Quotes
Quotes - Poe
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
Sound loves to revel in a summer night.
Years of love have been forgot
In the hatred of a minute.
From a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.
Vastness! and Age! and Memories of Eld!
Silence! and Desolation! and dim Night!
This--all this--was in the olden
Time long ago.
Unthought-like thoughts that are the souls of thought,
This maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
Keeping time, time, time
In a sort of Runic rhyme
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells.
Hear the mellow wedding bells
Golden bells!
What a world of happiness their harmony foretells
Through the balmy air of night
How they ring out their delight!
And all my days are trances
And all my nightly dreams
Are where thy dark eye glances
And where thy footstep gleams--
In what ethereal dances
By what eternal streams.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping.
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December;
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me--filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before.
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dreamed before.
Perched upon a bust of Pallas, just above my chamber door,--
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.
Whom unmerciful disaster
Followed fast and followed faster.
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted--Nevermore!
To the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome.
The skies they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crisped and sere--
The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year.
Here once, through an alley Titanic,
Of cypress, I roamed with my soul,--
Of cypress, with Psyche, my soul.
A Quixotic sense of the honorable--of the chivalrous.
The object, Truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, and the object, Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are, although attainable, to a certain extent, in poetry, far more readily attainable in prose.
I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is Taste.
