Famous Absorbed Poems by Famous Poets

These are examples of famous Absorbed poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous absorbed poems. These examples illustrate what a famous absorbed poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).

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Adela

...alian girl,
Adela
That bends her face on mine in the gondola!


There is scarce a breath of wind on the lagoon.
Life is absorbed in its beatitude,
A meditative mage beneath the moon
Ah! should we come, a delicate interlude,
To Campo Santo that, this night of June,
Heals for awhile the immitigable feud?
Adela!
Your breath ruffles my soul in the gondola! 

Through maze on maze of silent waterways,
Guarded by lightless sentinel palaces,
We glide; the soft plash of the oar, that ...Read more of this...
by Crowley, Aleister


Black Cat

...ll is like a place
your sight can knock on, echoing; but here
within this thick black pelt, your strongest gaze
will be absorbed and utterly disappear:

just as a raving madman, when nothing else
can ease him, charges into his dark night
howling, pounds on the padded wall, and feels
the rage being taken in and pacified.

She seems to hide all looks that have ever fallen
into her, so that, like an audience,
she can look them over, menacing and sullen,
and curl to sleep with th...Read more of this...
by Rilke, Rainer Maria

Black Stone On Top Of Nothing

...aily task of preparing lunch for her Monsieur. 
Vallejo pretends he hears nothing or perhaps he truly 
hears nothing so absorbed is he in this odd task consuming 
his late morning. Did I forget to mention that no one else 
can see the black ribbon or understand why his fingers 
seem so intent on unraveling what is not there? Remember 
when you were only six and on especially hot days you 
would descend the shaky steps to the cellar hoping at first 
that someone, perhaps your ...Read more of this...
by Levine, Philip

Child In Red

...Sometimes she walks through the village in her
 little red dress
all absorbed in restraining herself,
and yet, despite herself, she seems to move
according to the rhythm of her life to come.

She runs a bit, hesitates, stops,
half-turns around...
and, all while dreaming, shakes her head
for or against.

Then she dances a few steps
that she invents and forgets,
no doubt finding out that life
moves on too fast.

It's not so muc...Read more of this...
by Rilke, Rainer Maria

Cleopatra

...s if the very eyes of love
Shone through her shutting lids, and stole
The slow looks of a snake or dove;
As if her lips absorbed the whole
Of love, her soul the soul thereof.

Lost, all the lordly pearls that were
Wrung from the sea's heart, from the green
Coasts of the Indian gulf-river;
Lost, all the loves of the world---so keen
Towards this queen for love of her.

You see against her throat the small
Sharp glittering shadows of them shake;
And through her hair the imperial...Read more of this...
by Swinburne, Algernon Charles


Eviradnus

...oursers horrible, 
 That formed a legion lured by Death to war, 
 These men and horses masked, how dread they are! 
 Absorbed in shadows of the eternal shore, 
 Among the living all their tasks are o'er. 
 Silent, they seem all mystery to brave, 
 These sphinxes whom no beacon light can save 
 Upon the threshold of the gulf so near, 
 As if they faced the great enigma here; 
 Ready with hoofs, between the pillars blue 
 To strike out sparks, and combats to renew, 
...Read more of this...
by Hugo, Victor

Four Quartets 2: East Coker

...eep lane insists on the direction
Into the village, in the electric heat
Hypnotised. In a warm haze the sultry light
Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
Wait for the early owl.

 In that open field
If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signif...Read more of this...
by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)

Good Friday 2001 Riding North

...me rushed at the expense
of all around him.
Gripped by sentiment
at being once again in this, the country
his innocence absorbed, he sings the songs
of artists prone to praise the great Midwest,
prodigal farms and wheat. My eyes are burning.
An eighteen-wheeler whip has somehow managed
to drive his truck straight up a grass embankment
which rises to an overpass ahead.
It lingers there, a sacrament of chrome,
as I make peace at length with pink crape myrtles,
white baby's brea...Read more of this...
by Reeser, Jennifer

Hymn To The Penates

...ot the less, PENATES, loved I then
Your altars, not the less at evening hour
Delighted by the well-trimm'd fire to sit,
Absorbed in many a dear deceitful dream
Of visionary joys: deceitful dreams--
Not wholly vain--for painting purest joys,
They form'd to Fancy's mould her votary's heart.

By Cherwell's sedgey side, and in the meads
Where Isis in her calm clear stream reflects
The willow's bending boughs, at earliest dawn
In the noon-tide hour, and when the night-mists rose,
...Read more of this...
by Southey, Robert

Mementos

...ts step drew nigh, 
Averted was the father's eye; 
And then, a life impure and wild 
Made him a stranger to his child; 
Absorbed in vice, he little cared 
On what she did, or how she fared. 
The love withheld, she never sought, 
She grew uncherished­learnt untaught; 
To her the inward life of thought 
Full soon was open laid. 
I know not if her friendlessness 
Did sometimes on her spirit press, 
But plaint she never made. 

