
St. 8
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=elcc (written 1750, publ. 1751)
V, st. 1
The Tower (1928), Nineteen Hundred And Nineteen http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1547/
St. 8
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=elcc (written 1750, publ. 1751)
V, st. 3
The Tower (1928), Nineteen Hundred And Nineteen http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1547/
Source: Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (1535), Chapter 2, Verse 14
“The maple tree that night
Without a wind or rain
Let go its leaves
Because its time had come.”
"The Maple Tree"
Poems
As quoted in Flicker to Flame : Living with Purpose, Meaning, and Happiness (2006) by Jeffrey Thompson Parker, p. 118
This quotation is likely a modern paraphrasing of a longer passage from Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, II.43.3.
In Memory Of Major Robert Gregory, st. 12
The Wild Swans at Coole (1919)
“Leaves, some the wind scatters on the ground—So is the race of man.”
Leaves, also, are thy children; and leaves, too, are they who cry out so if they are worthy of credit, or bestow their praise, or on the contrary curse, or secretly blame and sneer; and leaves, in like manner, are those who shall receive and transmit a man's fame to after-times. For all such things as these "are produced in the season of spring," as the poet says; then the wind casts them down; then the forest produces other leaves in their places. But a brief existence is common to all things, and yet thou avoidest and pursuest all things as if they would be eternal.
X, 34
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book X
Mock On, st. 1
1800s, Poems from Blake's Notebook (c. 1804)