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Famous Axis Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Burns, Robert
...rnal!


While Highlandmen hate tools an’ taxes;
While moorlan’s herds like guid, fat braxies;
While terra firma, on her axis,
 Diurnal turns;
Count on a friend, in faith an’ practice,
 In Robert Burns.


POSTCRIPTMY memory’s no worth a preen;
I had amaist forgotten clean,
Ye bade me write you what they mean
 By this “new-light,”
’Bout which our herds sae aft hae been
 Maist like to fight.


In days when mankind were but callans
At grammar, logic, an’ sic talents,
They...Read More



by Frost, Robert
...own from field to field.

Sometimes he came with arms outspread
 Like wings, revolving in the scene
Upon his longer axis, and
 With no small dignity of mien.

Faster or slower as he chanced,
 Sitting or standing as he chose,
According as he feared to risk
 His neck, or thought to spare his clothes,

He never let the lantern drop.
 And some exclaimed who saw afar
The figures he described with it,
 ”I wonder what those signals are

Brown makes at such an hour of nig...Read More

by Emerson, Ralph Waldo
...the point is Paradise
Where their glances meet:
Their reach shall yet be more profound,
And a vision without bound:
The axis of those eyes sun-clear
Be the axis of the sphere;
Then shall the lights ye pour amain
Go without check or intervals,
Through from the empyrean walls,
Unto the same again.

Close, close to men,
Like undulating layer of air,
Right above their heads,
The potent plain of Dæmons spreads.
Stands to each human soul its own,
For watch, and ward, and fu...Read More

by Warren, Robert Penn
...ar
Is steady, like Plato, over the mountain.

If there were no wind we might, we think, hear
The earth grind on its axis, or history
Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar....Read More

by Mueller, Lisel
...by flowers,
Venus supreme in the sky,
the miracle of always
landing on your feet,
even though the earth
rotates on its axis.

Start out with that, at least....Read More



by Wheatley, Phillis
...h'd by Dodonean Jove,
To approach the tables of the gods above:
Her grandsire Atlas, who with mighty pains
Th' ethereal axis on his neck sustains:
Her other grandsire on the throne on high
Rolls the loud-pealing thunder thro' the sky.

Her spouse, Amphion, who from Jove too springs,
Divinely taught to sweep the sounding strings.

Seven sprightly sons the royal bed adorn,
Seven daughters beauteous as the op'ning morn,
As when Aurora fills the ravish'd sight,
And decks ...Read More

by Ginsberg, Allen
...ar began turning its twelve signs,
 ere constellations wheeled for twenty-four thousand
 sunny years
slowly round their axis in Sagittarius, one hundred 
 sixty-seven thousand times returning to this night

Radioactive Nemesis were you there at the beginning 
 black dumb tongueless unsmelling blast of Disil-
 lusion?
I manifest your Baptismal Word after four billion years
I guess your birthday in Earthling Night, I salute your
 dreadful presence last majestic as the Gods,
Sab...Read More

by Whitman, Walt
...is provided for in the west;
Banding the bulge of the earth winds the hot equator, 
Curiously north and south turn the axis-ends; 
Within me is the longest day—the sun wheels in slanting rings—it does not set for months;

Stretch’d in due time within me the midnight sun just rises above the horizon, and sinks
 again;

Within me zones, seas, cataracts, plants, volcanoes, groups,
Malaysia, Polynesia, and the great West Indian islands. 

3
What do you hear, Walt Whitman? 

...Read More

by Dickinson, Emily
...!

During my education,
It was announced to me
That gravitation, stumbling,
Fell from an apple tree!

The earth upon an axis
Was once supposed to turn,
By way of a gymnastic
In honor of the sun!

It was the brave Columbus,
A sailing o'er the tide,
Who notified the nations
Of where I would reside!

Mortality is fatal --
Gentility is fine,
Rascality, heroic,
Insolvency, sublime!

