“From reveries so airy, from the toil
Of dropping buckets into empty wells,
And growing old in drawing nothing up.”
Source: The Task (1785), Book III, The Garden, Line 188.
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
William Cowper 174
(1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist 1731–1800Related quotes

“Every day the bucket a-go a well, one day the bottom a-go drop out.”
I Shot The Sheriff, from the album Burnin (1973)
Song lyrics

“It still felt like hauling buckets from a well of memory with a rope that burned his hands.”
Source: World of the Five Gods series, The Hallowed Hunt (2005), Chapter 2 (p. 35)

On how drawings are used in all of its forms as a recurrent theme in From the Cables of Genocide in “Poetry Saved My Life: An Interview with Lorna Dee Cervantes” https://opencourses.uoa.gr/modules/document/file.php/ENL9/Instructional%20Package/Texts//Readings/Chicana%20Movement-%20Further%20Reading/An%20Interview%20with%20Lorna%20Dee%20Cervantes.pdf (Spring 2007)

"Farewell" (1945)
Rescue (1945)