FAMOUS FIRST LINES 1

Are you a student or an amateur of literature in English? In either case, you may enjoy reading these first lines from plays, poems, novels or other writings, and trying to guess the name of the work, its author, and when it was written :

N.B. Utilisez TAB ou -->/ pour aller d'une question à une autre


1) Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote

The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote

And bathed every veyne in swich licour,

Of which vertu engendred is the flour;


2) Goe, and catche a falling starre,

Get with child a mandrake roote,


3) Barnardo. Who's there ?

Francisco. Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself.

Barnardo. Long live the king !

Francisco. Barnardo ?

Barnardo. He.


4) Had we but world enough, and time,

This coyness, Lady, were no crime.


5) Blessed be God, at the end of the last year I was in very good health, without any sense of my old pain but upon taking of cold. I lived in Axe Yard, having my wife and servant Jane, and no more in family than us three.


6) 'Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill

Appear in writing or in judging ill ;


7) I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me ;


8) Lady Sneer. The paragraphs, you say, Mr. Snake, were all inserted ?

Snake. They were, madam ; and, as I copied them myself in a feigned hand, there can be no suspicion whence they came.


9) It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.


10) Algernon : Did you hear what I was playing , Lane ?

Lane : I didn't think it polite to listen, sir.


11) April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.


12) I was born in the city of Bombay .. once upon a time.


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