Best Famous Gnaws Poems

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

Search and read the best famous Gnaws poems, articles about Gnaws poems, poetry blogs, or anything else Gnaws poem related using the PoetrySoup search engine at the top of the page.

• All Famous Gnaws Poems

Written by Robinson Jeffers | The Broken Balance I. Reference to a Passage in Plutarch's Life of Sulla The people buying and selling, consuming pleasures, talking in the archways, Were all suddenly struck quiet And ran from under stone to look up at the sky: so shrill and mournful, So fierce and final, a brazen Pealing of trumpets high up in the air, in the summer blue over Tuscany. They marvelled; the soothsayers answered: "Although the Gods are little troubled toward men, at the end of each period A sign is declared in heaven Indicating new times, new customs, a changed people; the Romans Rule, and Etruria is finished; A wise mariner will trim the sails to the wind. " I heard yesterday So shrill and mournful a trumpet-blast, It was hard to be wise. . . . You must eat change and endure; not be much troubled For the people; they will have their happiness. When the republic grows too heavy to endure, then Caesar will carry It; When life grows hateful, there's power . . . II. To the Children Power's good; life is not always good but power's good. So you must think when abundance Makes pawns of people and all the loaves are one dough. The steep singleness of passion Dies; they will say, "What was that?" but the power triumphs. Loveliness will live under glass And beauty will go savage in the secret mountains. There is beauty in power also. You children must widen your minds' eyes to take mountains Instead of faces, and millions Instead of persons; not to hate life; and massed power After the lone hawk's dead. III That light blood-loving weasel, a tongue of yellow Fire licking the sides of the gray stones, Has a more passionate and more pure heart In the snake-slender flanks than man can imagine; But he is betrayed by his own courage, The man who kills him is like a cloud hiding a star. Then praise the jewel-eyed hawk and the tall blue heron; The black cormorants that fatten their sea-rock With shining slime; even that ruiner of anthills The red-shafted woodpecker flying, A white star between blood-color wing-clouds, Across the glades of the wood and the green lakes of shade. These live their felt natures; they know their norm And live it to the brim; they understand life. While men moulding themselves to the anthill have choked Their natures until the souls the in them; They have sold themselves for toys and protection: No, but consider awhile: what else? Men sold for toys. Uneasy and fractional people, having no center But in the eyes and mouths that surround them, Having no function but to serve and support Civilization, the enemy of man, No wonder they live insanely, and desire With their tongues, progress; with their eyes, pleasure; with their hearts, death. Their ancestors were good hunters, good herdsmen and swordsman, But now the world is turned upside down; The good do evil, the hope's in criminals; in vice That dissolves the cities and war to destroy them. Through wars and corruptions the house will fall. Mourn whom it falls on. Be glad: the house is mined, it will fall. IV Rain, hail and brutal sun, the plow in the roots, The pitiless pruning-iron in the branches, Strengthen the vines, they are all feeding friends Or powerless foes until the grapes purple. But when you have ripened your berries it is time to begin to perish. The world sickens with change, rain becomes poison, The earth is a pit, it Is time to perish. The vines are fey, the very kindness of nature Corrupts what her cruelty before strengthened. When you stand on the peak of time it is time to begin to perish. Reach down the long morbid roots that forget the plow, Discover the depths; let the long pale tendrils Spend all to discover the sky, now nothing is good But only the steel mirrors of discovery . . . And the beautiful enormous dawns of time, after we perish. V Mourning the broken balance, the hopeless prostration of the earth Under men's hands and their minds, The beautiful places killed like rabbits to make a city, The spreading fungus, the slime-threads And spores; my own coast's obscene future: I remember the farther Future, and the last man dying Without succession under the confident eyes of the stars. It was only a moment's accident, The race that plagued us; the world resumes the old lonely immortal Splendor; from here I can even Perceive that that snuffed candle had something . . . a fantastic virtue, A faint and unshapely pathos . . . So death will flatter them at last: what, even the bald ape's by-shot Was moderately admirable? VI. Palinode All summer neither rain nor wave washes the cormorants' Perch, and their droppings have painted it shining white. If the excrement of fish-eaters makes the brown rock a snow-mountain At noon, a rose in the morning, a beacon at moonrise On the black water: it is barely possible that even men's present Lives are something; their arts and sciences (by moonlight) Not wholly ridiculous, nor their cities merely an offense. VII Under my windows, between the road and the sea-cliff, bitter wild grass Stands narrowed between the people and the storm. The ocean winter after winter gnaws at its earth, the wheels and the feet Summer after summer encroach and destroy. Stubborn green life, for the cliff-eater I cannot comfort you, ignorant which color, Gray-blue or pale-green, will please the late stars; But laugh at the other, your seed shall enjoy wonderful vengeances and suck The arteries and walk in triumph on the faces.

