Nature quotes
Quotations about the natural world, from Wordsworth’s daffodils and Keats’s autumn to Thoreau’s pond and Frost’s early green. Poems are often quoted in fragments that change their sense, so each entry gives the lines as printed, with the poem, the book and the year.
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: / Its loveliness increases; it will never / Pass into nothingness;
Earth’s crammed with heaven, / And every common bush afire with God;
Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! / Bird thou never wert,
I loafe and invite my soul, / I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
I wandered lonely as a Cloud / That floats on high o’er Vales and Hills, / When all at once I saw a crowd / A host of dancing Daffodills;
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
O Wind, / If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.
Just like moons and like suns, / With the certainty of tides, / Just like hopes springing high, / Still I’ll rise.
My heart leaps up when I behold / A Rainbow in the sky:
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw / With ravine, shriek’d against his creed—
Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.
Nature’s first green is gold, / Her hardest hue to hold.
O rose, thou art sick! / The invisible worm, / That flies in the night, / In the howling storm,
On the seashore of endless worlds children meet. The infinite sky is motionless overhead and the restless water is boisterous.
Piping down the valleys wild, / Piping songs of pleasant glee, / On a cloud I saw a child, / And he laughing said to me:
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean—roll! / Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, / Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
The highest excellence is like (that of) water.
The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, / There is a rapture on the lonely shore, / There is society where none intrudes, / By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! / No hungry generations tread thee down;
Tyger Tyger, burning bright, / In the forests of the night;