Our Fathers being weary,
Laid down on Bunker Hill;
And tho' full many a morning,
Yet they are sleep...Read More

by Dickinson, Emily
...!

During my education,
It was announced to me
That gravitation, stumbling,
Fell from an apple tree!

The earth upon an axis
Was once supposed to turn,
By way of a gymnastic
In honor of the sun!

It was the brave Columbus,
A sailing o'er the tide,
Who notified the nations
Of where I would reside!

Mortality is fatal --
Gentility is fine,
Rascality, heroic,
Insolvency, sublime!

Our Fathers being weary,
Laid down on Bunker Hill;
And tho' full many a morning,
Yet they are sleep...Read More

by Chatterton, Thomas
...The Sun revolving on his axis turns, 
And with creative fire intensely burns; 
Impell'd by forcive air, our Earth supreme, 
Rolls with the planets round the solar gleam. 
First Mercury completes his transient year, 
Glowing, refulgent, with reflected glare; 
Bright Venus occupies a wider way, 
The early harbinger of night and day; 
More distant still our globe terraqueous turns,...Read More

by von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang
...hat now are small, and now countless,

Gather the smaller-sized leaves, close by the side 
of their like.
Round the axis compress'd the sheltering calyx unfoldeth,

And, as the perfectest type, brilliant-hued coronals 
forms.
Thus doth Nature bloom, in glory still nobler and fuller,

Showing, in order arranged, member on member uprear'd.
Wonderment fresh dost thou feel, as soon as the stem rears the flower

Over the scaffolding frail of the alternating leaves....Read More

by Thomas, R S
...to door moves to a scale
Beyond the bland day's two dimensions.

Stay, then, village, for round you spins
On a slow axis a world as vast
And meaningful as any posed
By great Plato's solitary mind....Read More

by Thomas, R S
...to door moves to a scale
Beyond the bland day's two dimensions.

Stay, then, village, for round you spins
On a slow axis a world as vast
And meaningful as any posed
By great Plato's solitary mind....Read More

by Whitman, Walt
...is that calm and patient, 
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions, 
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of
 diseas’d
 corpses, 
It distils such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks, its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops, 
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last....Read More

by Tessimond, A S J
...ams,
 skeletal,
 strange?

Is it winds
 curling round invisible corners?
Polyphony of perfumes?
Antennae discovering an axis,
 erecting the architecture of a world?

Is it
 orchestration of the finger-tips,
 graph of a fugue:
Scaffold for colours:
 colour itself being god?...Read More

by Nash, Ogden
...More than a catbird hates a cat,
Or a criminal hates a clue,
Or the Axis hates the United States,
That's how much I love you.

I love you more than a duck can swim,
And more than a grapefruit squirts,
I love you more than a gin rummy is a bore,
And more than a toothache hurts.

As a shipwrecked sailor hates the sea,
Or a juggler hates a shove,
As a hostess detests unexpected guests,
That's how much you I love.

I...Read More

by Hugo, Victor
...as seen 
 Upon my Dresden china ware? 
 Or shall I touch the globe, and care 
 To make the heavens turn upon 
 Its axis? No, not one—not one 
 Of all these things care I to do; 
 All wearies me—I think of you. 
 In truth with you my sunshine fled, 
 And gayety with your light tread— 
 Glad noise that set me dreaming still. 
 'Twas my delight to watch your will, 
 And mark you point with finger-tips 
 To help your spelling out a word; 
 To see the pearls between ...Read More

by Whitman, Walt
...or thee—my Book and the War are one, 
Merged in its spirit I and mine—as the contest hinged on thee, 
As a wheel on its axis turns, this Book, unwitting to itself,
Around the Idea of thee....Read More

by Wagoner, David
...as a decision
To get out of bed on Sunday and carefully
 Relocate his center of gravity
 Above and beyond an imaginary axis
Between his feet and carry the good news
 Along the path and the sidewalk, well on his way
 To readjusting the business of the earth....Read More

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