Famous Becoming Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Caution To Everybody

by Ogden Nash
 Consider the auk;
Becoming extinct because he forgot how to fly, and could only walk.
Consider man, who may well become extinct
Because he forgot how to walk and learned how to fly before he thinked....Read more of this...

With the same love that you were

by Emile Verhaeren
With the same love that you were for me long ago a garden of splendour whose wavering coppices shaded the long grass and the docile roses, you are for me in these black days a calm and steadfast sanctuary.
All is centred there: your fervour and your brightness and your movements assembling the flowers of your goodness; but all is drawn...Read more of this...

Brown's Descent

by Robert Frost
 Brown lived at such a lofty farm
 That everyone for miles could see
His lantern when he did his chores
 In winter after half-past three.

And many must have seen him make
 His wild descent from there one night,
’Cross lots, ’cross walls, ’cross everything,
 Describing rings of lantern light.

Between the house and barn the gale
 Got him by something he had...Read more of this...

As It Was Written

by Anne Sexton
 Earth, earth,
riding your merry-go-round
toward extinction,
right to the roots,
thickening the oceans like gravy,
festering in your caves,
you are becoming a latrine.
Your trees are twisted chairs.
Your flowers moan at their mirrors,
and cry for a sun that doesn't wear a mask.

Your clouds wear white,
trying to become nuns
and say novenas to the sky.
The sky is yellow with its jaundice,
and its veins spill into the...Read more of this...

Hysteria

by T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
 As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth
were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at
each momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple of
unseen muscles. An elderly waiter with trembling...Read more of this...

Big Miniature

by Dejan Stojanovic
To transform a grimace into a sound
Sounds impossible, yet it is possible
To transform a vision into music, 
To go outside an enslaved personality, 
To become impersonal by transforming
Into sand, into water, into light, 
To feel the air and breathe the air
By becoming the air, become
A bird, the first cell, the first man, 
Become a wandering comet, 
A dying star, a...Read more of this...

Apostroph

by Walt Whitman
 O MATER! O fils! 
O brood continental! 
O flowers of the prairies! 
O space boundless! O hum of mighty products! 
O you teeming cities! O so invincible, turbulent, proud!
O race of the future! O women! 
O fathers! O you men of passion and the storm! 
O native power only! O beauty! 
O yourself! O God! O divine average! 
O...Read more of this...

From The Testament of Beauty

by Robert Seymour Bridges
 'Twas at that hour of beauty when the setting sun
squandereth his cloudy bed with rosy hues, to flood
his lov'd works as in turn he biddeth them Good-night;
and all the towers and temples and mansions of men
face him in bright farewell, ere they creep from their pomp
naked beneath the darkness;- while to mortal eyes
'tis given, ifso they close not of...Read more of this...

The Hymn

by Anne Kingsmill Finch
 To the Almighty on his radiant Throne, 
Let endless Hallelujas rise! 
Praise Him, ye wondrous Heights to us unknown, 
Praise Him, ye Heavens unreach'd by mortal Eyes, 
Praise Him, in your degree, ye sublunary Skies! 

Praise Him, you Angels that before him bow, 
You Creatures of Celestial frame, 
Our Guests of old, our wakeful Guardians now, 
Praise Him, and...Read more of this...

Half Steps

by Billy Jno Hope
 folly cracked the mirror
a soul gasping wound
voodoo induced vertigo
psychedelic blackouts
in the cracks
between art and blasphemy
paralyzing paranoia of becoming
the vision that heals
cast shadows to douse the flames
starved enlightenment
i betrayed my muse
i wallowed in nostalgic fumes
blood clots from yesteryears insurrection mad dissident desire found wanting a rage dissipating in the twilight of friendship a facade evolved....Read more of this...

Grace

by George Herbert
 This air is flooded with her. I am a boy again, and my mother
and I lie on wet grass, laughing. She startles, turns to
marigolds at my side, saying beautiful, and I can see the red
there is in them.

When she would fall into her thoughts, we'd look for what
distracted her from us.

My mother's gone again as suddenly as ever and,...Read more of this...

The Choir And Music Of Solitude And Silence

by Delmore Schwartz
 Silence is a great blue bell
Swinging and ringing, tinkling and singing, 
In measure's pleasure, and in the supple symmetry
 of the soaring of the immense intense wings
 glinting against
All the blue radiance above us and within us, hidden
Save for the stars sparking, distant and unheard in their
 singing.
And this is the first meaning of the famous saying,
The stars sang....Read more of this...

A Poem For You

by Lam Quang My
You are a shrapnel shell
 - that tears me in a thousand pieces
Some find their way to heaven
take wing and fly into the eye of the storm 
Some fall in the sea
- becoming crystal salt to shine by night.
The rest fall on the paper
- to mark a poem on the page for you...Read more of this...

