pond quotes

Four ducks on a pond, A grass-bank beyond, A blue sky of spring, White clouds on the wing; What a little thing To remember for years To remember with tears!

-William Allingham
  'A Memory'.

An old pond A frog jumps in The sound of water

- Matsuo Basho
c.1689  Quoted in Hugh Cortazzi  The Japanese Achievement (1990).

Fish say, they have their stream and pond; But is there anything beyond?

- Rupert Chawner Brooke
  'Heaven'.

Science, which cuts its way through the muddy pond of daily lifewithout mingling with it, casts its wealthtoright and left, but the puny boatmen do not know how to fish for it.

- Alexander Ivanovich Herzen
  Notebook entry, collected in Byloe i dumy (My Past and Thoughts), vol.3 (published1861^7, translated by Constance Garnett,1924).

All thenightthefrogsgo chuckle, all theday thebirdsare singing In the pond beside the meadow, by the roadway poplar- lined, In the field between the trenches are a million blossoms springing 'Twixt the grass of silver bayonets where the lines of battle wind Where man has manned thetrenches for the maiming of his kind.

- Patrick MacGill
  Soldier Songs,'The Trench'.