bell quotes

The bell-rope that gathers God at dawn Dispatches me as though I dropped down the knell Of a spent day.

- (Harold) Hart Crane
  'The Broken Tower', in the New Republic, 8  Jun.

Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved inmankind; and thereforenever send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

-John Donne
  Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation no.17.

Time and the bell have buried the day, The black cloud carries the sun away.

-T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
  Four Quartets,'Burnt Norton', pt.4.

The tolling bell Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried Ground swell, a time Older than the time of chronometers.

-T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
Four Quartets,'The Dry Salvages', pt.1.

The worstthing thatcanhappento oldgoodmusic isthat it might become dated for a while, but watch out, in twenty years it will come drifting back like bell-bottoms and W.C. Fields movies.

- Hampton Hawes
  Raise Up Off Me (with Don  Asher), ch.22.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self! Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.

-John Keats
  Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St.  Agnes and Other Poems,'Ode to a Nightingale', stanza 8.

Through breaks of the cedar and sycamore bowers Struggles the light that is love to the flowers; And, softer than slumber and sweeter than singing, The notes of the bell-birds are running and ringing. The silver-voiced bell-birds, the darlings of daytime! They sing in September their songs of the May-time.

- Henry Clarence Kendall
  Leaves from  Australian Forests,'Bell-Birds'.

What calls me is that lifted, rough-tongued bell (Art, if you like) whose individual sound Insists I too am an individual.

- Philip Arthur Larkin
  'Reasons for  Attendance'.

When boats or ships came near him He tinkledy-binkledy-winkled a bell.

- Edward Lear
NonsenseSongs, Stories, Botany and  Alphabets,'The Pobble Who Has No Toes'.

   All winter long, I am one for whom the bell is tolling; I can arouse no interest in basketball, Indoor fly casting or bowling; The sports pages are strictly no soap! And until the cry Play Ball! I simply mope.

- (Frederic) Ogden Nash
  Quoted in Colin  Jarman The Guinness Dictionary of Sports Quotations (1990).

Through gilded trellises Of the heat, spangles Pelt down through the tangles Of bell-flowers.

- Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell
  Fa c° ade,'Through GildedTrellises'.

Time that is moved by little fidget wheels Is not myTime, the flood that does not flow. Between the double and the single bell Of a ship's hour, between a round of bells From the dark warship riding there below, I have lived many lives, and this one life Of Joe, long dead, who lives between five bells.

- Adam Skirving
  Five Bells, title poem.The poem was written as an elegy for Joe Lynch, a friend who fell overboard from a Sydney ferry.

Twilight and evening bell, And after that the dark! And may there be no sadness of farewell, When I embark; For though from out our bourne of Time and Place The flood may bear me far, I hope to see my Pilot face to face When I have crossed the bar.

-Tennyson
  'Crossing the Bar', l.9^16.This wasTennyson's last poem.

Rose of all Roses,Rose of all the World! The tall thought-woven sails, that flap unfurled Above the tide of hours, trouble the air, And God's bell buoyed to be the water's care.

-W(illiam) B(utler) Yeats
  'The Rose of Battle', l.1^4. Collected in The Rose (1893).