Famous Long Philosophy Poems

Famous Long Philosophy Poems. Long Philosophy Poetry by Famous Poets. A collection of the all-time best Philosophy long poems

See also: Long Member Poems

 When I am in New York, I like to drop around at night,
To visit with my honest, genial friends, the Stoddards hight;
Their home in Fifteenth street is all so snug, and furnished so,
That, when I once get planted there, I don't know when to go;
A cosy cheerful refuge for the weary homesick guest,
Combining Yankee comforts with the freedom of the west.

The first thing you discover, as you maunder through the hall,
Is a curious little clock upon a bracket on the wall;
'T was made by Stoddard's father, and it's very, very old--
The connoisseurs assure me it is worth its weight in gold;
And I, who've bought all kinds of clocks, 'twixt Denver and the Rhine,
Cast envious eyes upon that clock, and wish that it were mine.

But in the parlor. Oh, the gems on tables, walls, and floor--
Rare first editions, etchings, and old crockery galore.
Why, talk about the Indies and the wealth of Orient things--
They couldn't hold a candle to these quaint and sumptuous things;
In such profusion, too--Ah me! how dearly I recall
How I have sat and watched 'em and wished I had 'em all.

Now, Mr. Stoddard's study is on the second floor,
A wee blind dog barks at me as I enter...
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 White handkerchiefs wave from the short black pier 
As we glide to the grand old sea -- 
But the song of my heart is for none to hear 
If one of them waves for me. 
A roving, roaming life is mine, 
Ever by field or flood -- 
For not far back in my father's line 
Was a dash of the Gipsy blood. 

Flax and tussock and fern, 
Gum and mulga and sand, 
Reef and palm -- but my fancies turn 
Ever away from land; 
Strange wild cities in ancient state, 
Range and river and tree, 
Snow and ice. But my star of fate 
Is ever across the sea. 

A god-like ride on a thundering sea, 
When all but the stars are blind -- 
A desperate race from Eternity 
With a gale-and-a-half behind. 
A jovial spree in the cabin at night, 
A song on the rolling deck, 
A lark ashore with the ships in sight, 
Till -- a wreck goes down with a wreck. 

A smoke and a yarn on the deck by day, 
When life is a waking dream, 
And care and trouble so far away 
That out of your life they seem. 
A roving spirit in sympathy, 
Who...
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 In Ionia whence sprang old poets' fame,
From whom that sea did first derive her name,
The blessed bed whereon the Muses lay,
Beauty of Greece, the pride of Asia,
Whence Archelaus, whom times historify,
First unto Athens brought philosophy:
In this fair region on a goodly plain,
Stretching her bounds unto the bord'ring main,
The mountain Latmus overlooks the sea,
Smiling to see the ocean billows play:
Latmus, where young Endymion used to keep
His fairest flock of silver-fleeced sheep,
To whom Silvanus often would resort,
At barley-brake to see the Satyrs sport;
And when rude Pan his tabret list to sound,
To see the fair Nymphs foot it in a round,
Under the trees which on this mountain grew,
As yet the like Arabia never knew;
For all the pleasures Nature could devise
Within this plot she did imparadise;
And great Diana of her special grace
With vestal rites had hallowed all the place.
Upon this mount there stood a stately grove,
Whose reaching arms to clip the welkin strove,
Of tufted cedars, and the branching pine,
Whose bushy tops themselves do so entwine,
As seem'd, when Nature first this work begun,
She then conspir'd against the piercing sun;
Under whose covert (thus divinely made)
Ph{oe}bus' green laurel flourish'd in the shade,
Fair Venus' myrtle, Mars his warlike fir,
Minerva's olive, and the weeping myrrh,
The patient palm, which...
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 "My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: 
 anyone who understands them eventually recognizes them as 
 nonsensical, when he has used them -- as steps -- to climb 
 up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder 
 after he has climbed up it.)" -- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus 

1. 

The first time I met Wittgenstein, I was 
late. "The traffic was murder," I explained. 
He spent the next forty-five minutes 
analyzing this sentence. Then he was silent. 
I wondered why he had chosen a water tower
for our meeting. I also wondered how
I would leave, since the ladder I had used 
to climb up here had fallen to the ground. 

2. 

