I pray-for fashion's word is out And prayer comes round again- That I may seem, though I die old, A foolish, passionate man.

I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree.

In dreams begins responsibility.

It's certain there is no fine thing Since Adam's fall but needs much laboring.

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life, or of the work And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

Only God, my dear, Could love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair.