Thomas Chatterton/chatterton%e2%80%99s Swan Song

Famous quotes containing the words swan song, thomas, chatterton, swan and/or song:

    The Teutons have been singing the swan song ever since they entered the ranks of history. They have always confounded truth with death.
    Henry Miller (1891–1980)

    My busy heart who shudders as she talks
    Sheds the syllabic blood and drains her words.
    —Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)

    Liste! now the thunder’s rattling clymmynge sound
    Cheves slowlie on, and then embollen clangs,
    Shakes the hie spyre, and losst, dispended, drown’d,
    Still on the gallard eare of terroure hanges;
    The windes are up; the lofty elmen swanges;
    Again the levynne and the thunder poures,
    And the full cloudes are braste attenes in stonen showers.
    —Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770)

    And of the swan in death these dreamers tell
    of its last flight and how it falls, a plummet,
    pierced by the freezing bullet
    and how three feathers, loosened by the shot,
    descend like snow upon it.
    Patricia K. Page (b. 1916)

    And that song ain’t so very far from wrong.
    Frank Loesser (1910–1969)