Written by Sylvia Plath | Dialogue Between Ghost And Priest In the rectory garden on his evening walk Paced brisk Father Shawn. A cold day, a sodden one it was In black November. After a sliding rain Dew stood in chill sweat on each stalk, Each thorn; spiring from wet earth, a blue haze Hung caught in dark-webbed branches like a fabulous heron. Hauled sudden from solitude, Hair prickling on his head, Father Shawn perceived a ghost Shaping itself from that mist. 'How now,' Father Shawn crisply addressed the ghost Wavering there, gauze-edged, smelling of woodsmoke, 'What manner of business are you on? From your blue pallor, I'd say you inhabited the frozen waste Of hell, and not the fiery part. Yet to judge by that dazzled look, That noble mien, perhaps you've late quitted heaven?' In voice furred with frost, Ghost said to priest: 'Neither of those countries do I frequent: Earth is my haunt. ' 'Come, come,' Father Shawn gave an impatient shrug, 'I don't ask you to spin some ridiculous fable Of gilded harps or gnawing fire: simply tell After your life's end, what just epilogue God ordained to follow up your days. Is it such trouble To satisfy the questions of a curious old fool?' 'In life, love gnawed my skin To this white bone; What love did then, love does now: Gnaws me through. ' 'What love,' asked Father Shawn, 'but too great love Of flawed earth-flesh could cause this sorry pass? Some damned condition you are in: Thinking never to have left the world, you grieve As though alive, shriveling in torment thus To atone as shade for sin that lured blind man. ' 'The day of doom Is not yest come. Until that time A crock of dust is my dear hom. ' 'Fond phantom,' cried shocked Father Shawn, 'Can there be such stubbornness-- A soul grown feverish, clutching its dead body-tree Like a last storm-crossed leaf? Best get you gone To judgment in a higher court of grace. Repent, depart, before God's trump-crack splits the sky. ' From that pale mist Ghost swore to priest: 'There sits no higher court Than man's red heart. '

