The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations Preface

Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
‘Fern Hill’ (1946)
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ (1934)
And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.
‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ (1934)
The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
These five kings did a king to death.
‘The hand that signed the paper felled a city’ (1936)
The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,
And famine grew, and locusts came;
Great is the hand that holds dominion over
Man by a scribbled name.
‘The hand that signed the paper felled a city’ (1936)
Light breaks where no sun shines;
Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides.
‘Light breaks where no sun shines’ (1934)
It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore.
The morning beckon.
‘Poem in October’ (1946)
Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall vales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could I marvel