The book-shelves were her darling treasure, 
She rar...Read more of this...
by Bronte, Charlotte

Mornings Like This

...ad,

Sad as telegraph poles, my Sacr? Coeur silent and boarded up.

My Seine empty of the barges of D?rain

My Sorbonne absorbed, its students gone

Mornings like this, I awaken and wonder....Read more of this...
by Tebb, Barry

Pan and Luna

...the sister paps--that . . . once for all, 
Say--her consummate circle thus escaped 
With its innumerous circlets, sank absorbed, 
Safe in the cloud--O naked Moon full-orbed! 

But what means this? The downy swathes combine, 
Conglobe, the smothery coy-caressing stuff 
Curdles about her! Vain each twist and twine 
Those lithe limbs try, encroached on by a fluff 
Fitting as close as fits the dented spine 
Its flexible ivory outside-flesh: enough! 
The plumy drifts contract, co...Read more of this...
by Browning, Robert

Portrait of a Baby

...s to rise -- till deeper sleep 
Buried the hope, the call, the leap; 
A wind puffed out his mind's faint spark. 
He was absorbed into the dark. 
He woke again and felt a surge 
Within him, a mysterious urge 
That grew one hungry flame of passion; 
The whole world altered shape and fashion. 
Deceived, befooled, bereft and torn, 
He scourged the heavens with his scorn, 
Lifting a bitter voice to cry 
Against the eternal treachery -- 
Till, suddenly, he found the breast, 
And ce...Read more of this...
by Benet, Stephen Vincent

Schoolroom On A Wet Afternoon

...ins and ecstasies surf-ride each singing wave
Which breaks in darkness on the mental shores.
Each child is disciplined; absorbed and still
At his small desk. Yet lift the lid and see,
Amidst frayed books and pencils, other shapes:
Vicious rope, glaring blade, the gun cocked to kill....Read more of this...
by Scannell, Vernon

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

...y forage in secret on our idea of distortion.
Why be unhappy with this arrangement, since
Dreams prolong us as they are absorbed?
Something like living occurs, a movement 
Out of the dream into its codification.

As I start to forget it
It presents its stereotype again
But it is an unfamiliar stereotype, the face
Riding at anchor, issued from hazards, soon
To accost others, "rather angel than man" (Vasari).
Perhaps an angel looks like everything
We have forgotten, I mean forg...Read more of this...
by Ashbery, John

Symphonic Studies (After Schumann)

...hunder-peal, 
Against the rain-blurred square of light, the head 
Of the pale poet at the lyric keys 
Stood boldly cut, absorbed in reveries, 
While over it keen-bladed lightnings played. 
"Rage on, wild storm!" the music seemed to sing: 
"Not all the thunders of thy wrath can move 
The soul that's dedicate to worshipping 
Eternal Beauty, everlasting Love." 
No more! the song was ended, and behold, 
A rainbow trembling on a sky of gold! 


Epilogue

Forth in the sunlit, rain-...Read more of this...
by Lazarus, Emma

The Bight

...umbling ribs of marl protrude and glare
and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches.
Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,
the water in the bight doesn't wet anything,
the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.
One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire
one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.
The little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock
already plays the dry perfectly off-beat claves.
The birds are outsize. Pelicans crash...Read more of this...
by Bishop, Elizabeth

The Cremona Violin

...his way to praise him. Lotta smiled,
He was as happy as a little child.
From that day on, Herr Altgelt, more and more,
Absorbed himself in work. Lotta at first
Was patient and well-wishing. But it wore
Upon her when two weeks had brought no burst
Of loving from him. Then she feared the worst;
That his short interest in her was a light
Flared up an instant only in the night.
`Idomeneo' was the opera's name,
A name that poor Charlotta learnt to hate.
Herr Altgelt worked so har...Read more of this...
by Lowell, Amy

The Giaour

...a friend!
To him this pledge I charge thee send,
Memorial of a youthful vow;
I would remind him of my end:
Though souls absorbed like mine allow
Brief thought to distant friendship's claim,
Yet dear to him my blighted name.
'Tis strange - he prophesied my doom,
And I have smiled - I then could smile -
When prudence would his voice assume,
And warn - I recked not what - the while:
But now remembrance whispers o'er
Those accents scarcely marked before.
Say - that his bodings ca...Read more of this...
by Byron, George (Lord)

The Shadow

...r way
Home, and she meant to start next day.

Paul worked by the pointed, tulip-flame
Of a tallow candle, and became
So absorbed, that his old clock made him wince
Striking the hour a moment since.
Its echo, only half apprehended,
Lingered about the room. He ended
Screwing the little rubies in,
Setting the wheels to lock and spin,
Curling the infinitesimal springs,
Fixing the filigree hands. Chippings
Of precious stones lay strewn about.
The table before him was a rout
Of spl...Read more of this...
by Lowell, Amy

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