John Davidson (poet)

Business – the world's work – is the sale of lies…

John Davidson (April 11, 1857 – March 23, 1909) was a Scottish journalist, playwright, fiction-writer and translator, but is best remembered as a poet.

Quotes

One must become
Fanatic – be a wedge – a thunder-bolt
To smite a passage through the close-grained world.

Mere by-blows are the world and we,
And time within eternity
A sheer anachronism.

Unwilling friend, let not your spite abate;
Help me with scorn, and strengthen me with hate.

• Business – the world's work – is the sale of lies:
  Not goods, but trade-marks; and still more and more
  In every branch becomes the sale of money.
  • Smith (Glasgow: Wilson, 1888) p. 26

• One must become
  Fanatic – be a wedge – a thunder-bolt
  To smite a passage through the close-grained world.
  • Smith (Glasgow: Wilson, 1888) p. 33

• Mere by-blows are the world and we,
  And time within eternity
  A sheer anachronism.
  • "Queen Elizabeth's Day", from Fleet Street Eclogues (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., [1893] 1895) p. 198

• Farewell the hope that mocked, farewell despair
  That went before me still and made the pace.
  The earth is full of graves, and mine was there
  Before my life began; my resting-place.
  • "The Last Journey", from The Testament of dick peter (London: Grant Richards, 1908) p. 146

• That minister of ministers,
  Imagination, gathers up
  The undiscovered Universe,
  Like jewels in a jasper cup.
  • There is a Dish to hold the Sea, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

• My feet are heavy now but on I go,
  My head erect beneath the tragic years.
  • I felt the World a-spinning on its Nave, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Ballads and Songs (1894)

Quotations are cited from the 1st edition (Boston: Copeland & Day, 1894).

• Unwilling friend, let not your spite abate;
  Help me with scorn, and strengthen me with hate.
  • "To My Enemy", p. 2

• Seraphs and saints with one great voice
  Welcomed that soul that knew not fear.
  Amazed to find it could rejoice,
  Hell raised a hoarse, half-human cheer.
  • "A Ballad of Hell", p. 85

• And the difficultest job a man can do,
  Is to come it brave and meek with thirty bob a week,
  And feel that that's the proper thing for you.
  
  It's a naked child against a hungry wolf;
  It's playing bowls upon a splitting wreck;
  It's walking on a string across a gulf
  With millstones fore-and-aft about your neck;
  But the thing is daily done by many and many a one.
  And we fall, face forward, fighting, on the deck.
  • "Thirty Bob a Week", p. 97