Written by Rainer Maria Rilke | DUINO ELEGIES The First Elegy Who if I cried out would hear me among the angels' hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed I that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we still are just able to endure and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying. And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note Of my dark sobbing. Ah whom can we ever turn to in our need? Not angels not humans and already the knowing animals are aware that we are not really at home in our interpreted world. Perhaps there remains for us some tree on a hillside which every day we can take into our vision; there remains for us yesterday's street and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left. Oh and night: there is night when a wind full of infinite space gnaws at out faces. Whom would it not remain for-that longed-after mildly disillusioning presence which the solitary heart so painfully meets. Is it any less difficult for lovers? But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate. Don't you know yet? Fling the emptiness out of your arms Into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying. Yes-the springtime needed you. Often a star was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you out of the distant past or as you walked under an open window a violin yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission. But could you accomplish it? Weren't you always Distracted by expectation as if every event announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place to keep her with all the huge strange thoughts inside you going and coming and often staying all night. ) But when you feel longing sing of women in love; for their famous passion is still not immortal. Sing of women abandoned and desolate (you envy them almost) who could love so much more purely than those who were gratified. Begin again and again the never-attainable praising; remember: the hero lives on; even his downfall was merely a pretext for achieving his final birth. But Nature spent and exhausted takes lovers back into herself as if there were not enough strength to create them a second time. Have you imagined Gaspara Stampa intensely enough so that any girl deserted by her beloved might be inspired by that fierce example of soaring objectless love and might say to herself Perhaps I can be like her ? Shouldn't this most ancient suffering finally grow more fruitful for us? Isn't it time that we lovingly freed ourselves from the beloved and quivering endured: as the arrow endures the bowstring's tension so that gathered in the snap of release it can be more than itself. For there is no place where we can remain. Voices. Voices. Listen my heart as only Saints have listened: until the gigantic call lifted them off the ground; yet they kept on impossibly kneeling and didn't notice at all: so complete was their listening. Not that you could endure God's voice-far from it. But listen to the voice of the wind and the ceaseless message that forms itself out of silence. It is murmuring toward you now from those who died young. Didn't their fate whenever you stepped into a church In Naples or Rome quietly come to address you? Or high up some eulogy entrusted you with a mission as last year on the plaque in Santa Maria Formosa. What they want of me is that I gently remove the appearance of injustice about their death-which at times slightly hinders their souls from proceeding onward. Of course it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer to give up customs one barely had time to learn not to see roses and other promising Things in terms of a human future; no longer to be what one was in infinitely anxious hands; to leave even one's own first name behind forgetting it as easily as a child abandons a broken toy. Strange to no longer desire one's desires. Strange to see meanings that clung together once floating away in every direction. And being dead is hard work and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel a trace of eternity. -Though the living are wrong to believe in the too-sharp distinctions which they themselves have created. Angels (they say) don't know whether it is the living they are moving among or the dead. The eternal torrent whirls all ages along in it through both realms forever and their voices are drowned out in its thunderous roar. In the end those who were carried off early no longer need us: they are weaned from earth's sorrows and joys as gently as children outgrow the soft breasts of their mothers. But we who do need such great mysteries we for whom grief is so often the source of our spirit's growth-: could we exist without them? Is the legend meaningless that tells how in the lament for Linus the daring first notes of song pierced through the barren numbness; and then in the startled space which a youth as lovely as a god had suddenly left forever the Void felt for the first time that harmony which now enraptures and comforts and helps us.

Written by D. H. Lawrence | Worm Either Way If you live along with all the other people and are just like them, and conform, and are nice you're just a worm -- and if you live with all the other people and you don't like them and won't be like them and won't conform then you're just the worm that has turned, in either case, a worm. The conforming worm stays just inside the skin respectably unseen, and cheerfully gnaws away at the heart of life, making it all rotten inside. The unconforming worm -- that is, the worm that has turned -- gnaws just the same, gnawing the substance out of life, but he insists on gnawing a little hole in the social epidermis and poking his head out and waving himself and saying: Look at me, I am not respectable, I do all the things the bourgeois daren't do, I booze and fornicate and use foul language and despise your honest man. -- But why should the worm that has turned protest so much? The bonnie bonnie bourgeois goes a-whoring up back streets just the same. The busy busy bourgeois imbibes his little share just the same if not more. The pretty pretty bourgeois pinks his language just as pink if not pinker, and in private boasts his exploits even louder, if you ask me, than the other. While as to honesty, Oh look where the money lies! So I can't see where the worm that has turned puts anything over the worm that is too cunning to turn. On the contrary, he merely gives himself away. The turned worm shouts. I bravely booze! the other says. Have one with me! The turned worm boasts: I copulate! the unturned says: You look it. You're a d----- b----- b----- p----- bb-----, says the worm that's turned. Quite! says the other. Cuckoo!

