“The simple lack of her is more to me than others' presence.”

“Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rainOn this bleak hut, and solitude, and meRemembering again that I shall dieAnd neither hear the rain nor give it thanksFor washing me cleaner than I have beenSince I was born into this solitude.Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:But here I pray that none whom once I lovedIs dying to-night or lying still awakeSolitary, listening to the rain,Either in pain or thus in sympathyHelpless among the living and the dead,Like a cold water among broken reeds,Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,Like me who have no love which this wild rainHas not dissolved except the love of death,If love it be towards what is perfect andCannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.”

“I lay awake listening to the rain, and at first it was as pleasant to my ear and my mind as it had long been desired; but before I fell asleep it had become a majestic and finally a terrible thing, instead of a sweet sound and symbol. It was accusing and trying me and passing judgment. Long I lay still under the sentence, listening to the rain, and then at last listening to words which seemed to be spoken by a ghostly double beside me. He was muttering: The all-night rain puts out summer like a torch. In the heavy, black rain falling straight from invisible, dark sky to invisible, dark earth the heat of summer is annihilated, the splendour is dead, the summer is gone. The midnight rain buries it away where it has buried all sound but its own. I am alone in the dark still night, and my ear listens to the rain piping in the gutters and roaring softly in the trees of the world. Even so will the rain fall darkly upon the grass over the grave when my ears can hear it no more…The summer is gone, and never can it return. There will never be any summer any more, and I am weary of everything… I am alone.The truth is that the rain falls for ever and I am melting into it. Black and monotonously sounding is the midnight and solitude of the rain. In a little while or in an age – for it is all one – I shall know the full truth of the words I used to love, I knew not why, in my days of nature, in the days before the rain: ‘Blessed are the dead that the rain rains on.”

“Verse is the natural speech of men, as singing is of birds’The Week’s Survey, 18 June 1904”

“Tall NettlesTall nettles cover up, as they have doneThese many springs, the rusty harrow, the ploughLong worn out, and the roller made of stone :Only the elm butt tops the nettles now.This corner of the farmyard I like most:As well as any bloom upon a flowerI like the dust on the nettles, never lostExcept to prove the sweetness of a shower.”

“You English words?I know you:You are light as dreams,Tough as oak,Precious as gold,As poppies and corn,Or an old cloak:Sweet as our birdsTo the ear,As the burnet roseIn the heatOf Midsummer”

“How nice it would be to be dead if only we could know we were dead. That is what I hate, the not being able to turn round in the grave and to say It is over.”