Wittgenstein served as a machine-gunner 
in the Austrian Army in World War I. 
Before the war he studied logic in Cambridge 
with Bertrand Russell. Having inherited 
his father's fortune (iron and steel), he 
gave away his money, not to the poor, whom 
it would corrupt, but to relations so rich 
it would not thus affect them. 

3. 

On leave in Vienna in August 1918 
he assembled his notebook entries 
into the Tractatus, Since it provided 
the definitive solution to all the problems...
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 What tree may not the fig be gathered from?  
The grape may not be gathered from the birch?
It's all you know the grape, or know the birch.
As a girl gathered from the birch myself
Equally with my weight in grapes, one autumn,
I ought to know what tree the grape is fruit of.
I was born, I suppose, like anyone,
And grew to be a little boyish girl
My brother could not always leave at home.
But that beginning was wiped out in fear
The day I swung suspended with the grapes,
And was come after like Eurydice
And brought down safely from the upper regions;
And the life I live now's an extra life
I can waste as I please on whom I please.
So if you see me celebrate two birthdays,
And give myself out of two different ages,
One of them five years younger than I look-

One day my brother led me to a glade
Where a white birch he knew of stood alone,
Wearing a thin head-dress of pointed leaves,
And heavy on her heavy hair behind,
Against her neck, an ornament of grapes.
Grapes, I knew grapes from having seen them last year.
One bunch of them, and there began to be
Bunches all round me growing in white birches,
The way they grew round...
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 To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage.
A dove-house filled with doves and pigeons
Shudders hell through all its regions.
A dog starved at his master's gate
Predicts the ruin of the state.
A horse misused upon the road
Calls to heaven for human blood.
Each outcry of the hunted hare
A fibre from the brain does tear.
A skylark wounded in the wing,
A cherubim does cease to sing.
The game-cock clipped and armed for fight
Does the rising sun affright.
Every wolf's and lion's howl
Raises from hell a human soul.
The wild deer wandering here and there
Keeps the human soul from care.
The lamb misused breeds public strife,
And yet forgives the butcher's knife.
The bat that flits at close of eve
Has left the brain that won't believe.
The owl that calls upon the night
Speaks the unbeliever's fright.
He who shall hurt the little wren
Shall never be beloved by men.
He who the ox to wrath has moved
Shall never be by woman loved.
The wanton boy that kills the fly
Shall feel the spider's enmity.
He who torments the chafer's sprite
Weaves a bower in endless night.
The caterpillar on the leaf
Repeats to...
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 AFRICA 

I will sing you a song of Los. the Eternal Prophet: 
He sung it to four harps at the tables of Eternity. 
In heart-formed Africa. 
Urizen faded! Ariston shudderd! 
And thus the Song began 

Adam stood in the garden of Eden: 
And Noah on the mountains of Ararat; 
They saw Urizen give his Laws to the Nations 
By the hands of the children of Los. 

Adam shudderd! Noah faded! black grew the sunny African 
When Rintrah gave Abstract Philosophy to Brama in the East: 
(Night spoke to the Cloud! 
Lo these Human form'd spirits in smiling hipocrisy. War 
Against one another; so let them War on; slaves to the eternal Elements) 
Noah shrunk, beneath the waters; 
Abram fled in fires from Chaldea; 
Moses beheld upon Mount Sinai forms of dark delusion: 

To Trismegistus. Palamabron gave an abstract Law: 
To Pythagoras Socrates & Plato. 

Times rolled on o'er all the sons of Har, time after time 
Orc on Mount Atlas howld, chain'd down with the Chain of Jealousy 
Then Oothoon hoverd over Judah & Jerusalem 
And Jesus heard her voice (a man of sorrows) he recievd 
A Gospel from wretched Theotormon. 

The human race began to wither, for the...
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 1
SAUNTERING the pavement, or riding the country by-road—lo! such faces! 
Faces of friendship, precision, caution, suavity, ideality; 
The spiritual, prescient face—the always welcome, common, benevolent face, 
The face of the singing of music—the grand faces of natural lawyers and judges, broad
 at
 the
 back-top; 
The faces of hunters and fishers, bulged at the brows—the shaved blanch’d faces
 of
 orthodox citizens;
The pure, extravagant, yearning, questioning artist’s face; 
The ugly face of some beautiful Soul, the handsome detested or despised face; 
The sacred faces of infants, the illuminated face of the mother of many children; 
The face of an amour, the face of veneration; 
The face as of a dream, the face of an immobile rock;
The face withdrawn of its good and bad, a castrated face; 
A wild hawk, his wings clipp’d by the clipper; 
A stallion that yielded at last to the thongs and knife of the gelder. 

