“Methought I saw my late espousèd saint
Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave.”
John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet
On His Deceased Wife (c. 1658)
Verses to Edmund Spenser, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919); Comparable to: "Methought I saw my late espoused saint", John Milton, Sonnet xxiii, and "Methought I saw the footsteps of a throne", William Wordsworth, Sonnet.
“Methought I saw my late espousèd saint
Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave.”
John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet
On His Deceased Wife (c. 1658)
Maurice Baring (1874–1945) English writer
"Jean Francois", from Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches.
Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist
Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Seventh Son (1987), Chapter 10.
“I only saw her as she pass'd —
A great, sad beauty, in whose eyes
Lay all the loves of Paradise.”
Joaquin Miller (1837–1913) American judge
IV, p. 25.
The Ship in the Desert (1875)
Context: I only saw her as she pass'd —
A great, sad beauty, in whose eyes
Lay all the loves of Paradise....
You shall not know her — she who sat
Unconscious in my heart all time
I dream'd and wove this wayward rhyme,
And loved and did not blush thereat.
Richard Wilbur (1921–2017) American poet
The Pardon
Context: My dog lay dead five days without a grave
In the thick of summer, hid in a clump of pine
And a jungle of grass and honey-suckle vine.
I who had loved him while he kept alive
Went only close enough to where he was
To sniff the heavy honeysuckle-smell
Twined with another odor heavier still
And hear the flies' intolerable buzz.
Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet
Os bons vi sempre passar
No mundo graves tormentos;
E para mais me espantar,
Os maus vi sempre nadar
Em mar de contentamentos.
"Esparsa ao Desconcerto do Mundo", translation from Luís de Camões and the Epic of the Lusiads (1962) by Henry Hersch Hart, p. 111
Lyric poetry, Songs (redondilhas)
Billy Graham (1918–2018) American Christian evangelist
Source: Nearing Home: Life, Faith, and Finishing Well