Written by Charles Baudelaire | TO A MADONNA MADONNA, mistress, I would build for thee An altar deep in the sad soul of me; And in the darkest corner of my heart, From mortal hopes and mocking eyes apart, Carve of enamelled blue and gold a shrine For thee to stand erect in, Image divine! And with a mighty Crown thou shalt be crowned Wrought of the gold of my smooth Verse, set round With starry crystal rhymes; and I will make, O mortal maid, a Mantle for thy sake, And weave it of my jealousy, a gown Heavy, barbaric, stiff, and weighted down With my distrust, and broider round the hem Not pearls, but all my tears in place of them. And then thy wavering, trembling robe shall be All the desires that rise and fall in me From mountain-peaks to valleys of repose, Kissing thy lovely body's white and rose. For thy humiliated feet divine, Of my Respect I'll make thee Slippers fine Which, prisoning them within a gentle fold, Shall keep their imprint like a faithful mould. And if my art, unwearying and discreet, Can make no Moon of Silver for thy feet To have for Footstool, then thy heel shall rest Upon the snake that gnaws within my breast, Victorious Queen of whom our hope is born! And thou shalt trample down and make a scorn Of the vile reptile swollen up with hate. And thou shalt see my thoughts, all consecrate, Like candles set before thy flower-strewn shrine, O Queen of Virgins, and the taper-shine Shall glimmer star-like in the vault of blue, With eyes of flame for ever watching you. While all the love and worship in my sense Will be sweet smoke of myrrh and frankincense. Ceaselessly up to thee, white peak of snow, My stormy spirit will in vapours go! And last, to make thy drama all complete, That love and cruelty may mix and meet, I, thy remorseful torturer, will take All the Seven Deadly Sins, and from them make In darkest joy, Seven Knives, cruel-edged and keen, And like a juggler choosing, O my Queen, That spot profound whence love and mercy start, I'll plunge them all within thy panting heart!

