Poetry Quotes

I've chosen some of the poetry references from the  third section of the book: Like a Fox in a Hole; December 1923 to A Long Hard War; September 1940

'Courtship  to marriage, as a very witty prologue to a very dull play,'  Izzy said .... 'Someone said that.'"

'Congreve,' Sylvie said.'

This starts of another sparring session between the sisters-in-law at Hugh's sixtieth birthday.

William Congreve is the author of many well-known quips.

'Salute the last, and everlasting day' John Donne, considered the founder of the Metaphysical poet.This is from a Sonnet Cycle for Lady Magdalen, a stanza entitled Ascention. This quote appears when Ursula experiences the Argyll street bombing for the first time.

'Despair behind, and death before'   Another John Donne quote. Also in the Argyll street blitz, in a subsequent version. It also appears later on in different circumstances.

John Donne c.1595

Copyright National Portrait Gallery

Here are some other Donne quotes that Ursula uses, with links to the full poems, and to appraisals of them:

'Why dost thou thus, / Through windows, and through curtains, call on us?' she thought. if she could go back in time and take a lover from history it would be Donne.'"

She was thinking of Donne's poem, 'The Relic', one of her favourites - 'the bracelet of bright hair about the bone'."

John Keats 1819 by Joseph Severn

'The Queen moon... and all her starry fays'  John Keats  Ode To A Nightingale Yet again Argyll Street

Home from Sylvie's funeral in freezing London Ursula busies herself looking through a box of her old books and reads the beginning of Keat's The Eve of St Agnes:

Ah, bitter chill it was!

The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;

The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass.

And silent was the flock in woolly fold.'

Ursula then tries to warm herself by quoting from another Keats' poem.

'For summer has o'erbrimm'd their clammy cells'

This refers to the bees in the poem To Autumn

Not much later on the same grim, grey day, postwar, post Teddy, Hugh and now Sylvie, Ursula ponders:

'Would it be so very bad? 'To cease upon the midnight with no pain.' There were worse ways. Auschwitz, Treblinka. Teddy's Halifax going down in flames.' This is Ode to A Nightingale again. Another quote from this poem comes later.

'Tender is the night'

F.Scott Fitzgerald took this line for the title of his 1934 novel. Here you can listen to him read the poem.

Andrew Marvell c.1681

'What a wondrous life is this I lead!

ripe apples drop about my head;

the luscious clusters of the vine

upon my mouth do crush their wine...'

Sylvie decides that this poem by Marvell, another Metaphysical poet, is 'rather lush'

Marvell reappears:

'She tried to recall another line from Marvell, was it in 'A Dialogue Between the Soul and Body', something about bolts of bones and fetters and manacles but it wouldn't come.'

But in the end Ursula chooses Donne over Keats. 'The knowledge of his untimely death would colour everything quite wretchedly.'

Keats' grave in the protestant cemetery, Rome

How aware is she  of her own, numerous untimely deaths?