“Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep in exile?”
Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) French Decadent and Symbolist poet
Source: A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat
J'ai vu des archipels sidéraux! et des îles<br>Dont les cieux délirants sont ouverts au vogueur:<br>Est-ce en ces nuits sans fond que tu dors et t'exiles,<br>Million d'oiseaux d'or, ô future Vigueur ? <br class="br">St. 25 <br class="br"> Le Bateau Ivre http://www.mag4.net/Rimbaud/poesies/Boat.html (The Drunken Boat) (1871)
“Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep in exile?”
Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) French Decadent and Symbolist poet
Source: A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat
“O starry night, This is how I want to die”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States
Source: The Complete Poems
George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter
The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)
“Oh, for the simple life,
For tents and starry skies!”
Israel Zangwill (1864–1926) British writer
Aspiration.
Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962) English writer and gardener
"The Greater Cats"
Kings Daughter (1929)
Context: The greater cats with golden eyes
Stare out between the bars.
Deserts are there, and the different skies,
And night with different stars.
They prowl the aromatic hill,
And mate as fiercely as they kill,
To roam, to live, to drink their fill;
But this beyond their wit know I:
Man loves a little, and for long shall die.
Dafydd ap Gwilym (1320–1380) Welsh poet
Yr wylan deg ar lanw dioer
Unlliw ag eiry neu wenlloer,
Dilwch yw dy degwch di,
Darn fel haul, dyrnfol, heli.
"Yr Wylan" (To the Sea-gull), line 1; translation from Robert Gurney (ed. and trans.) Bardic Heritage (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969) p. 130.
Jean Ingelow (1820–1897) British writer
"Sleep (A Woman Speaks)", line 1, p. 98.
The Monitions of the Unseen (1871)