Christopher Morley

Christopher Morley Poems

I OFTEN wander on the beach
Where once, so brown of limb,
The biting air, the roaring surf
Summoned me to swim.
...

There were two cheerful pronouns
And nought did them disturb:
Until they met, out walking.
A conjugative verb.
...

Animal crackers and cocoa to drink,
That is the finest of suppers I think;
When I'm grown up and can have what I please
...

WHY is it that the poet tells
So little of the sense of smell?
These are the odors I love well:
...

I'M glad our house is a little house,
Not too tall nor too wide:
I'm glad the hovering butterflies
Feel free to come inside.
...

DOWN-SLIPPING Time, sweet, swift, and shallow stream,
Here, like a boulder, lies this afternoon
Across your eager flow. So you shall stay,
...

AT six-long ere the wintry dawn-
There sounded through the silent hall
To where I lay, with blankets drawn
Above my ears, a plaintive call.
...

AS I sat, to sift my dreaming
To the meet and needed word,
Came a merry Interruption
With insistence to be heard.
...

The greatest poem ever known
Is one all poets have outgrown:
The poetry, innate, untold,
Of being only four years old.
...

TRUTH is enough for prose:
Calmly it goes
To tell just what it knows.
...

Sweetly solemn see them stand,
Spinning churns on either hand,
Neatly capped and aproned white
Airy fairy dairy sight.
...

ONCE we read Tennyson aloud
In our great fireside chair;
Between the lines my lips could touch
...

WHEN withered leaves are lost in flame
Their eddying gosts, a thin blue haze,
Blow through the thickets whence they came
...

TO make this little house my very own
Could not be done by law alone.
Though covenant and deed convey
Absolute fee, as lawyers say,
...

COLIN, worshipping some frail,
By self-deception sways her:
Calls himself unworthy male,
...

IT should be yours, if I could build
The quaint old dwelling I desire,
With books and pictures bravely filled
...

IT was the House of Quietness
To which I came at dusk;
The garth was lit with roses
And heavy with their musk.
...

THE furnace tolls the knell of falling steam,
The coal supply is virtually done,
And at this price, indeed it does not seem
...

I READ in our old journals of the days
When our first love was April-sweet and new,
How fair it blossomed and deep-rooted grew
...

EARLY in the morning, when the dawn is on the roofs,
You hear his wheels come rolling, you hear his horses hoofs;
...

Christopher Morley Biography

Christopher Morley was an American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet. He also produced stage productions for a few years and gave college lectures. Biography Christopher Morley was born in Haverford, Pennsylvania. His father, Frank Morley, was a mathematics professor at Haverford College; his mother, Lilian Janet Bird, was a poet and musician who provided Christopher with much of his later love for literature and poetry. In 1900 the family moved to Baltimore, Maryland. In 1906 Christopher entered Haverford College, graduating in 1910 as valedictorian. He then went to New College, Oxford, for three years on a Rhodes scholarship, studying modern history. In 1913 Morley completed his Oxford studies and moved to Garden City, New York. On 14 June 1914 he married Helen Booth Fairchild (with whom he would have four children). They first lived in Hempstead, and then in Queens Village. They then moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and in 1920 they made their final move, to a house they called "Green Escape" in Roslyn Estates, New York. They remained there for the rest of his life. In 1936 he built a cabin at the rear of the property (The Knothole), which he maintained as his writing study from then on. In 1951 Morley suffered a series of strokes, which greatly reduced his voluminous literary output. He died on Mar 28 1957 and was buried in the Roslyn Cemetery in Nassau County, New York. After his death, two New York newspapers published his last message to his friends: Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity. Career Morley began writing while still in college. He edited The Haverfordian and contributed articles to that college publication. He provided scripts for and acted in the university's drama program (he also played on the cricket and soccer teams). In Oxford a volume of his poems, The Eighth Sin (1912), was published. After graduating from Oxford, Morley began his literary career at Doubleday, working as publicist and publisher's reader. In 1917 he got his start as a newspaper reporter and then as a newspaper columnist in Philadelphia. He also edited the Ladies' Home Journal (1917–1918) and the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger. Morley's first novel, Parnassus on Wheels, appeared in 1917. The protagonist, traveling bookseller Roger Mifflin, appeared again in his second novel, The Haunted Bookshop in 1919. In 1920 he returned to New York City to write a column (The Bowling Green) for the New York Evening Post. He was one of the founders and a longtime contributing editor of the Saturday Review of Literature. A highly gregarious man, he was the mainstay of what he dubbed the "Three Hours for Lunch Club". Out of enthusiasm for the Sherlock Holmes stories, he helped to found the Baker Street Irregulars and wrote the introduction to the standard omnibus edition of The Complete Sherlock Holmes. He also wrote an introduction to standard omnibus edition of The Complete Works of Shakespeare in 1936, although Morley called it an "Introduction to Yourself as a Reader of Shakespeare". That year, he was appointed to revise and enlarge Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (11th edition in 1937 and 12th edition in 1948). He was one of the first judges for the Book of the Month Club, serving in that position until the early 1950s. Author of more than 100 novels, books of essays, and volumes of poetry, Morley is probably best known for his 1939 novel Kitty Foyle, which was made into an Academy Award-winning movie. Another well-known work is Thunder on the Left (1925). From 1928 to 1930, Morley co-produced theater productions (dramas) at his theater in Hoboken, New Jersey, which he had "deemed the last seacoast in Bohemia". For most of his life, he lived in Roslyn Estates, Nassau County, Long Island, commuting to the city on the Long Island Rail Road, about which he wrote affectionately. In 1961, a 98-acre (40-hectare) park was named in his honor on Searingtown Road in Nassau County. This park preserves as a publicly available point of interest his studio, the "Knothole" (which was moved to the site after his death), along with his furniture and bookcases. Literary Connections Morley was a close friend of Don Marquis, author of the Archy and Mehitabel stories featuring the antics and commentary of a New York cockroach and a cat. In 1924 Morley and Marquis co-authored Pandora Lifts The Lid, a light novel about the well-to-do in contemporary Hamptons. They are said to have written alternate chapters, each taking the plot forward from where the other had left off. Morley's widow sold a collection of his personal papers and books to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin after his death. Morley helped to found the Baker Street Irregulars, dedicated to the study of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. Morley edited two editions of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations: 1937 (11th) and 1948 (12th.) Morley's 1939 novel Kitty Foyle was unusual for its time, as it openly discussed abortion. It became an instant best-seller, selling over one million copies. Morley's brothers Felix and Frank were also Rhodes Scholars. Felix became President of Haverford College. In 1942 Morley wrote his own obituary for the biographical dictionary Twentieth Century Authors.)

The Best Poem Of Christopher Morley

The Old Swimmer

I OFTEN wander on the beach
Where once, so brown of limb,
The biting air, the roaring surf
Summoned me to swim.

I see my old abundant youth
Whee combers lean and spill,
And though I taste the foam no more
Other swimmers will.

Oh, good exultant strength to meet
The arching wall of green,
To break the crystal, swirl, emerge
Dripping, taut, and clean.

To climb the moving hilly blue,
To dive in ecstasy
And feel the salty chill embrace
Arm and rib and knee.

What brave and vanished laughter then
And tingling thighs to run,
What warm and comfortable sands
Dreaming in the sun.

The crumbling water spreads in snow,
The surf is hissing still,
And though I kiss the salt no more,
Other swimmers will.

Christopher Morley Comments

Christopher Morley Quotes

Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it.

Dancing is a wonderful training for girls, it's the first way you learn to guess what a man is going to do before he does it.

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