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Best Famous Magnet Poems

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

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Written by George (Lord) Byron | Create an image from this poem

Youth and Age

THERE'S not a joy the world can give like that it takes away 
When the glow of early thought declines in feeling's dull decay; 
'Tis not on youth's smooth cheek the blush alone which fades so fast  
But the tender bloom of heart is gone ere youth itself be past. 

Then the few whose spirits float above the wreck of happiness 5 
Are driven o'er the shoals of guilt or ocean of excess: 
The magnet of their course is gone or only points in vain 
The shore to which their shiver'd sail shall never stretch again. 

Then the mortal coldness of the soul like death itself comes down; 
It cannot feel for others' woes it dare not dream its own; 10 
That heavy chill has frozen o'er the fountain of our tears  
And though the eye may sparkle still 'tis where the ice appears. 

Though wit may flash from fluent lips and mirth distract the breast  
Through midnight hours that yield no more their former hope of rest  
'Tis but as ivy-leaves around the ruin'd turret wreathe 15 
All green and wildly fresh without but worn and gray beneath. 

Oh could I feel as I have felt or be what I have been  
Or weep as I could once have wept o'er many a vanish'd scene ¡ª 
As springs in deserts found seem sweet all brackish though they be  
So midst the wither'd waste of life those tears would flow to me! 20


Written by Derek Walcott | Create an image from this poem

The Star-Apple Kingdom

 There were still shards of an ancient pastoral 
in those shires of the island where the cattle drank 
their pools of shadow from an older sky, 
surviving from when the landscape copied such objects as 
"Herefords at Sunset in the valley of the Wye." 
The mountain water that fell white from the mill wheel 
sprinkling like petals from the star-apple trees, 
and all of the windmills and sugar mills moved by mules 
on the treadmill of Monday to Monday, would repeat 
in tongues of water and wind and fire, in tongues 
of Mission School pickaninnies, like rivers remembering 
their source, Parish Trelawny, Parish St David, Parish 
St Andrew, the names afflicting the pastures, 
the lime groves and fences of marl stone and the cattle 
with a docile longing, an epochal content. 
And there were, like old wedding lace in an attic, 
among the boas and parasols and the tea-colored 
daguerreotypes, hints of an epochal happiness 
as ordered and infinite to the child 
as the great house road to the Great House 
down a perspective of casuarinas plunging green manes 
in time to the horses, an orderly life 
reduced by lorgnettes day and night, one disc the sun, 
the other the moon, reduced into a pier glass: 
nannies diminished to dolls, mahogany stairways 
no larger than those of an album in which 
the flash of cutlery yellows, as gamboge as 
the piled cakes of teatime on that latticed 
bougainvillea verandah that looked down toward 
a prospect of Cuyp-like Herefords under a sky 
lurid as a porcelain souvenir with these words: 
"Herefords at Sunset in the Valley of the Wye." 

Strange, that the rancor of hatred hid in that dream 
of slow rivers and lily-like parasols, in snaps 
of fine old colonial families, curled at the edge 
not from age of from fire or the chemicals, no, not at all, 
but because, off at its edges, innocently excluded 
stood the groom, the cattle boy, the housemaid, the gardeners, 
the tenants, the good ******* down in the village, 
their mouth in the locked jaw of a silent scream. 
A scream which would open the doors to swing wildly 
all night, that was bringing in heavier clouds, 
more black smoke than cloud, frightening the cattle 
in whose bulging eyes the Great House diminished; 
a scorching wind of a scream 
that began to extinguish the fireflies, 
that dried the water mill creaking to a stop 
as it was about to pronounce Parish Trelawny 
all over, in the ancient pastoral voice, 
a wind that blew all without bending anything, 
neither the leaves of the album nor the lime groves; 
blew Nanny floating back in white from a feather 
to a chimerical, chemical pin speck that shrank 
the drinking Herefords to brown porcelain cows 
on a mantelpiece, Trelawny trembling with dusk, 
the scorched pastures of the old benign Custos; blew 
far the decent servants and the lifelong cook, 
and shriveled to a shard that ancient pastoral 
of dusk in a gilt-edged frame now catching the evening sun 
in Jamaica, making both epochs one. 

