Famous Chant Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Chant poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous chant poems. These examples illustrate what a famous chant poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Whitman, Walt
...aces—the temples, with idols ranged along the sides, or at the
end—bonze,
brahmin, and lama;
The mandarin, farmer, merchant, mechanic, and fisherman;
The singing-girl and the dancing-girl—the ecstatic person—the secluded Emperors,
Confucius himself—the great poets and heroes—the warriors, the castes, all,
Trooping up, crowding from all directions—from the Altay mountains,
From Thibet—from the four winding and far-flowing rivers of China,
From the Southern peninsulas, an...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...-giving wars.
10
Loud, O my throat, and clear, O soul!
The season of thanks, and the voice of full-yielding;
The chant of joy and power for boundless fertility.
All till’d and untill’d fields expand before me;
I see the true arenas of my race—or first, or last,
Man’s innocent and strong arenas.
I see the Heroes at other toils;
I see, well-wielded in their hands, the better weapons.
11
I see where America, Mother of All,
Well-pleased, with full-span...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...nd of peace return’d, and the dead that return no
more,
A Phantom, gigantic, superb, with stern visage, accosted me;
Chant me the poem, it said, that comes from the soul of America—chant me
the
carol of victory;
And strike up the marches of Libertad—marches more powerful yet;
And sing me before you go, the song of the throes of Democracy.
(Democracy—the destin’d conqueror—yet treacherous lip-smiles everywhere,
And Death and infidelity at every step.)
2
A Na...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...e, as o’er thy tomb, I and my Soul,
A thought to launch in memory of thee,
A burial verse for thee.
What may we chant, O thou within this tomb?
What tablets, pictures, hang for thee, O millionaire?
—The life thou lived’st we know not,
But that thou walk’dst thy years in barter, ’mid the haunts of brokers;
Nor heroism thine, nor war, nor glory.
Yet lingering, yearning, joining soul with thine,
If not thy past we chant, we chant the future,
Select, adorn the f...Read more of this...
by
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...earth, good-will to men!
Till, ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
Then from each black accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
And in despair I ...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Robert
...ings
Thou wonderingly dost enumerate.
That epos on thy hundred plates of gold
Is mine,--and also mine the little chant,
So sure to rise from every fishing-bark
When, lights at prow, the seamen haul their net.
The image of the sun-god on the phare,
Men turn from the sun's self to see, is mine;
The P?o'er-storied its whole length,
As thou didst hear, with painting, is mine too.
I know the true proportions of a man
And woman also, not observed before;
And...Read more of this...
by
Wilcox, Ella Wheeler
...Embraces death without one sigh or tear.
Life's martyrs still the endless drama play
Though no great Homer lives to chant their worth to-day.
III.
And if he chanted, who would list his songs,
So hurried now the world's gold-seeking throngs?
And yet shall silence mantle mighty deeds?
Awake, dear Muse, and sing though no ear heeds!
Extol the triumphs, and bemoan the end
Of that true hero, lover, son and friend
Whose faithful heart in his last choice was shown-...Read more of this...
by
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...ke the drone of a bagpipe,
Followed the old man's songs and united the fragments together.
As in a church, when the chant of the choir at intervals ceases,
Footfalls are heard in the aisles, or words of the priest at the altar,
So, in each pause of the song, with measured motion the clock clicked.
Thus as they sat, there were footsteps heard, and, suddenly lifted,
Sounded the wooden latch, and the door swung back on its hinges.
Benedict knew by the hob-nailed sho...Read more of this...
by
Keats, John
...e amorous dark what day doth borrow.
"Good bye! I'll soon be back."--"Good bye!" said she:--
And as he went she chanted merrily.
XXVII.
So the two brothers and their murder'd man
Rode past fair Florence, to where Arno's stream
Gurgles through straiten'd banks, and still doth fan
Itself with dancing bulrush, and the bream
Keeps head against the freshets. Sick and wan
The brothers' faces in the ford did seem,
Lorenzo's flush with love.--They pass'd the ...Read more of this...
by
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
...s fall they will.
'Tis the law of bush and stone—
Each can only take his own.
Let him heed who can and will,—
Enchantment fixed me here
To stand the hurts of time, until
In mightier chant I disappear.
