Best Famous Harbor Poems

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

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• All Famous Harbor Poems

Written by Louise Gluck | Odysseus Decision The great man turns his back on the island. Now he will not die in paradise nor hear again the lutes of paradise among the olive trees, by the clear pools under the cypresses. Time begins now, in which he hears again that pulse which is the narrative sea, ar dawn when its pull is stongest. What has brought us here will lead us away; our ship sways in the tined harbor water. Now the spell is ended. Giove him back his life, sea that can only move forward.

Written by Billy Collins | Forgetfulness The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones. Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag, and even now as you memorize the order of the planets, something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps, the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay. Whatever it is you are struggling to remember, it is not poised on the tip of your tongue, not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen. It has floated away down a dark mythological river whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall, well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle. No wonder you rise in the middle of the night to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war. No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Written by Emma Lazarus | The New Colossus Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Written by W S Merwin | The Ships Are Made Ready In Silence Moored to the same ring: The hour, the darkness and I, Our compasses hooded like falcons. Now the memory of you comes aching in With a wash of broken bits which never left port In which once we planned voyages, They come knocking like hearts asking: What departures on this tide? Breath of land, warm breath, You tighten the cold around the navel, Though all shores but the first have been foreign, And the first was not home until left behind. Our choice is ours but we have not made it, Containing as it does, our destination Circled with loss as with coral, and A destination only until attained. I have left you my hope to remember me by, Though now there is little resemblance. At this moment I could believe in no change, The mast perpetually Vacillating between the same constellations, The night never withdrawing its dark virtue >From the harbor shaped as a heart, The sea pulsing as a heart, The sky vaulted as a heart, Where I know the light will shatter like a cry Above a discovery: "Emptiness. Emptiness! Look!" Look. This is the morning.

Written by Sylvia Plath | Lesbos Viciousness in the kitchen! The potatoes hiss. It is all Hollywood, windowless, The fluorescent light wincing on and off like a terrible migraine, Coy paper strips for doors -- Stage curtains, a widow's frizz. And I, love, am a pathological liar, And my child -- look at her, face down on the floor, Little unstrung puppet, kicking to disappear -- Why she is schizophrenic, Her face is red and white, a panic, You have stuck her kittens outside your window In a sort of cement well Where they crap and puke and cry and she can't hear. You say you can't stand her, The bastard's a girl. You who have blown your tubes like a bad radio Clear of voices and history, the staticky Noise of the new. You say I should drown the kittens. Their smell! You say I should drown my girl. She'll cut her throat at ten if she's mad at two. The baby smiles, fat snail, From the polished lozenges of orange linoleum. You could eat him. He's a boy. You say your husband is just no good to you. His Jew-Mama guards his sweet sex like a pearl. You have one baby, I have two. I should sit on a rock off Cornwall and comb my hair. I should wear tiger pants, I should have an affair. We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, Me and you. Meanwhile there's a stink of fat and baby crap. I'm doped and thick from my last sleeping pill. The smog of cooking, the smog of hell Floats our heads, two venemous opposites, Our bones, our hair. I call you Orphan, orphan. You are ill. The sun gives you ulcers, the wind gives you T.B. Once you were beautiful. In New York, in Hollywood, the men said: 'Through? Gee baby, you are rare.' You acted, acted for the thrill. The impotent husband slumps out for a coffee. I try to keep him in, An old pole for the lightning, The acid baths, the skyfuls off of you. He lumps it down the plastic cobbled hill, Flogged trolley. The sparks are blue. The blue sparks spill, Splitting like quartz into a million bits. O jewel! O valuable! That night the moon Dragged its blood bag, sick Animal Up over the harbor lights. And then grew normal, Hard and apart and white. The scale-sheen on the sand scared me to death. We kept picking up handfuls, loving it, Working it like dough, a mulatto body, The silk grits. A dog picked up your doggy husband. He went on. Now I am silent, hate Up to my neck, Thick, thick. I do not speak. I am packing the hard potatoes like good clothes, I am packing the babies, I am packing the sick cats. O vase of acid, It is love you are full of. You know who you hate. He is hugging his ball and chain down by the gate That opens to the sea Where it drives in, white and black, Then spews it back. Every day you fill him with soul-stuff, like a pitcher. You are so exhausted. Your voice my ear-ring, Flapping and sucking, blood-loving bat. That is that. That is that. You peer from the door, Sad hag. 'Every woman's a whore. I can't communicate.' I see your cute décor Close on you like the fist of a baby Or an anemone, that sea Sweetheart, that kleptomaniac. I am still raw. I say I may be back. You know what lies are for. Even in your Zen heaven we shan't meet.