Sauntering the pavement, thus, or crossing the ceaseless ferry, faces, and faces, and
 faces: 
I see them, and complain not, and am content with all.

2
Do you suppose I could be content with all, if I thought them their own finale? 

This now is too lamentable a face for a man; 
Some abject...
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 My sister! my sweet sister! if a name
Dearer and purer were, it should be thine;
Mountains and seas divide us, but I claim
No tears, but tenderness to answer mine:
Go where I will, to me thou art the same— 
A loved regret which I would not resign.
There yet are two things in my destiny,— 
A world to roam through, and a home with thee.

The first were nothing—had I still the last,
It were the haven of my happiness;
But other claims and other ties thou hast,
And mine is not the wish to make them less.
A strange doom is thy father's sons's, and past
Recalling, as it lies beyond redress;
Reversed for him our grandsire's fate of yore,— 
He had no rest at sea, nor I on shore.

If my inheritance of storms hath been
In other elements, and on the rocks
Of perils, overlooked or unforeseen,
I have sustained my share of worldly shocks,
The fault was mine; nor do I seek to screen
My errors with defensive paradox;
I have been cunning in mine overthrow,
The careful pilot of my proper woe.

Mine were my faults, and mine be their reward,
My whole life was a contest, since the day
That gave me being, gave me that which marred
The gift,—a fate, or will, that walked...
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 I 
'Tis done -- but yesterday a King! 
And arm'd with Kings to strive -- 
And now thou art a nameless thing: 
So abject -- yet alive! 
Is this the man of thousand thrones, 
Who strew'd our earth with hostile bones, 
And can he thus survive? 
Since he, miscall'd the Morning Star, 
Nor man nor fiend hath fallen so far. 

II 
Ill-minded man! why scourge thy kind 
Who bow'd so low the knee? 
By gazing on thyself grown blind, 
Thou taught'st the rest to see. 
With might unquestion'd, -- power to save, -- 
Thine only gift hath been the grave, 
To those that worshipp'd thee; 
Nor till thy fall could mortals guess 
Ambition's less than littleness! 

III 
Thanks for that lesson -- It will teach 
To after-warriors more, 
Than high Philosophy can preach, 
And vainly preach'd before. 
That spell upon the minds of men 
Breaks never to unite again, 
That led them to adore 
Those Pagod things of sabre sway 
With fronts of brass, and feet of clay. 

IV 
The triumph and the vanity, 
The rapture of the strife -- 
The earthquake voice of Victory, 
To thee the breath of life; 
The sword, the sceptre, and that sway 
Which...
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 Nay, let us walk from fire unto fire,
From passionate pain to deadlier delight, -
I am too young to live without desire,
Too young art thou to waste this summer night
Asking those idle questions which of old
Man sought of seer and oracle, and no reply was told.

For, sweet, to feel is better than to know,
And wisdom is a childless heritage,
One pulse of passion - youth's first fiery glow, -
Are worth the hoarded proverbs of the sage:
Vex not thy soul with dead philosophy,
Have we not lips to kiss with, hearts to love and eyes to see!

Dost thou not hear the murmuring nightingale,
Like water bubbling from a silver jar,
So soft she sings the envious moon is pale,
That high in heaven she is hung so far
She cannot hear that love-enraptured tune, -
Mark how she wreathes each horn with mist, yon late and labouring
moon.

White lilies, in whose cups the gold bees dream,
The fallen snow of petals where the breeze
Scatters the chestnut blossom, or the gleam
Of boyish limbs in water, - are not these
Enough for thee, dost thou desire more?
Alas! the Gods will give nought else from their eternal store.

For our high Gods have sick and wearied grown
Of all our endless sins, our vain endeavour
For wasted...
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 “Gawaine, Gawaine, what look ye for to see, 
So far beyond the faint edge of the world? 
D’ye look to see the lady Vivian, 
Pursued by divers ominous vile demons 
That have another king more fierce than ours?
Or think ye that if ye look far enough 
And hard enough into the feathery west 
Ye’ll have a glimmer of the Grail itself? 
And if ye look for neither Grail nor lady, 
What look ye for to see, Gawaine, Gawaine?”

