Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch Poems

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch Biography

Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch was born on November 21, 1863 in Cornwall. He was a British writer, who published under the pen name of "Q". Quiller-Couch received a degree from Trinity College, Oxford and later became a lecturer there. While he was at Oxford he published Dead Man’s Rock (1887), and followed this with the 1888 publication of Troy Town and in 1889, The Splendid Spur. His later novels included The Blue Pavilions (1891), The Ship of Stars (1899), Hetty Wesley (1903), The Adventures of Harry Revel (1903), Fort Amity (1904), The Shining Ferry (1905), and Sir John Constantine (1906). In 1898 he completed Robert Louis Stevenson’s unfinished novel, St Ives. While in Oxford he was known as a writer of excellent verse. His poetical work is contained in Poems and Ballads (1896). In 1895 he published an anthology from the 16th and 17th-century English lyrists, The Golden Pomp, followed in 1900 by an equally successful Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250—1900 (1900). He was knighted in 1910, also that year publishing The Sleeping Beauty and other Fairy Tales from the Old French. He received a professorship of English at The University of Cambridge in 1912, which he retained for the rest of his life, later becoming Chair of English.)

The Best Poem Of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

Mary Leslie

O Mary Leslie, blithe and shrill
The bugles blew for Spain:
And you below the Castle Hill
Stood in the crowd your lane.
Then hearts were wild to watch us pass,
Yet laith to let us go!
While mine said, 'Fare-ye-well, my lass!'
And yours, 'God keep my Jo!'

Here by the bivouac fire, above
These fields of savage play,
I'll lift my love to meet thy love
Twa thousand miles away,

Where yonder, yonder by the stars,
Nightlong there rins a burn,
And maids with lovers at the wars
May list their wraiths' return.

More careless yet my spirit grows
Of fame, more sick of blood:
But I can think of Badajoz,
And yet that God is good.
Beyond the siege, beyond the stour,
Beyond the sack of towns,
I reach to pluck ae lily-floo'r
Where leaders press for crowns.

O Mary! lily! bow'd and wet
With mair than mornin's rain!
The bugles up the Lawnmarket
Shall sound us home again.

Then fare-ye-well, these foreign lands,
And be damn'd their bitter drouth.
With your dear face between my hands
And the cup held to my mouth,
My love,
It's clean cup to my mouth!

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