Written by Robinson Jeffers | The Great Explosion The universe expands and contracts like a great heart. It is expanding, the farthest nebulae Rush with the speed of light into empty space. It will contract, the immense navies of stars and galaxies, dust clouds and nebulae Are recalled home, they crush against each other in one harbor, they stick in one lump And then explode it, nothing can hold them down; there is no way to express that explosion; all that exists Roars into flame, the tortured fragments rush away from each other into all the sky, new universes Jewel the black breast of night; and far off the outer nebulae like charging spearmen again Invade emptiness. No wonder we are so fascinated with fireworks And our huge bombs: it is a kind of homesickness perhaps for the howling fireblast that we were born from. But the whole sum of the energies That made and contain the giant atom survives. It will gather again and pile up, the power and the glory-- And no doubt it will burst again; diastole and systole: the whole universe beats like a heart. Peace in our time was never one of God's promises; but back and forth, live and die, burn and be damned, The great heart beating, pumping into our arteries His terrible life. He is beautiful beyond belief. And we, God's apes--or tragic children--share in the beauty. We see it above our torment, that's what life's for. He is no God of love, no justice of a little city like Dante's Florence, no anthropoid God Making commandments,: this is the God who does not care and will never cease. Look at the seas there Flashing against this rock in the darkness--look at the tide-stream stars--and the fall of nations--and dawn Wandering with wet white feet down the Caramel Valley to meet the sea. These are real and we see their beauty. The great explosion is probably only a metaphor--I know not --of faceless violence, the root of all things.

Written by Billy Collins | Silence Now it is time to say what you have to say. The room is quiet. The whirring fan has been unplugged, and the girl who was tapping a pencil on her desktop has been removed. So tell us what is on your mind. We want to hear the sound of your foliage, the unraveling of your tool kit, your songs of loneliness, your songs of hurt. The trains are motionless on the tracks, the ships are at restn the harbor. The dogs are cocking their heads and the gods are peering down from their balloons. The town is hushed, and everyone here has a copy. So tell us about your parents— your father behind the steering wheel, your cruel mother at the sink. Let's hear about all the clouds you saw, all the trees. Read the poem you brought with you tonight. The ocean has stopped sloshing around, and even Beethoven is sitting up in his deathbed, his cold hearing horn inserted in one ear.

Written by Mark Doty | Visitation When I heard he had entered the harbor, and circled the wharf for days, I expected the worst: shallow water, confusion, some accident to bring the young humpback to grief. Don't they depend on a compass lodged in the salt-flooded folds of the brain, some delicate musical mechanism to navigate their true course? How many ways, in our century's late iron hours, might we have led him to disaster? That, in those days, was how I'd come to see the world: dark upon dark, any sense of spirit an embattled flame sparked against wind-driven rain till pain snuffed it out. I thought, This is what experience gives us , and I moved carefully through my life while I waited. . . Enough, it wasn't that way at all. The whale —exuberant, proud maybe, playful, like the early music of Beethoven— cruised the footings for smelts clustered near the pylons in mercury flocks. He (do I have the gender right?) would negotiate the rusty hulls of the Portuguese fishing boats —Holy Infant, Little Marie— with what could only be read as pleasure, coming close then diving, trailing on the surface big spreading circles until he'd breach, thrilling us with the release of pressured breath, and the bulk of his sleek young head —a wet black leather sofa already barnacled with ghostly lice— and his elegant and unlikely mouth, and the marvelous afterthought of the flukes, and the way his broad flippers resembled a pair of clownish gloves or puppet hands, looming greenish white beneath the bay's clouded sheen. When he had consumed his pleasure of the shimmering swarm, his pleasure, perhaps, in his own admired performance, he swam out the harbor mouth, into the Atlantic. And though grief has seemed to me itself a dim, salt suspension in which I've moved, blind thing, day by day, through the wreckage, barely aware of what I stumbled toward, even I couldn't help but look at the way this immense figure graces the dark medium, and shines so: heaviness which is no burden to itself. What did you think, that joy was some slight thing?

