owl quotes

Up the airy mountain, Down the rushy glen, We daren't go a-hunting, For fear of little men; Wee folk, good folk, Trooping all together; Green jacket, red cap, And white owl's feather!

-William Allingham
  'The Fairies'.

  Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower The moping owl does to the moon complain.

-Thomas Gray
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, l.9^10.

St. Agnes' EveAh, bitter chill it was! The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold; The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass, And silent was the flock in woolly fold.

-John Keats
  Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St.  Agnes and Other Poems,'The Eve of St.  Agnes', stanza1.

And they brought an Owl, and a useful Cart, And a pound of Rice, and a CranberryTart, And a hive of silvery Bees. And they brought a Pig, and some green Jack-daws, And a lovely Monkey with lollipop paws, and forty Bottles of Ring-Bo-Ree, And no end of Stilton Cheese.

- Edward Lear
Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and  Alphabets,'The Jumblies'.

The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea In a beautiful pea-green boat. They took some honey, and plenty of money, Wrapped up in a five-pound note. The Owl looked up to the Stars above And sang to a small guitar, 'Oh lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love, What a beautiful Pussy you are'.

- Edward Lear
Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and  Alphabets,'The Owl and the Pussy-Cat'.

Lovelyare the curves of the white owl sweeping Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star. Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried, Brooding o'er the gloom, spins the brown eve-jar.

- George Meredith
Poems,'Love in the Valley', stanza 5. The poem was revised and republished in1878.

He is a rarity which I cannot but be fond of, as one would be of a hog that could fiddle, or a singing owl.

-JohnWilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester
c.1676  Of Dryden. Letter to Henry Savile. In The Letters ofJohn Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, edited byJeremyTreglown (1980).

I will be deafer than the blue-eyed cat, And thrice as blind as any noonday owl, To holy virgins in their ecstasies.

-Tennyson
  Idylls of the King,'The Holy Grail', l.862^4.