Alfred Austin
Alfred Austin
Alfred Austin DLwas an English poet who was appointed Poet Laureate in 1896, after an interval following the death of Tennyson, when the other candidates had either caused controversy or refused the honour. It was claimed that he was being rewarded for his support for the Conservative leader Lord Salisbury in the General Election of 1895. Austin’s poems are little-remembered today, his most popular work being prose idylls celebrating nature...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth30 May 1835
garden self-made made-it
No one can rightly call his garden his own unless he himself made it.
humility gardening
There is no gardening without humility
educational humility garden
There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.
mistake garden society
Exclusiveness in a garden is a mistake as great as it is in society.
character garden taste
A garden that one makes oneself becomes associated with one’s personal history and that of one’s friends, interwoven with one’s tastes, preferences and character and constitutes a sort of unwritten autobiography.
horse food garden
Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are.
garden earth return
We come from the earth, we return to the earth, and in between we garden.
heart garden hands
The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just on the body, but the soul.
quality may obscure
No verse which is unmusical or obscure can be regarded as poetry whatever other qualities it may possess.
rain hazards sunny
From sunny woof and cloudy weft Fell rain in sheets; so, to myself I hummed these hazard rhymes, and left The learned volume on the shelf.
winter rose snow
So, timely you came, and well you chose, You came when most needed, my winter rose. From the snow I pluck you, and fondly press Your leaves 'twixt the leaves of my leaflessness.
past mind age
Thought, stumbling, plods Past fallen temples, vanished gods, Altars unincensed, fanes undecked, Eternal systems flown or wrecked; Through trackless centuries that grant To the poor trudge refreshment scant, Age after age, pants on to find A melting mirage of the mind.
flower winter dumb
Where has thou been all the dumb winter days When neither sunlight was nor smile of flowers, Neither life, nor love, nor frolic, Only expanse melancholic, With never a note of thy exhilarating lays?
gleam faces vain
In vain would science scan and trace Firmly her aspect. All the while, There gleams upon her far-off face A vague unfathomable smile.