Comin' in on a wing and a prayer.

-Adamson, Harold
  Title of song. The phrase was taken from the words of a fighter pilot from his battered jet to ground control.

Four ducks on a pond, A grass-bank beyond, A blue sky of spring, White clouds on the wing; What a little thing To remember for yearsö To remember with tears!

-Allingham,William
  'A Memory'.

Harold Macmillan held his party together by not allowing his left wing to see what his right wing was doing.

-Baroness
Attributed.

The year's at the spring, And days at the morn; Morning's at seven; The hill-side's dew-pearled; The lark's on the wing; The snail's on the thorn; God's in His heavenö All's right with the world.

-Browning, Robert
Pippa Passes, pt.1.

Now air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing, Or where the beetle winds His small but sullen horn, As oft he rises midst the twilight path, Against the pilgrim borne in heedless hum.

-Collins,William
  Odes on Several Descriptive and  Allegoric Subjects,'Ode to Evening', l.9^14.

Dead echoes! But I knew her body there, Time like a serpent down her shoulder, dark, And space, an eaglet's wing, laid on her hair.

-Crane, (Harold) Hart
  The Bridge,'The River'.

Our Meistersinger, thou set breath in steel; And it was thou who on the boldest heel Stood up and flung the span on even wing Of that great Bridge, our Myth, whereof I sing.

-Crane, (Harold) Hart
  On Whitman and Brooklyn Bridge. The Bridge,'Cape Hatteras'.

What is the odds so long as the fire of soul is kindled at the taper of conwiviality, and the wing of friendship never moults a feather!

-Dickens, CharlesJohn Huffam
^1  Dick Swiveller. The Old Curiosity Shop, ch.2.

Fan the sinking flame of hilarity with the wing of friendship; and pass the rosy wine.

-Dickens, CharlesJohn Huffam
^1  Dick Swiveller. The Old Curiosity Shop, ch.7.

After the kingfisher's wing Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still At the still point of the turning world.

-Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)
  Four Quartets,'Burnt Norton', pt.5.

   The insect youth are on the wing, Eager to taste the honeyed spring, And float amid the liquid noon: Some lightly o'er the current skim, Some show their gaily-gilded trim Quick-glancing to the sun.

-Gray,Thomas
  Ode on the Spring, l.25^30.

   The wing trails like a banner in defeat, No more to use the sky forever but live with famine And pain a few days. 436

-Jeffers, (John) Robinson
  Cawdor,'Hurt Hawks'.

Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail, A swollen magpie in a fitful sun, Half black half white Nor knowst'ou wing from tail Pull down thy vanity.

-Pound, Ezra Loomis
  The Pisan Cantos, no.81.

Musing on roses and revolutions, I saw night close down on the earth like a great dark wing.

-Randall, Dudley
  Cities Burning,'Roses and Revolutions'.

The awful shadow of some unseen Power Floats though unseen among us,övisiting This various world with as inconstant wing As summer winds that creep from flower to flower.

-Shelley, Percy Bysshe
  'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty'.

And shade is on the brightest wing, And dust forbids the birds to sing.

-Sitwell, Dame Edith Louisa
  Fa c° ade,'Popular Song'.

My life has crept so long on a broken wing Through cells of madness, haunts of horror and fear, That I come to be grateful at last for a little thing.

-Tennyson
  Maud, pt.3, sect.6, stanza1, l.1^3.