A very short Victorian poem
We didn’t include this lovely quatrain from William Allingham, beginning ‘Everything passes and vanishes’, in our compilation of short Victorian poems; though we could easily have done so. William Allingham (1824-89) was an Irish poet whose most enduringly popular poem is ‘The Faeries’; his Diary, which contains his encounters with the great and the good of Victorian letters, is also widely praised. But this little quatrain seems like the perfect ‘Friday thought’ to usher in the weekend:
Everything passes and vanishes
Everything leaves its trace;
And often you see in a footstep
What you could not see in a face.