Written by Vachel Lindsay | The Santa-Fe Trail (A Humoresque) I asked the old *****, "What is that bird that sings so well?" He answered: "That is the Rachel-Jane. " "Hasn't it another name, lark, or thrush, or the like?" "No. Jus' Rachel-Jane. " I. IN WHICH A RACING AUTO COMES FROM THE EAST This is the order of the music of the morning: — First, from the far East comes but a crooning. The crooning turns to a sunrise singing. Hark to the calm -horn, balm -horn, psalm -horn. Hark to the faint -horn, quaint -horn, saint -horn. . . . Hark to the pace -horn, chase -horn, race -horn. And the holy veil of the dawn has gone. Swiftly the brazen ear comes on. It burns in the East as the sunrise burns. I see great flashes where the far trail turns. Its eyes are lamps like the eyes of dragons. It drinks gasoline from big red flagons. Butting through the delicate mists of the morning, It comes like lightning, goes past roaring. It will hail all the wind-mills, taunting, ringing, Dodge the cyclones, Count the milestones, On through the ranges the prairie-dog tills— Scooting past the cattle on the thousand hills. . . . Ho for the tear-horn, scare-horn, dare-horn, Ho for the gay -horn, bark -horn, bay -horn. Ho for Kansas, land that restores us When houses choke us, and great books bore us! Sunrise Kansas, harvester's Kansas, A million men have found you before us. II. IN WHICH MANY AUTOS PASS WESTWARD I want live things in their pride to remain. I will not kill one grasshopper vain Though he eats a hole in my shirt like a door. I let him out, give him one chance more. Perhaps, while he gnaws my hat in his whim, Grasshopper lyrics occur to him. I am a tramp by the long trail's border, Given to squalor, rags and disorder. I nap and amble and yawn and look, Write fool-thoughts in my grubby book, Recite to the children, explore at my ease, Work when I work, beg when I please, Give crank-drawings, that make folks stare To the half-grown boys in the sunset glare, And get me a place to sleep in the hay At the end of a live-and-let-live day. I find in the stubble of the new-cut weeds A whisper and a feasting, all one needs: The whisper of the strawberries, white and red Here where the new-cut weeds lie dead. But I would not walk all alone till I die Without some life-drunk horns going by. Up round this apple-earth they come Blasting the whispers of the morning dumb:— Cars in a plain realistic row. And fair dreams fade When the raw horns blow. On each snapping pennant A big black name:— The careering city Whence each car came. They tour from Memphis, Atlanta, Savannah, Tallahassee and Texarkana. They tour from St. Louis, Columbus, Manistee, They tour from Peoria, Davenport, Kankakee. Cars from Concord, Niagara, Boston, Cars from Topeka, Emporia, and Austin. Cars from Chicago, Hannibal, Cairo. Cars from Alton, Oswego, Toledo. Cars from Buffalo, Kokomo, Delphi, Cars from Lodi, Carmi, Loami. Ho for Kansas, land that restores us When houses choke us, and great books bore us! While I watch the highroad And look at the sky, While I watch the clouds in amazing grandeur Roll their legions without rain Over the blistering Kansas plain— While I sit by the milestone And watch the sky, The United States Goes by. Listen to the iron-horns, ripping, racking. Listen to the quack-horns, slack and clacking. Way down the road, trilling like a toad, Here comes the dice -horn, here comes the vice -horn, Here comes the snarl -horn, brawl -horn, lewd -horn, Followed by the prude -horn, bleak and squeaking: — (Some of them from Kansas, some of themn from Kansas. ) Here comes the hod -horn, plod -horn, sod -horn, Nevermore-to-roam -horn, loam -horn, home -horn. (Some of them from Kansas, some of them from Kansas. ) Far away the Rachel-Jane Not defeated by the horns Sings amid a hedge of thorns:— "Love and life, Eternal youth— Sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet, Dew and glory, Love and truth, Sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet. " WHILE SMOKE-BLACK FREIGHTS ON THE DOUBLE-TRACKED RAILROAD, DRIVEN AS THOUGH BY THE FOUL-FIEND'S OX-GOAD, SCREAMING TO THE WEST COAST, SCREAMING TO THE EAST, CARRY OFF A HARVEST, BRING BACK A FEAST, HARVESTING MACHINERY AND HARNESS FOR THE BEAST. THE HAND-CARS WHIZ, AND RATTLE ON THE RAILS, THE SUNLIGHT FLASHES ON THE TIN DINNER-PAILS. And then, in an instant, Ye modern men, Behold the procession once again, Listen to the iron-horns, ripping, racking, Listen to the wise -horn, desperate-to-advise horn, Listen to the fast -horn, kill -horn, blast -horn. . . . Far away the Rachel-Jane Not defeated by the horns Sings amid a hedge of thorns:— Love and life, Eternal youth, Sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet, Dew and glory, Love and truth. Sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet. The mufflers open on a score of cars With wonderful thunder, CRACK, CRACK, CRACK, CRACK-CRACK, CRACK-CRACK, CRACK-CRACK-CRACK, . . . Listen to the gold-horn . . . Old-horn . . . Cold-horn . . . And all of the tunes, till the night comes down On hay-stack, and ant-hill, and wind-bitten town. Then far in the west, as in the beginning, Dim in the distance, sweet in retreating, Hark to the faint-horn, quaint-horn, saint-horn, Hark to the calm-horn, balm-horn, psalm-horn. . . . They are hunting the goals that they understand:— San-Francisco and the brown sea-sand. My goal is the mystery the beggars win. I am caught in the web the night-winds spin. The edge of the wheat-ridge speaks to me. I talk with the leaves of the mulberry tree. And now I hear, as I sit all alone In the dusk, by another big Santa-Fe stone, The souls of the tall corn gathering round And the gay little souls of the grass in the ground. Listen to the tale the cotton-wood tells. Listen to the wind-mills, singing o'er the wells. Listen to the whistling flutes without price Of myriad prophets out of paradise. Harken to the wonder That the night-air carries. . . . Listen . . . to . . . the . . . whisper . . . Of . . . the . . . prairie . . . fairies Singing o'er the fairy plain:— "Sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet. Love and glory, Stars and rain, Sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet . . . . "

