Quote #134347
Go by, go by, with all your din,
Your dust, your greed, your guile,
Your pomp, your gold; you cannot win
From her one smile....
Outlawed? Then hills and glens and streams
Are outlawed, too.
Proud world, from our immortal dreams,
We banish you.
Alfred Noyes
About This Quote
This quote needs no introduction—at least for now. We're working on adding more context soon.
Interpretation
The speaker rejects the noisy, acquisitive “world” of status, money, and manipulation (“din…dust…greed…guile…pomp…gold”) in favor of a purer allegiance to an idealized beloved and to the sustaining power of imagination. The claim that the world “cannot win / From her one smile” sets intimate, inward value against public, material success. When the speaker is labeled “Outlawed,” he turns the accusation back: if devotion to love and to nature’s “hills and glens and streams” is outlawry, then the natural world itself stands outside society’s rules. The closing banishment—“from our immortal dreams, / We banish you”—asserts the sovereignty of the dream-life (art, love, spiritual aspiration) over social judgment.