So Dagonet, whom Arthur made a knight 
Because he loved him as he laughed at him, 
Intoned his idle presence on a day 
To Gawaine, who had thought himself alone, 
Had there been in him thought of anything
Save what was murmured now in Camelot 
Of Merlin’s hushed and all but unconfirmed 
Appearance out of Brittany. It was heard 
At first there was a ghost in Arthur’s palace, 
But soon among the scullions and anon
Among the knights a firmer credit held 
All tongues from uttering what all glances told— 
Though not for long. Gawaine, this afternoon, 
Fearing he might say more to Lancelot 
Of Merlin’s rumor-laden resurrection
Than Lancelot would have an ear to cherish, 
Had sauntered off with his imagination 
To Merlin’s Rock,...
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 I rode one evening with Count Maddalo 
Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow
Of Adria towards Venice: a bare strand
Of hillocks, heap'd from ever-shifting sand,
Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds,
Such as from earth's embrace the salt ooze breeds,
Is this; an uninhabited sea-side,
Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried,
Abandons; and no other object breaks
The waste, but one dwarf tree and some few stakes
Broken and unrepair'd, and the tide makes
A narrow space of level sand thereon,
Where 'twas our wont to ride while day went down.
This ride was my delight. I love all waste
And solitary places; where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be:
And such was this wide ocean, and this shore
More barren than its billows; and yet more
Than all, with a remember'd friend I love
To ride as then I rode; for the winds drove
The living spray along the sunny air
Into our faces; the blue heavens were bare,
Stripp'd to their depths by the awakening north;
And, from the waves, sound like delight broke forth
Harmonizing with solitude, and sent
Into our hearts aëreal merriment.
So, as we rode, we talk'd; and the swift thought,
Winging itself with laughter, linger'd not,
But flew from brain to...
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 Were I - who to my cost already am
One of those strange, prodigious creatures, man -
A spirit free to choose for my own share
What sort of flesh and blood I pleased to wear,
I'd be a dog, a monkey, or a bear,
Or anything but that vain animal,
Who is so proud of being rational.

His senses are too gross; and he'll contrive
A sixth, to contradict the other five;
And before certain instinct will prefer
Reason, which fifty times for one does err.
Reason, an ignis fatuus of the mind,
Which leaving light of nature, sense, behind,
Pathless and dangerous wand'ring ways it takes,
Through Error's fenny bogs and thorny brakes;
Whilst the misguided follower climbs with pain
Mountains of whimsey's, heaped in his own brain;
Stumbling from thought to thought, falls headlong down,
Into Doubt's boundless sea where, like to drown,
Books bear him up awhile, and make him try
To swim with bladders of Philosophy;
In hopes still to o'ertake the escaping light;
The vapour dances, in his dancing sight,
Till spent, it leaves him to eternal night.
Then old age and experience, hand in hand,
Lead him to death, make him to understand,
After a search so painful, and so long,
That all his life he has been in the wrong:

Huddled In dirt the reasoning engine lies,
Who was so...
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 Were I (who to my cost already am 
One of those strange prodigious Creatures Man) 
A Spirit free, to choose for my own share, 
What Case of Flesh, and Blood, I pleas'd to weare, 
I'd be a Dog, a Monkey, or a Bear, 
Or any thing but that vain Animal, 
Who is so proud of being rational. 
The senses are too gross, and he'll contrive 
A Sixth, to contradict the other Five; 
And before certain instinct, will preferr 
Reason, which Fifty times for one does err. 
Reason, an Ignis fatuus, in the Mind, 
Which leaving light of Nature, sense behind; 
Pathless and dang'rous wandring ways it takes, 
Through errors Fenny -- Boggs, and Thorny Brakes; 
Whilst the misguided follower, climbs with pain, 
Mountains of Whimseys, heap'd in his own Brain: 
Stumbling from thought to thought, falls headlong down, 
Into doubts boundless Sea, where like to drown, 
Books bear him up awhile, and make him try, 
To swim with Bladders of Philosophy; 
In hopes still t'oretake th'escaping light, 
The Vapour dances in his dazling sight, 
Till spent, it leaves him to eternal Night. 
Then Old Age, and experience, hand in hand, 
Lead him to death, and make him understand, 
After...
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