Written by Charles Baudelaire | THE IRREPARABLE AN we suppress the old Remorse Who bends our heart beneath his stroke, Who feeds, as worms feed on the corse, Or as the acorn on the oak? Can we suppress the old Remorse? Ah, in what philtre, wine, or spell, May we drown this our ancient foe, Destructive glutton, gorging well, Patient as the ants, and slow? What wine, what philtre, or what spell? Tell it, enchantress, if you can, Tell me, with anguish overcast, Wounded, as a dying man, Beneath the swift hoofs hurrying past. Tell it, enchantress, if you can, To him the wolf already tears Who sees the carrion pinions wave, This broken warrior who despairs To have a cross above his grave-- This wretch the wolf already tears. Can one illume a leaden sky, Or tear apart the shadowy veil Thicker than pitch, no star on high, Not one funereal glimmer pale Can one illume a leaden sky? Hope lit the windows of the Inn, But now that shining flame is dead; And how shall martyred pilgrims win Along the moonless road they tread? Satan has darkened all the Inn! Witch, do you love accurs?d hearts? Say, do you know, the reprobate? Know you Remorse, whose venomed darts Make souls the targets of their hate? Witch, do you know accurs?d hearts? The Might-have-been with tooth accursed Gnaws at the piteous souls of men, The deep foundations suffer first, And all the structure crumbles then Beneath the bitter tooth accursed. II. Often, when seated at the play, And sonorous music lights the stage, I see the frail hand of a Fay With magic dawn illume the rage Of the dark sky. Oft at the play A being made of gauze and fire Casts to the earth a Demon great. And my heart, whence all hopes expire, Is like a stage where I await, In vain, the Fay with wings of fire!

Written by Aleister Crowley | The Mantra-Yoga I How should I seek to make a song for thee When all my music is to moan thy name? That long sad monotone - the same - the same - Matching the mute insatiable sea That throbs with life's bewitching agony, Too long to measure and too fierce to tame! An hurtful joy, a fascinating shame Is this great ache that grips the heart of me. Even as a cancer, so this passion gnaws Away my soul, and will not ease its jaws Till I am dead. Then let me die! Who knows But that this corpse committed to the earth May be the occasion of some happier birth? Spring's earliest snowdrop? Summer's latest rose? II Thou knowest what asp hath fixed its lethal tooth In the white breast that trembled like a flower At thy name whispered. thou hast marked how hour By hour its poison hath dissolved my youth, Half skilled to agonise, half skilled to soothe This passion ineluctable, this power Slave to its single end, to storm the tower That holdeth thee, who art Authentic Truth. O golden hawk! O lidless eye! Behold How the grey creeps upon the shuddering gold! Still I will strive! That thou mayst sweep Swift on the dead from thine all-seeing steep - And the unutterable word by spoken.

Written by Charles Baudelaire | The Enemy My youth was nothing but a black storm Crossed now and then by brilliant suns. The thunder and the rain so ravage the shores Nothing's left of the fruit my garden held once. I should employ the rake and the plow, Having reached the autumn of ideas, To restore this inundated ground Where the deep grooves of water form tombs in the lees. And who knows if the new flowers you dreamed Will find in a soil stripped and cleaned The mystic nourishment that fortifies? —O Sorrow—O Sorrow—Time consumes Life, And the obscure enemy that gnaws at my heart Uses the blood that I lose to play my part.

Written by Edgar Lee Masters | Ollie McGee Have you seen walking through the village A man with downcast eyes and haggard face? That is my husband who, by secret cruelty never to be told, robbed me of my youth and my beauty; Till at last, wrinkled and with yellow teeth, And with broken pride and shameful humility, I sank into the grave. But what think you gnaws at my husband's heart? The face of what I was, the face of what he made me! These are driving him to the place where I lie. In death, therefore, I am avenged.