, by lawn and lea,
A rivulet then a river:
Nowhere by thee my steps shall be
For ever and for ever.

But here will sigh thine alder tree
And here thine aspen shiver;
And here by thee will hum the bee,
For ever and for ever.

A thousand suns will stream on thee,
A thousand moons will quiver;
But not by thee my steps shall be,
For ever and for ever. ~ Alfred Tennyson

In her right hand the lily, in her left
The letter--all her bright hair streaming down--
And all the coverlid was cloth of gold
Drawn to her waist, and she herself in white
All but her face, and that clear-featured face
Was lovely, for she did not seem as dead,
But fast asleep, and lay as though she smiled. ~ Alfred Tennyson

Authority forgets a dying king ~ Alfred Tennyson

Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore
Than labor in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar;
O, rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more. ~ Alfred Tennyson

after all had eaten, then Geraint, For now the wine made summer in his veins, Let his eye rove in following, or rest On Enid at her lowly handmaid-work, ~ Alfred Tennyson

Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. ~ Alfred Tennyson

Maud in the light of her youth and her grace,
Singing of Death, and of Honor that cannot die,
Till I well could weep for a time so sordid and mean,
And myself so languid and base. ~ Alfred Tennyson

...and Gareth bowed himself with all obedience to the King, and wrought
All kind of service with a noble ease
That graced the lowliest act in doing it. ~ Alfred Tennyson

So word by word, and line by line,
The dead man touch'd me from the past,
And all at once it seem'd at last
The living soul was flash'd on mine,


And mine in his was wound, and whirl'd
About empyreal heights of thought,
And came on that which is, and caught
The deep pulsations of the world,


Aeonian music measuring out
The steps of Time - the shocks of Chance--
The blows of Death. At length my trance
Was cancell'd, stricken thro' with doubt. ~ Alfred Tennyson

Light, so low upon earth,
You send a flash to the sun.
Here is the golden close of love,
All my wooing is done.
Oh, all the woods and the meadows,
Woods, where we hid from the wet,
Stiles where we stayed to be kind,
Meadows in which we met!
Light, so low in the vale
You flash and lighten afar,
For this is the golden morning of love,
And you are his morning star.
Flash, I am coming, I come,
By meadow and stile and wood,
Oh, lighten into my eyes and my heart,
Into my heart and my blood!
Heart, are you great enough
For a love that never tires?
O heart, are you great enough for love?
I have heard of thorns and briers.
Over the thorns and briers,
Over the meadows and stiles,
Over the world to the end of it
Flash of a million miles. ~ Alfred Tennyson

I know her by her angry air,
Her brightblack eyes, her brightblack hair,
Her rapid laughters wild and shrill,
As laughter of the woodpecker
From the bosom of a hill.
'Tis Kate--she sayeth what she will;
For Kate hath an unbridled tongue,
Clear as the twanging of a harp.
Her heart is like a throbbing star.
Kate hath a spirit ever strung
Like a new bow, and bright and sharp
As edges of the scymetar.
Whence shall she take a fitting mate?
For Kate no common love will feel;
My woman-soldier, gallant Kate,
As pure and true as blades of steel.
Kate saith "the world is void of might".
Kate saith "the men are gilded flies".
Kate snaps her fingers at my vows;
Kate will not hear of lover's sighs.
I would I were an armèd knight,
Far famed for wellwon enterprise,
And wearing on my swarthy brows
The garland of new-wreathed emprise:
For in a moment I would pierce
The blackest files of clanging fight,
And strongly strike to left and right,
In dreaming of my lady's eyes.
Oh! Kate loves well the bold and fierce;
But none are bold enough for Kate,
She cannot find a fitting mate. ~ Alfred Tennyson

The quiet sense of something lost ~ Alfred Tennyson

A beam in darkness: let it grow. ~ Alfred Tennyson

Seal'd her minefrom her first sweet breath
Mine, and mine by right, from birth till death
Mine, mine-our fathers have sworn. ~ Alfred Tennyson

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
too full for sound or foam,
when that which drew from out
the boundless deep
turns again home. ~ Alfred Tennyson

What hope is here for modern rhyme
To him, who turns a musing eye
On songs, and deeds, and lives, that lie
Foreshorten'd in the tract of time?