Written by Vachel Lindsay | The Chinese Nightingale A Song in Chinese Tapestries "How, how," he said. "Friend Chang," I said, "San Francisco sleeps as the dead— Ended license, lust and play: Why do you iron the night away? Your big clock speaks with a deadly sound, With a tick and a wail till dawn comes round. While the monster shadows glower and creep, What can be better for man than sleep?" "I will tell you a secret," Chang replied; "My breast with vision is satisfied, And I see green trees and fluttering wings, And my deathless bird from Shanghai sings." Then he lit five fire-crackers in a pan. "Pop, pop," said the fire-crackers, "cra-cra-crack." He lit a joss stick long and black. Then the proud gray joss in the corner stirred; On his wrist appeared a gray small bird, And this was the song of the gray small bird: "Where is the princess, loved forever, Who made Chang first of the kings of men?" And the joss in the corner stirred again; And the carved dog, curled in his arms, awoke, Barked forth a smoke-cloud that whirled and broke. It piled in a maze round the ironing-place, And there on the snowy table wide Stood a Chinese lady of high degree, With a scornful, witching, tea-rose face.... Yet she put away all form and pride, And laid her glimmering veil aside With a childlike smile for Chang and for me. The walls fell back, night was aflower, The table gleamed in a moonlit bower, While Chang, with a countenance carved of stone, Ironed and ironed, all alone. And thus she sang to the busy man Chang: "Have you forgotten.... Deep in the ages, long, long ago, I was your sweetheart, there on the sand— Storm-worn beach of the Chinese land? We sold our grain in the peacock town Built on the edge of the sea-sands brown— Built on the edge of the sea-sands brown.... "When all the world was drinking blood From the skulls of men and bulls And all the world had swords and clubs of stone, We drank our tea in China beneath the sacred spice-trees, And heard the curled waves of the harbor moan. And this gray bird, in Love's first spring, With a bright-bronze breast and a bronze-brown wing, Captured the world with his carolling. Do you remember, ages after, At last the world we were born to own? You were the heir of the yellow throne— The world was the field of the Chinese man And we were the pride of the Sons of Han? We copied deep books and we carved in jade, And wove blue silks in the mulberry shade...." "I remember, I remember That Spring came on forever, That Spring came on forever," Said the Chinese nightingale. My heart was filled with marvel and dream, Though I saw the western street-lamps gleam, Though dawn was bringing the western day, Though Chang was a laundryman ironing away.... Mingled there with the streets and alleys, The railroad-yard and the clock-tower bright, Demon clouds crossed ancient valleys; Across wide lotus-ponds of light I marked a giant firefly's flight. And the lady, rosy-red, Flourished her fan, her shimmering fan, Stretched her hand toward Chang, and said: "Do you remember, Ages after, Our palace of heart-red stone? Do you remember The little doll-faced children With their lanterns full of moon-fire, That came from all the empire Honoring the throne?— The loveliest fête and carnival Our world had ever known? The sages sat about us With their heads bowed in their beards, With proper meditation on the sight. Confucius was not born; We lived in those great days Confucius later said were lived aright.... And this gray bird, on that day of spring, With a bright bronze breast, and a bronze-brown wing, Captured the world with his carolling. Late at night his tune was spent. Peasants, Sages, Children, Homeward went, And then the bronze bird sang for you and me. We walked alone. Our hearts were high and free. I had a silvery name, I had a silvery name, I had a silvery name — do you remember The name you cried beside the tumbling sea?" Chang turned not to the lady slim— He bent to his work, ironing away; But she was arch, and knowing and glowing, And the bird on his shoulder spoke for him. "Darling . . . darling . . . darling . . . darling . . ." Said the Chinese nightingale. The great gray joss on a rustic shelf, Rakish and shrewd, with his collar awry, Sang impolitely, as though by himself, Drowning with his bellowing the nightingale's cry: "Back through a hundred, hundred years Hear the waves as they climb the piers, Hear the howl of the silver seas, Hear the thunder. Hear the gongs of holy China How the waves and tunes combine In a rhythmic clashing wonder, Incantation old and fine: `Dragons, dragons, Chinese dragons, Red fire-crackers, and green fire-crackers, And dragons, dragons, Chinese dragons.'" Then the lady, rosy-red, Turned to her lover Chang and said: "Dare you forget that turquoise dawn When we stood in our mist-hung velvet lawn, And worked a spell this great joss taught Till a God of the Dragons was charmed and caught? From the flag high over our palace home He flew to our feet in rainbow-foam — A king of beauty and tempest and thunder Panting to tear our sorrows asunder. A dragon of fair adventure and wonder. We mounted the back of that royal slave With thoughts of desire that were noble and grave. We swam down the shore to the dragon-mountains, We whirled to the peaks and the fiery fountains. To our secret ivory house we were bourne. We looked down the wonderful wing-filled regions Where the