So the struck eagle, stretch'd upon the plain, No more through rolling clouds to soar again, View'd his own feather on the fatal dart, And wing'd the shaft that quiver'd in his heart.
We have all our private terrors, our particular shadows, our secret fears. We are afraid in a fear which we cannot face, which none understands, and our hearts are torn from us, our brains unskinned like the layers of an onion, ourselves the last.
Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will.
every idiot who goes about with a 'Merry Christmas' on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.
At ebb tide I wrote a line upon the sand, and gave it all my heart and all my soul. At flood tide I returned to read what I had inscribed and found my ignorance upon the shore.
Say, what other metre is it
Than the meeting of the eyes?
Nature poureth into nature
Through the channels of that feature
Riding on the ray of sight,
Fleeter far than whirlwinds go,
Or for service, or delight,
Hearts to hearts their meaning show.
Friends now fast sworn,
Whose double bosoms seems to wear one heart,
Whose hours, whose bed, whose meal and exercise
Are still together, who twin, as 'twere, in love,
Unseparable, shall within this hour,
On a dissension of a doit, break out
To bitterest enmity; so fellest foes,
Whose passions and whose plots have broke their sleep
To take the one the other, by some chance,
Some trick not worth an egg, shall grow dear friends
And interjoin their issues.
The still affection of the heart Became an outward breathing type, That into stillness past again, And left a want unknown before; Although the loss had brought us pain, That loss but made us love the more.
Out of my deeper heart a bird rose and flew skywards.
Higher and higher did it rise, yet larger and larger did it grow.
At first it was but like a swallow, then a lark, then an eagle, then as vast as a spring cloud, and then it filled the starry heavens.
Out of my heart a bird flew skywards. And it waxed larger as it flew. Yet it left not my heart.