English poet (1835-1913)
Our modern pessimists cannot see a tree, a flower, or a mountain, but straightway they drop into what I may call a falling sickness, and all the beauty of the woods, fields, and sky merely suggests to them a picturesque background for their own superior sighs and sorrows.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
Through the dripping weeks that follow
One another slow, and soak
Summer's extinguished fire and autumn's drifting smoke.
ALFRED AUSTIN
"A Spring Carol", Soliloquies in Song
We should be sorry to be thought guilty of dogmatism, and there is always peril in generalizations.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
Is life worth living? Yes, so long
As Spring revives the year,
And hails us with the cuckoo's song,
To show that she is here;
So long as May of April takes,
In smiles and tears, farewell,
And windflowers dapple all the brakes,
And primroses the dell.
ALFRED AUSTIN
"Is Life Worth Living?", Lyrical Poems
Imagination in poetry, as distinguished from mere fancy is the transfiguring of the real or actual to the ideal.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus: Prose Papers on Poetry
Once learn how Nature gardens for herself, and you will be able to spare yourself a good deal of trouble.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Garden that I Love
I think the proposition still holds good that men of letters who aspire to high distinction do well not to disdain altogether the politics of their time.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
If it be urged that Dante, and even Shakespeare, do not always yield up their meaning to the reader at once, the allegation must be traversed absolutely. The immediate apprehension of the meaning of the Vita Nuova and the Divina Commedia presupposes an intimate acquaintance with the various dialects of the Italian language existing in Dante’s time, and likewise with the erudition he scatters so profusely, if allusively, throughout his verse. But to the Italian readers of Dante, even superficially acquainted with those dialects, and adequate masters of the theology and the astronomy of Dante’s time, those poems present no difficulty. Of Shakespeare, the greatest of all the poets in our language, let it be granted that he is not unoften one of the most careless and even most slovenly; but rarely is he so to the obscuring of his meaning, and never save casually, and in some brief passage. Yet let it not be inferred that I am of opinion that the full meaning of the greatest passages in the greatest poems is to be seized all at once, or by the average reader at all. That is "deeper than ever plummet sounded," though Tennyson’s "indolent reviewer" apparently imagines that he at once fathoms the more intellectual poetry of his time. There can be but few readers, and possibly none but poets themselves, or persons who, to quote Tennyson again, "have the great poetic heart," who master the full significance of Hamlet or of the tersely told story of Francesca da Rimini. But the whole world at once understood the more obvious tenor of both, and is not puzzled by either. There is a sliding scale of understanding, as there is a sliding scale of inspiration. "We needs must love the highest when we see it"; but "when we see it" is an important qualification in the statement.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
In my song you catch at times
Note sweeter far than mine,
And in the tangle of my rhymes
Can scent the eglantine.
ALFRED AUSTIN
"A Birthday", Lyrical Poems
When held up to the window pane,
What fixed my baby stare?
The glory of the glittering rain,
And newness everywhere.
ALFRED AUSTIN
"A Birthday", Lyrical Poems
Where has thou been all the dumb winter days
When neither sunlight was nor smile of flowers,
Neither life, nor love, nor frolic,
Only expanse melancholic,
With never a note of thy exhilarating lays?
ALFRED AUSTIN
"A Spring Carol", Soliloquies in Song
If Conservatism may, in a non-party sense, claim Shakespeare as an authority in its favor, in Milton, on the other hand, I suppose Liberalism again in a non-party sense would recognize a support.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
Do you remember the winter days
When we piled up the leaves and made them blaze,
While the blue smoke curled, in the frosty air,
Up the great wan trunks that rose gaunt and bare,
And we clapped our hands, and the rotten bough
Came crackling down to our feet, as now?
ALFRED AUSTIN
"The Last Night", At the Gate of the Convent and Other Poems
Never did form more fairy thread the dance
Than she who scours the hills to find it flowers;
Never did sweeter lips chained ears entrance
Than hers that move, true to its striking hours;
No hands so white e'er decked the warrior's lance,
As those which tend its lamp as darkness lours;
And never since dear Christ expired for man,
Had holy shrine so fair a sacristan.
ALFRED AUSTIN
Madonna's Child
For great poetry, as Wordsworth teaches us in a single line, is not mere emotion, not mere subtle or sensuous singing, but "Reason in her most exalted mood."
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
Though what is understood as religious sentiment comes next to the love of individuals for each other in the extent of its influence, it has produced much verse, but, it must be allowed, little poetry, the reason probably being that the religious sentiment of the few who are endowed with the gift of writing poetry differs from that of the average "religious" person.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
Surely music is not only the food of love, but of poetry as well.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
It is the business of poets to deal with the relation of the individual to himself, to the silent uniform forces of nature, and to other individuals, singly and collectively: in other words, to be dramatic or epic, as well as lyrical or idyllic.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
Why from the plain truth should I shrink?
In woods men feel; in towns they think.
Yet, which is best? Thought, stumbling, plods
Past fallen temples, vanished gods,
Altars unincensed, fanes undecked,
Eternal systems flown or wrecked;
Through trackless centuries that grant
To the poor trudge refreshment scant,
Age after age, pants on to find
A melting mirage of the mind.
But feeling never wanders far,
Content to fare with things that are.
ALFRED AUSTIN
"A Defence of English Spring", Lyrical Poems
Your voice would have silenced merle and thrush,
And the rose outbloomed would have blushed to blush,
And Summer, seeing you, paused, and known
That the glow of your beauty outshone its own.
ALFRED AUSTIN
"My Winter Rose", Lyrical Poems