dragons darted in glimmering legions. Right by my breast the nightingale sang; The old rhymes rang in the sunlit mist That we this hour regain — Song-fire for the brain. When my hands and my hair and my feet you kissed, When you cried for your heart's new pain, What was my name in the dragon-mist, In the rings of rainbowed rain?" "Sorrow and love, glory and love," Said the Chinese nightingale. "Sorrow and love, glory and love," Said the Chinese nightingale. And now the joss broke in with his song: "Dying ember, bird of Chang, Soul of Chang, do you remember? — Ere you returned to the shining harbor There were pirates by ten thousand Descended on the town In vessels mountain-high and red and brown, Moon-ships that climbed the storms and cut the skies. On their prows were painted terrible bright eyes. But I was then a wizard and a scholar and a priest; I stood upon the sand; With lifted hand I looked upon them And sunk their vessels with my wizard eyes, And the stately lacquer-gate made safe again. Deep, deep below the bay, the sea-weed and the spray, Embalmed in amber every pirate lies, Embalmed in amber every pirate lies." Then this did the noble lady say: "Bird, do you dream of our home-coming day When you flew like a courier on before From the dragon-peak to our palace-door, And we drove the steed in your singing path— The ramping dragon of laughter and wrath: And found our city all aglow, And knighted this joss that decked it so? There were golden fishes in the purple river And silver fishes and rainbow fishes. There were golden junks in the laughing river, And silver junks and rainbow junks: There were golden lilies by the bay and river, And silver lilies and tiger-lilies, And tinkling wind-bells in the gardens of the town By the black-lacquer gate Where walked in state The kind king Chang And his sweet-heart mate.... With his flag-born dragon And his crown of pearl...and...jade, And his nightingale reigning in the mulberry shade, And sailors and soldiers on the sea-sands brown, And priests who bowed them down to your song— By the city called Han, the peacock town, By the city called Han, the nightingale town, The nightingale town." Then sang the bird, so strangely gay, Fluttering, fluttering, ghostly and gray, A vague, unravelling, final tune, Like a long unwinding silk cocoon; Sang as though for the soul of him Who ironed away in that bower dim: — "I have forgotten Your dragons great, Merry and mad and friendly and bold. Dim is your proud lost palace-gate. I vaguely know There were heroes of old, Troubles more than the heart could hold, There were wolves in the woods Yet lambs in the fold, Nests in the top of the almond tree.... The evergreen tree... and the mulberry tree... Life and hurry and joy forgotten, Years on years I but half-remember... Man is a torch, then ashes soon, May and June, then dead December, Dead December, then again June. Who shall end my dream's confusion? Life is a loom, weaving illusion... I remember, I remember There were ghostly veils and laces... In the shadowy bowery places... With lovers' ardent faces Bending to one another, Speaking each his part. They infinitely echo In the red cave of my heart. `Sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart.' They said to one another. They spoke, I think, of perils past. They spoke, I think, of peace at last. One thing I remember: Spring came on forever, Spring came on forever," Said the Chinese nightingale.

Written by Hart Crane | To Brooklyn Bridge How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him, Shedding white rings of tumult, building high Over the chained bay waters Liberty-- Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes As apparitional as sails that cross Some page of figures to be filed away; --Till elevators drop us from our day . . . I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene Never disclosed, but hastened to again, Foretold to other eyes on the same screen; And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced As though the sun took step of thee, yet left Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,-- Implicitly thy freedom staying thee! Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets, Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning, A jest falls from the speechless caravan. Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks, A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene; All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn . . . Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still. And obscure as that heaven of the Jews, Thy guerdon . . . Accolade thou dost bestow Of anonymity time cannot raise: Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show. O harp and altar, of the fury fused, (How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!) Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge, Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry,-- Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars, Beading thy path--condense eternity: And we have seen night lifted in thine arms. Under thy shadow by the piers I waited; Only in darkness is thy shadow clear. The City's fiery parcels all undone, Already snow submerges an iron year . . . O Sleepless as the river under thee, Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod, Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend And of the curveship lend a myth to God.