Wight

Examples in classic English literature and poetry

• Geoffrey Chaucer, ', line 4236, The Riverside Chaucer :
• : "For had swonken al the longe nyght, And seyde, 'Fare weel, Malyne, sweete wight!'"
• Geoffrey Chaucer, ', line 380:
• : "She kept her maidenhood from every wight
• : To no man deigned she for to be bond."
• Geoffrey Chaucer, ', line 579:
• : "Worste of alle wightes."
• Geoffrey Chaucer, ', line 72-73:
• : "Ne neuere yet no vileynye he sayde
• : In al his lyf vnto no manere wight.
• : He was a verray parfit gentil knyght."
• Geoffrey Chaucer, ', line 1830-1831:
• : "We ben shrewes, every wight,
• : And han delyt in wikkednes."
• Edmund Spenser, ', I.i.6.8-9:
• : "That every wight to shrowd it did constrain,
• : And this fair couple eke to shroud themselues were fain."
• William Shakespeare, ', Act I, Sc. III:
• : "O base Hungarian wight! wilt thou the spigot wield?
• William Shakespeare, ', Act II, Sc. I:
• : "She was a wight, if ever such wight were"
• John Milton, ', verse vi:
• : "Oh say me true if thou wert mortal wight..."
• Church of Scotland, Scots Metrical Psalter, Psalm 18 verse xxvi:
• : "froward thou kythst unto the froward wight..."
• John Keats, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci":
• : Ah what can ail thee, wretched wight,
• : Alone and palely loitering;
• Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow:
• : "In this by-place of nature there abode, in a remote period of American history, that is to say, some thirty years since, a worthy wight of the name of Ichabod Crane, who sojourned, or, as he expressed it, "tarried," in Sleepy Hollow, for the purpose of instructing the children of the vicinity."
• George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Canto 1, verse :
• : Ah, me! in sooth he was a shamles wight'...".
• Edwin Greenslade Murphy, "Wot Won the Larst?", in Dryblower’s Verses'':
• : From weedy little wights whose cigarettes
• : Recall a badly-disinfected drain
• W.S. Gilbert, "Princess Ida", a song sung by the character King Gama:
• : "Now when a wight sits up all night, ill natured jokes devising, and all his wiles are met with smiles, it's hard, there's no disguising!"