These mortal lullabies of pain
May bind a book, may line a box,
May serve to curl a maiden's locks;
Or when a thousand moons shall wane


A man upon a stall may find,
And, passing, turn the page that tells
A grief, then changed to something else,
Sung by a long-forgotten mind.


But what of that? My darken'd ways
Shall ring with music all the same;
To breathe my loss is more than fame,
To utter love more sweet than praise. ~ Alfred Tennyson

Let darkness keep her raven gloss:
Ah, sweeter to be drunk with loss ~ Alfred Tennyson

Love is the only gold. ~ Alfred Tennyson

He often lying broad awake...hath heard time flowing in the middle of the night,
And all things creeping to a day of doom.
How could ye know him? Ye were yet within
The narrower circle; he had wellnigh reached
The last, which with a region of white flame,
Pure without heat, into a larger air
Upburning, and an ether of black blue,
Investeth and ingirds all other lives. ~ Alfred Tennyson

We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
"Ulysses" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson ~ Alfred Tennyson

I will drink life to the lees. ~ Alfred Tennyson

That which we are, we are. ~ Alfred Tennyson

=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. ~ Alfred Tennyson

Yet all things must die.
The stream will cease to flow;
The wind will cease to blow;
The clouds will cease to fleet;
The heart will cease to beat;
For all things must die.
All things must die. ~ Alfred Tennyson

Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone ~ Alfred Tennyson

For always roaming with a hungry heart. ~ Alfred Tennyson

To many-towered Camelot ~ Alfred Tennyson

And at the closing of the day
She loosed the chain, and down she lay;
The broad stream bore her far away,
The Lady of Shallot. ~ Alfred Tennyson

When in the down I sink my head,
Sleep, Death's twin-brother, times my breath;
Sleep, Death's twin-brother, knows not Death,
Nor can I dream of thee as dead: ~ Alfred Tennyson

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. ~ Alfred Tennyson

The Oak

Live thy Life,
Young and old,
Like yon oak,
Bright in spring,
Living gold;

Summer-rich
Then; and then
Autumn-changed
Soberer-hued
Gold again.

All his leaves
Fall'n at length,
Look, he stands,
Trunk and bough
Naked strength. ~ Alfred Tennyson

Then some one said, "We will return no more";
And all at once they sang, "Our island home
Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam. ~ Alfred Tennyson

Arthur spake, 'Behold, for these have sworn To wage my wars, and worship me their King; The old order changeth, yielding place to new; And we that fight for our fair father Christ, ~ Alfred Tennyson

A kind of walking trance I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has often come upon me through repeating my own name 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 surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life.... ~ Alfred Tennyson

I wither slowly in thine arms; here at the quiet limit of the world, a white hair'd shadow roaming like a dream. ~ Alfred Tennyson

Yet I thought I saw her stand,
A shadow there at my feet,
High over the shadowy land. ~ Alfred Tennyson

Tell thou the King and all his liars, that I
Have founded my Round Table in the North,
And whatsoever his own knights have sworn
My knights have sworn the counter to it -- and say
My tower is full of harlots, like his court,
But mine are worthier, seeing thy profess
To be none other than themselves -- and say
My knights are all adulterers like his own,
But mine are truer, seeing they profess
To be none other; and say his hour is come,
The heathen are upon him, his long lance
Broken, and his Excalibur a straw. ~ Alfred Tennyson

Life is brief but love is LONG . ~ Alfred Tennyson

Praise to our Indian brothers, and the dark face have his due!
Thanks to the kindly dark faces who fought with us, faithful and few,
Fought with the bravest among us, and drove them, and smote them, and slew.
That ever upon the topment roof our banner in India blew. ~ Alfred Tennyson

