Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1855/feb/23/supply-ministerial-explanations to the House of Commons (23 February 1855) opposing the Crimean War.
1850s
Context: The angel of death has been abroad throughout the land; you may almost hear the beating of his wings. There is no one, as when the first-born were slain of old, to sprinkle with blood the lintel and the two sideposts of our doors, that he may spare and pass on; he takes his victims from the castle of the noble, the mansion of the wealthy, and the cottage of the poor and the lowly, and it is on behalf of all these classes that I make this solemn appeal.
“For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast.”
The Destruction of Sennacherib, st. 3.
Hebrew Melodies (1815)
Source: Selected Poems
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George Gordon Byron 227
English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement 1788–1824Related quotes
“A beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.”
On Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron
Essays in Criticism, second series (1888)
“Death makes angels of us all
and gives us wings
where we had shoulders
smooth as raven's
claws”
An American Prayer (1978)
Variant: Death makes angels of us all
and gives us wings
where we had shoulders
smooth a raven´s claws…
“Am I that imagine this angel less-satisfied?
Are the wings his, the lapis-haunted air?”
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Context: What am I to believe? If the angel in his cloud,
Serenely gazing at the violent abyss,
Plucks on his strings to pluck abysmal glory, Leaps downward through evening’s revelations, and
On his spredden wings, needs nothing but deep space,
Forgets the gold centre, the golden destiny,Grows warm in the motionless motion of his flight,
Am I that imagine this angel less-satisfied?
Are the wings his, the lapis-haunted air?
Lifetimes
Song lyrics, Wavelength (1978)
“He who has rejected his demons badgers us to death with his angels”