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Best Famous Complement Poems

Here is a collection of the all-time best famous Complement poems. This is a select list of the best famous Complement poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Complement poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of complement poems.

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Written by D. H. Lawrence | Create an image from this poem

Tortoise Shout

 I thought he was dumb, said he was dumb,
Yet I've heard him cry.
First faint scream, Out of life's unfathomable dawn, Far off, so far, like a madness, under the horizon's dawning rim, Far, far off, far scream.
Tortoise in extremis.
Why were we crucified into sex? Why were we not left rounded off, and finished in ourselves, As we began, As he certainly began, so perfectly alone? A far, was-it-audible scream, Or did it sound on the plasm direct? Worse than the cry of the new-born, A scream, A yell, A shout, A paean, A death-agony, A birth-cry, A submission, All tiny, tiny, far away, reptile under the first dawn.
War-cry, triumph, acute-delight, death-scream reptilian, Why was the veil torn? The silken shriek of the soul's torn membrane? The male soul's membrane Torn with a shriek half music, half horror.
Crucifixion.
Male tortoise, cleaving behind the hovel-wall of that dense female, Mounted and tense, spread-eagle, out-reaching out of the shell In tortoise-nakedness, Long neck, and long vulnerable limbs extruded, spreadeagle over her house-roof, And the deep, secret, all-penetrating tail curved beneath her walls, Reaching and gripping tense, more reaching anguish in uttermost tension Till suddenly, in the spasm of coition, tupping like a jerking leap, and oh! Opening its clenched face from his outstretched neck And giving that fragile yell, that scream, Super-audible, From his pink, cleft, old-man's mouth, Giving up the ghost, Or screaming in Pentecost, receiving the ghost.
His scream, and his moment's subsidence, The moment of eternal silence, Yet unreleased, and after the moment, the sudden, startling jerk of coition, and at once The inexpressible faint yell -- And so on, till the last plasm of my body was melted back To the primeval rudiments of life, and the secret.
So he tups, and screams Time after time that frail, torn scream After each jerk, the longish interval, The tortoise eternity, Age-long, reptilian persistence, Heart-throb, slow heart-throb, persistent for the next spasm.
I remember, when I was a boy, I heard the scream of a frog, which was caught with his foot in the mouth of an up-starting snake; I remember when I first heard bull-frogs break into sound in the spring; I remember hearing a wild goose out of the throat of night Cry loudly, beyond the lake of waters; I remember the first time, out of a bush in the darkness, a nightingale's piercing cries and gurgles startled the depths of my soul; I remember the scream of a rabbit as I went through a wood at midnight; I remember the heifer in her heat, blorting and blorting through the hours, persistent and irrepressible, I remember my first terror hearing the howl of weird, amorous cats; I remember the scream of a terrified, injured horse, the sheet-lightning, And running away from the sound of a woman in labour, something like an owl whooing, And listening inwardly to the first bleat of a lamb, The first wail of an infant, And my mother singing to herself, And the first tenor singing of the passionate throat of a young collier, who has long since drunk himself to death, The first elements of foreign speech On wild dark lips.
And more than all these, And less than all these, This last, Strange, faint coition yell Of the male tortoise at extremity, Tiny from under the very edge of the farthest far-off horizon of life.
The cross, The wheel on which our silence first is broken, Sex, which breaks up our integrity, our single inviolability, our deep silence, Tearing a cry from us.
Sex, which breaks us into voice, sets us calling across the deeps, calling, calling for the complement, Singing, and calling, and singing again, being answered, having found.
Torn, to become whole again, after long seeking for what is lost, The same cry from the tortoise as from Christ, the Osiris-cry of abandonment, That which is whole, torn asunder, That which is in part, finding its whole again throughout the universe.


Written by Marianne Moore | Create an image from this poem

To a Steam Roller

 The illustration
is nothing to you without the application.
You lack half wit.
You crush all the particles down into close conformity, and then walk back and forth on them.
Sparkling chips of rock are crushed down to the level of the parent block.
Were not 'impersonal judment in aesthetic matters, a metaphysical impossibility,' you might fairly achieve it.
As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive of one's attending upon you, but to question the congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists.
Written by Katherine Philips | Create an image from this poem

To Mrs. M. A. at Parting

 I Have examin'd and do find,
Of all that favour me
There's none I grieve to leave behind
But only only thee.
To part with thee I needs must die, Could parting sep'rate thee and I.
But neither Chance nor Complement Did element our Love ; 'Twas sacred Sympathy was lent Us from the Quire above.
That Friendship Fortune did create, Still fears a wound from Time or Fate.
Our chang'd and mingled Souls are grown To such acquaintance now, That if each would resume their own, Alas ! we know not how.
We have each other so engrost, That each is in the Union lost.
And thus we can no Absence know, Nor shall we be confin'd ; Our active Souls will daily go To learn each others mind.
Nay, should we never meet to Sense, Our Souls would hold Intelligence.
Inspired with a Flame Divine I scorn to court a stay ; For from that noble Soul of thine I ne're can be away.
But I shall weep when thou dost grieve ; Nor can I die whil'st thou dost live.
By my own temper I shall guess At thy felicity, And only like my happiness Because it pleaseth thee.
Our hearts at any time will tell If thou, or I, be sick, or well.
All Honour sure I must pretend, All that is Good or Great ; She that would be Rosania's Friend, Must be at least compleat.
If I have any bravery, 'Tis cause I have so much of thee.
Thy Leiger Soul in me shall lie, And all thy thoughts reveal ; Then back again with mine shall flie, And thence to me shall steal.
Thus still to one another tend ; Such is the sacred name of Friend.
Thus our twin-Souls in one shall grow, And teach the World new Love, Redeem the Age and Sex, and shew A Flame Fate dares not move : And courting Death to be our friend, Our Lives together too shall end.
A Dew shall dwell upon our Tomb Of such a quality, That fighting Armies, thither come, Shall reconciled be.
We'll ask no Epitaph, but say ORINDA and ROSANIA.
Written by Ralph Waldo Emerson | Create an image from this poem

Etienne de la Boéce

 I serve you not, if you I follow,
Shadow-like, o'er hill and hollow,
And bend my fancy to your leading,
All too nimble for my treading.
When the pilgrimage is done, And we've the landscape overrun, I am bitter, vacant, thwarted, And your heart is unsupported.
Vainly valiant, you have missed The manhood that should yours resist, Its complement; but if I could In severe or cordial mood Lead you rightly to my altar, Where the wisest muses falter, And worship that world-warning spark Which dazzles me in midnight dark, Equalizing small and large, While the soul it doth surcharge, That the poor is wealthy grown, And the hermit never alone, The traveller and the road seem one With the errand to be done;— That were a man's and lover's part, That were Freedom's whitest chart.
Written by Edmund Spenser | Create an image from this poem

Sonnet XXIIII

 WHen I behold that beauties wonderment,
And rare perfection of each goodly part;
of natures skill the only complement,
I honor and admire the makers art.
But when I feele the bitter balefull smart, which her fayre eyes vnwares doe worke in mee: that death out of theyr shiny beames doe dart, I thinke that I a new Pandora see.
Whom all the Gods in councell did agree, into this sinfull world from heauen to send: that she to wicked men a scourge should bee, for all their faults with which they did offend, But since ye are my scourge I will intreat, that for my faults ye will me gently beat.