Here at the quiet limit of the world. ~ Alfred Tennyson

The shell must break before the bird can fly. ~ Alfred Tennyson

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. ~ Alfred Tennyson

I must lose myself in action, lest I wither in despair. ~ Alfred Tennyson

O, were I loved as I desire to be!
What is there in the great sphere of the earth,
Or range of evil between death and birth,
That I should fear, - if I were loved by thee!
All the inner, all the outer world of pain,
Clear love would pierce and cleave, if thou wert mine;
As I have heard that somewhere in the main
Fresh-water springs come up through bitter brine.
'I were joy, not fear, clasped hand in hand with thee,
To wait for death - mute - careless of all ills,
Apart upon a mountain, though the surge
Of some new deluge from a thousand hills
Flung leagues of roaring foam into the gorge
Below us, as far on as eye could see. ~ Alfred Tennyson

Thine are these orbs of light and shade;
Thou madest Life in man and brute;
Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot
Is on the skull which thou hast made. ~ Alfred Tennyson

Brothers in Art: a friendship so complete ~ Alfred Tennyson

I am a part of all that I have met. ~ Alfred Tennyson

The old order changes, giving place to the new... least on good custom should corrupts the world. ~ Alfred Tennyson

Frown not, old ghosts, if I be one of those
Who make you utter things you did not say,
And mould you all awry and mar your work;
For whatsoever knows us truly knows
That none can truly write his single day,
And none can write it for him upon earth. ~ Alfred Tennyson

Who can say
Why Today
Tomorrow will be Yesterday?
Who can tell
Why to smell
The violet, recall the dewy prime
Of youth and buried time?
The cause is never found in rhyme. ~ Alfred Tennyson

Their's not to make reply, Their's not to reason why, Their's but to do and die: Into ~ Alfred Tennyson

I follow up the quest despite of day and night and death and hell. ~ Alfred Tennyson

He makes no friends who never made a foe. ~ Alfred Tennyson

The children born of thee are sword and fire,
Red ruin, and the breaking up of laws, ~ Alfred Tennyson

Nature, red in tooth and claw. ~ Alfred Tennyson

No matter what the odds, a man does not pin his last hope for survival on something and then expect that it will fail. ~ Alfred Lansing

Why do some die and some live? The answer was clearly, that on the whole the best fitted live. From the effects of disease the most healthy escaped; from enemies, the strongest, swiftest, or the most cunning; from famine, the best hunters or those with the best digestion; and so on. Then it suddenly flashed upon me that this self-acting process would necessarily improve the race, because in every generation the inferior would inevitably be killed off and the superior would remain-that is, the fittest would survive. ~ Alfred Russel Wallace

I got told by pretty much everyone I knew that, if I'm going to be out in L.A., working, you need a car. So I was thinking, I'm going to try and not get a car, just because I'm a contrarian that way. ~ Alfred Enoch

The abuse of the veto power has become so predictable that frequently resolutions are not even tabled because of the certainty of a veto against their adoption. Necessary discussion is thereby suppressed. Concerted action by the Security Council, the General Assembly and other United Nations agencies is necessary to prevent major human rights violations, stop ongoing breaches and provide remedies to victims. ~ Alfred-Maurice De Zayas

For my part, I wish all guns with their belongings and everything could be sent to hell, which is the proper place for their exhibition and use. ~ Alfred Nobel

The world is made of sugar and dirt. ~ Alfred Doblin

Don't dodge difficulties; meet them, greet them, beat them. All great men have been through the wringer. ~ Alfred Armand Montapert

Later these tales would be retold and embellished by the genius of Mallory, Spenser, and Tennyson. ~ Winston S. Churchill

The Myth is the Myth of the Blood, which, under the sign of the Swastika, released the World Revolution. It is the Awakening of the Soul of the Race, which, after a period of long slumber, victoriously put an End to Racial Chaos. ~ Alfred Rosenberg

Justice is to be found only in imagination. ~ Alfred Nobel

I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

Reason may cure illusions, but not suffering. ~ Alfred De Musset

I liked reading and working out my ideas in the midst of that endless crowd walking in and out of the (library) looking for something. I, too, was seeking fame and fortune by sitting at the end of a long golden table next to the sets of American authors on the open shelves. ~ Alfred Kazin

Producer's Surplus is a convenient name for the genus of which the rent of land is the leading species. ~ Alfred Marshall

Even when they are saturated in the sense of the older theory of valence, the elementary atoms still possess sufficient chemical affinity to bind other seemingly also saturated atoms and groups of atoms, under generation of clearly defined atomic bonds. ~ Alfred Werner