“ Here are our shapes that play dream love quarrel, Here are our dreams (and if there were dreamers, If we were not like our visions a dream) All is not over—is all then over? Here is the well and the delicate water Far below gleaming, the starred white branches Fragrant with flowers. Here is the noontide, Even the grasses grow at the edges. What then is gone? If we were the dreamers (And not a dream) then all must be over. I an old man cold, fruitless and lonely, Watch by the water, which you cannot see. ”
Humbert Wolfe
Biographical details
Humbert Wolfe (1885-1940) published works such as London Sonnets. These writings evoke Pierrette, Hampton Court and dream.
Quotes by Humbert Wolfe
“ Beauty and love alone need no to-morrow. All other things—courage and truth and virtue— Have the one doom, the lust for the immortal. Love only, with lost beauty, life outpaces, Cold, though they burn, untroubled, though they hurt you, And white, like gods, when through the sculptured portal The starshine enter and the moon’s cold graces. {53} GOD GAVE US BODIES.... GOD gave us bodies for suffering and for strangers, To have their will of. We divided waken To find the heart that won through all its dangers By the stained body at the dawn forsaken. ”
“ The English lilies break a silver lance? “Where are the flowers that were at Hampton Court?” If thus the flowers, where are those who here Themselves fresh flowers with the springtime fraught, Saw the first leaves in Bushey Park appear The dead swept leaves the leaves of yesteryear? Where are they gone those lads of good report? It may be they are sleeping; it may be Strange lands have taken them or a strange sea. But wheresoever in the world they lie An English voice till that world ends will cry “Here are the flowers that were at Hampton Court?” ”