Smoky the Bear Sutra

by Gary Snyder
Smokey the Bear Sutra

Once in the Jurassic about 150 million years ago,
 the Great Sun Buddha in this corner of the Infinite
 Void gave a Discourse to all the assembled elements
 and energies: to the standing beings, the walking beings,
 the flying beings, and the sitting beings -- even grasses,
 to the number of thirteen billion, each one born from...Read more of this...

Dream Song 84: Op. posth. no. 7

by John Berryman
 Plop, plop. The lobster toppled in the pot,
fulfilling, dislike man, his destiny,
glowing fire-red,
succulent, and on the whole becoming what
man wants. I crack my final claw singly,
wind up the grave, & to bed.

-”Sound good, Mr Bones. I wish I had me some.
(I spose you got a lessen up your slave.)
-”O no no no.
Sole I remember; where no lobster swine,-”
pots hot...Read more of this...

Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape

by John Ashbery
 The first of the undecoded messages read: "Popeye sits 
in thunder,
Unthought of. From that shoebox of an apartment,
From livid curtain's hue, a tangram emerges: a country."
Meanwhile the Sea Hag was relaxing on a green couch: "How 
pleasant
To spend one's vacation en la casa de Popeye," she 
scratched
Her cleft chin's solitary hair. She remembered spinach

And was going to ask Wimpy...Read more of this...

Reality Jew

by D A Levy
When i was a little kid
my parents never told me
i didn't find out until
i got out of high school
then when people asked me,
I ASKED THEM,
"Nationality or Religion?"

When i was a little kid
my parents brought me up as a christian
that when i discovered,
i was different
i wasnt THAT sick!
so at sixteen
still being a virgin forest
i decided
i must be a buddhist monk,
Then when...Read more of this...

Idyll

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 A village Chorus is supposed to be assembled, and about to
commence its festive procession.

[Written for the birthday of the Duchess Louisa of Weimar.]

CHORUS.

THE festal day hail ye

With garlands of pleasure,

And dances' soft measure,
With rapture commingled
And sweet choral song.

DAMON.

Oh, how I yearn from out the crowd to flee!
What joy a secret glade would give to me!
Amid the throng, the turmoil...Read more of this...

March is the Month of Expectation

by Emily Dickinson
 March is the Month of Expectation.
The things we do not know --
The Persons of prognostication
Are coming now --
We try to show becoming firmness --
But pompous Joy
Betrays us, as his first Betrothal
Betrays a Boy....Read more of this...

Gin

by Philip Levine
 The first time I drank gin
I thought it must be hair tonic.
My brother swiped the bottle
from a guy whose father owned
a drug store that sold booze
in those ancient, honorable days
when we acknowledged the stuff
was a drug. Three of us passed
the bottle around, each tasting
with disbelief. People paid
for this? People had to have
it, the way we had to have
the women...Read more of this...

Even as upon a low and cloud-domed day,

by Fernando Pessoa
Even as upon a low and cloud-domed day,

When clouds are one cloud till the horizon,

Our thinking senses deem the sun away

And say «'tis sunless» and «there is no sun»;

And yet the very day they wrong truth by

Is of the unseen sun's effluent essence,

The very words do give themselves the lie,

The very thought of absence comes from presence:

Even so deem we...Read more of this...

Colophon

by Aleister Crowley
 TO LAYLAH EIGHT-AND-TWENTY

Lamp of living loveliness,
Maid miraculously male,
Rapture of thine own excess
Blushing through the velvet veil
Where the olive cheeks aglow
Shadow-soften into snow,
Breasts like Bacchanals afloat
Under the proudly phallic throat!
Be thou to my pilgrimage
Light, and laughter sweet and sage,
Till the darkling day expire
Of my life in thy caress,
Thou my frenzy and my fire,
Lamp of living loveliness!

Thou the ruler of the...Read more of this...

Sonnet CL

by William Shakespeare
 O, from what power hast thou this powerful might
With insufficiency my heart to sway?
To make me give the lie to my true sight,
And swear that brightness doth not grace the day?
Whence hast thou this becoming of things ill,
That in the very refuse of thy deeds
There is such strength and warrantize of skill
That, in my mind, thy worst all best...Read more of this...

Sonnet LXXXVII

by Francesco Petrarch
SONNET LXXXVII. Dolci durezze e placide repulse. HE OWES HIS OWN SALVATION TO THE VIRTUOUS CONDUCT OF LAURA.  O sweet severity, repulses mild,With chasten'd love, and tender pity fraught;Graceful rebukes, that to mad passion taughtBecoming mastery o'er its wishes wild;Speech dignified, in which, united, smiledAll courtesy, with purity of thought;Read more of this...

Sounds of Imagination

by Dejan Stojanovic
I imagined I was a mountain 
Then I became a cloud over that mountain 
Lightning and thunder pummeled the mountain 
Pierced the heart of the earth, 
Becoming lava and exploding as a volcano. 

I imagined I was a star 
Light traveling into space 
Then I grew as a tree 
With leaves of galaxies eating the light 
Becoming the angel of...Read more of this...

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