Thomas Hood
Thomas Hood
Thomas Hoodwas an English poet, author and humourist, best known for poems such as "The Bridge of Sighs" and "The Song of the Shirt". Hood wrote regularly for The London Magazine, the Athenaeum, and Punch. He later published a magazine largely consisting of his own works. Hood, never robust, lapsed into invalidism by the age of 41 and died at the age of 45. William Michael Rossetti in 1903 called him "the finest English poet" between the generations of Shelley...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth23 May 1799
men age old-man
When he is forsaken, Withered and shaken, What can an old man do but die?
pity
Pity it is to slay the meanest thing.
wish world may
Some sigh for this and that; My wishes don't go far; The world may wag at will, So I have my cigar.
mirth melancholy strings
There is not a string attuned to mirth but has its chord of melancholy.
comfort indolence cronies
Comfort and indolence are cronies.
Fuss is the froth of business.
honey bees drones
Well for the drones of the social hive that there are bees of an industrious turn, willing, for an infinitesimal share of the honey, to undertake the labor of its fabrication.
blessing sorrow literature
Experience enables me to depose to the comfort and blessing that literature can prove in seasons of sickness and sorrow.
soul mind matter
What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind. What is the soul? It is immaterial.
moon fickle shade
The moon, the moon, so silver and cold, Her fickle temper has oft been told, Now shade--now bright and sunny-- But of all the lunar things that change, The one that shows most fickle and strange, And takes the most eccentric range, Is the moon--so called--of honey!
white saint lilies
The lily is all in white, like a saint, And so is no mate for me.
joy bells able
While the steeples are loud in their joy, To the tune of the bells' ring-a-ding, Let us chime in a peal, one and all, For we all should be able to sing Hullah baloo.
cutting form short-cuts
Apothegms form a short cut to much knowledge.
lakes swans swim
There's a double beauty whenever a swan Swims on a lake with her double thereon.