If thou trowest
How the chemic eddies play
Pole to pole, and what they say,
And that these gray crags
Not on crags are hung,
But beads are of a rosary
On prayer and music strung;
And, credulous, through the granite seeming
Seest the smile of Reason beaming;
Can thy s...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...ar waters of Lake Tahoe—I see forests of majestic pines,
Or, crossing the great desert, the alkaline plains, I behold enchanting mirages of waters
and
meadows;
Marking through these, and after all, in duplicate slender lines,
Bridging the three or four thousand miles of land travel,
Tying the Eastern to the Western sea,
The road between Europe and Asia.
(Ah Genoese, thy dream! thy dream!
Centuries after thou art laid in thy grave,
The shore thou foundest verifies...Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
...blivion!
Grand Subject that annihilates inky hands & pages'
prayers, old orators' inspired Immortalities,
I begin your chant, openmouthed exhaling into spacious
sky over silent mills at Hanford, Savannah River,
Rocky Flats, Pantex, Burlington, Albuquerque
I yell thru Washington, South Carolina, Colorado,
Texas, Iowa, New Mexico,
Where nuclear reactors creat a new Thing under the
Sun, where Rockwell war-plants fabricate this death
stuff trigger in nitrogen baths,
Hange...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man;
And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.
I chant the chant of dilation or pride;
We have had ducking and deprecating about enough;
I show that size is only development.
Have you outstript the rest? Are you the President?
It is a trifle—they will more than arrive there, every one, and still pass
on.
I am he that walks with the tender and growing night;
I call to the earth and ...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...athedral, sacred Industry—no tomb,
A Keep for life for practical Invention.
As in a waking vision,
E’en while I chant, I see it rise—I scan and prophesy outside and in,
Its manifold ensemble.
6
Around a Palace,
Loftier, fairer, ampler than any yet,
Earth’s modern Wonder, History’s Seven outstripping,
High rising tier on tier, with glass and iron façades.
Gladdening the sun and sky—enhued in cheerfulest hues,
Bronze, lilac, robin’s-egg, marine and crims...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...rms,
Riven deep by the sharp tongues of the axes—there in the Redwood forest dense,
I heard the mighty tree its death-chant chanting.
The choppers heard not—the camp shanties echoed not;
The quick-ear’d teamsters, and chain and jack-screw men, heard not,
As the wood-spirits came from their haunts of a thousand years, to join the refrain;
But in my soul I plainly heard.
Murmuring out of its myriad leaves,
Down from its lofty top, rising two hundred feet high,
...Read more of this...
by
Stevens, Wallace
...burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
7
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, a...Read more of this...
by
Wordsworth, William
...s he were fearful, that an April night Would be too short for him to utter forth Hi? love-chant, and disburthen his full soul Of all its music! And I know a grove Of large extent, hard by a castle huge Which the great lord inhabits not: and so This grove is wild with tangling underwood, And the trim walks are broken up, and grass, Thin grass and king-cups gr...Read more of this...
by
Gibran, Kahlil
...nging came to me.
It was boundless in you;
The vast man in whom you are all but cells and sinews;
He in whose chant all your singing is but a soundless throbbing.
It is in the vast man that you are vast,
And in beholding him that I beheld you and loved you.
For what distances can love reach that are not in that vast sphere?
What visions, what expectations and what presumptions can outsoar that flight?
Like a giant oak tree covered with apple blosso...Read more of this...
by
Whittier, John Greenleaf
...br>
I see the gleam of axe and spear,
A sound of smitten shields I hear,
Keeping a harsh and fitting time
To Saga's chant, and Runic rhyme;
Such lays as Zetland's Scald has sung,
His gray and naked isles among;
Or mutter low at midnight hour
Round Odin's mossy stone of power.
The wolf beneath the Arctic moon
Has answered to that startling rune;
The Gael has heard its stormy swell,
The light Frank knows its summons well;
Iona's sable-stoled Culdee
Has heard i...Read more of this...
by
Warton, Thomas
...of prayer,
Oft let me tread, while to th' according voice
The many-sounding organ peals on high
The clear slow-dittied chant, or varied hymn,
Till all my soul is bathed in ecstasies,
And lapp'd in Paradise. Or let me sit
Far in sequester'd aisles of the deep dome,
There lonesome listen to the sacred sounds,
Which, as they lengthen through the Gothic vaults,
In hollow murmurs reach my ravish'd ear.
Nor when the lamps expiring yield to night,
And solitude returns, woul...Read more of this...
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