“The knell, the shroud, the mattock, and the grave,
The deep damp vault, the darkness and the worm.”
Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night IV, Line 10.
The quote "But strength alone though of the Muses born Is like a fallen angel: trees uptorn, Darkn…" is famous quote by John Keats (1795–1821), English Romantic poet.
"Sleep and Poetry", st. 11
Poems (1817)
“The knell, the shroud, the mattock, and the grave,
The deep damp vault, the darkness and the worm.”
Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night IV, Line 10.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus
The monster to Robert Walton
Source: Frankenstein (1818)
Context: I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion. But now crime has degraded me beneath the meanest animal. No guilt, no mischief, no malignity, no misery, can be found comparable to mine. When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.
Context: I seek not a fellow feeling in my misery. No sympathy may I ever find. When I first sought it, it was the love of virtue, the feelings of happiness and affection with which my whole being overflowed, that I wished to be participated. But now that virtue has become to me a shadow, and that happiness and affection are turned into bitter and loathing despair, in what should I seek for sympathy? I am content to suffer alone while my sufferings shall endure; when I die, I am well satisfied that abhorrence and opprobrium should load my memory. Once my fancy was soothed with dreams of virtue, of fame, and of enjoyment. Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding. I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion. But now crime has degraded me beneath the meanest animal. No guilt, no mischief, no malignity, no misery, can be found comparable to mine. When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.
“Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!”
Percy Bysshe Shelley book Ode to the West Wind
St. IV
Ode to the West Wind (1819)
Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer
I Am a Rock
Song lyrics, Sounds of Silence (1966)
Robert Herrick book Hesperides
"The Rose" (published c. 1648). Compare: "Flower of all hue, and without thorn the rose", John Milton, Paradise Lost, book iv. line 256.; "Every rose has it's thorn", Poison, "Every Rose Has Its Thorn".
Hesperides (1648)
R.S. Thomas (1913–2000) Welsh poet
"In a Country Church"
Song at the Year's Turning (1955)
Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union
Funeral oration for John Peter Altgeld (14 March 1902); published in an appendix to The Story of My Life (1932)
Francisco De Goya (1746–1828) Spanish painter and printmaker (1746–1828)
inscription by Goya, 1820
Goya painted this long inscription in 1820, - in the tradition of the ex-votos in the churches - in the double-portrait, [of his friend, and of Goya himself as the patient], he made of his doctor Eugenio Garciá Arrieta who helped him in 1819 with a severe illness
1820s