Is Life Worth Living? (1896)

• Is life worth living? Yes, so long
  As Spring revives the year,
  And hails us with the cuckoo's song,
  To show that she is here;

• Is life worth living? Yes, so long
  As there is wrong to right,
  Wail of the weak against the strong,
  Or tyranny to fight;

• So long as faith with freedom reigns
  And loyal hope survives,
  And gracious charity remains
  To leaven lowly lives;
  While there is one untrodden tract
  For intellect or will,
  And men are free to think and act,
  Life is worth living still.

• He is dead already who doth not feel
  Life is worth living still.

The Garden that I Love (1905)

• Show me your garden, provided
  it be your own, and I will tell you what you are
  like.

On the Illness of the Prince of Wales (1910)

• O'er the wires the electric message came,
  "He is no better; he is much the same."
  • An 1871 poem on the illness of the Prince of Wales, although there is some doubt that Austin actually wrote this part. That classic compendium "The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse" (2d ed. 1930; Capricorn paperback 1962) includes a dozen quotations from Austin but attributes this particular couplet (p. 17) to a "university poet unknown." It also provides a metrically more accurate first line, "Across the wires the gloomy message came," plus "not" for "no" in the second line.

Prose Papers on Poetry (1910)

• No verse which is unmusical or obscure can be regarded as poetry whatever other qualities it may possess.

• Imagination in poetry, as distinguished from mere fancy is the transfiguring of the real or actual to the ideal.