He looked out from the Great House windows on 
clouds that still held the fragrance of fire, 
he saw the Botanical Gardens officially drown 
in a formal dusk, where governors had strolled 
and black gardeners had smiled over glinting shears 
at the lilies of parasols on the floating lawns, 
the flame trees obeyed his will and lowered their wicks, 
the flowers tightened their fists in the name of thrift, 
the porcelain lamps of ripe cocoa, the magnolia's jet 
dimmed on the one circuit with the ginger lilies 
and left a lonely bulb on the verandah, 
and, had his mandate extended to that ceiling 
of star-apple candelabra, he would have ordered 
the sky to sleep, saying, I'm tired, 
save the starlight for victories, we can't afford it, 
leave the moon on for one more hour,and that's it. 
But though his power, the given mandate, extended 
from tangerine daybreaks to star-apple dusks, 
his hand could not dam that ceaseless torrent of dust 
that carried the shacks of the poor, to their root-rock music, 
down the gullies of Yallahs and August Town, 
to lodge them on thorns of maca, with their rags 
crucified by cactus, tins, old tires, cartons; 
from the black Warieka Hills the sky glowed fierce as 
the dials of a million radios, 
a throbbing sunset that glowed like a grid 
where the dread beat rose from the jukebox of Kingston. 
He saw the fountains dried of quadrilles, the water-music 
of the country dancers, the fiddlers like fifes 
put aside. He had to heal 
this malarial island in its bath of bay leaves, 
its forests tossing with fever, the dry cattle 
groaning like winches, the grass that kept shaking 
its head to remember its name. No vowels left 
in the mill wheel, the river. Rock stone. Rock stone. 

The mountains rolled like whales through phosphorous stars, 
as he swayed like a stone down fathoms into sleep, 
drawn by that magnet which pulls down half the world 
between a star and a star, by that black power 
that has the assassin dreaming of snow, 
that poleaxes the tyrant to a sleeping child. 
The house is rocking at anchor, but as he falls 
his mind is a mill wheel in moonlight, 
and he hears, in the sleep of his moonlight, the drowned 
bell of Port Royal's cathedral, sees the copper pennies 
of bubbles rising from the empty eye-pockets 
of green buccaneers, the parrot fish floating 
from the frayed shoulders of pirates, sea horses 
drawing gowned ladies in their liquid promenade 
across the moss-green meadows of the sea; 
he heard the drowned choirs under Palisadoes, 
a hymn ascending to earth from a heaven inverted 
by water, a crab climbing the steeple, 
and he climbed from that submarine kingdom 
as the evening lights came on in the institute, 
the scholars lamplit in their own aquarium, 
he saw them mouthing like parrot fish, as he passed 
upward from that baptism, their history lessons, 
the bubbles like ideas which he could not break: 
Jamaica was captured by Penn and Venables, 
Port Royal perished in a cataclysmic earthquake. 

Before the coruscating façades of cathedrals 
from Santiago to Caracas, where penitential archbishops 
washed the feet of paupers (a parenthetical moment 
that made the Caribbean a baptismal font, 
turned butterflies to stone, and whitened like doves 
the buzzards circling municipal garbage), 
the Caribbean was borne like an elliptical basin 
in the hands of acolytes, and a people were absolved 
of a history which they did not commit; 
the slave pardoned his whip, and the dispossessed 
said the rosary of islands for three hundred years, 
a hymn that resounded like the hum of the sea 
inside a sea cave, as their knees turned to stone, 
while the bodies of patriots were melting down walls 
still crusted with mute outcries of La Revolucion! 
"San Salvador, pray for us,St. Thomas, San Domingo, 
ora pro nobis, intercede for us, Sancta Lucia 
of no eyes," and when the circular chaplet 
reached the last black bead of Sancta Trinidad 
they began again, their knees drilled into stone, 
where Colon had begun, with San Salvador's bead, 
beads of black colonies round the necks of Indians. 
And while they prayed for an economic miracle, 
ulcers formed on the municipal portraits, 
the hotels went up, and the casinos and brothels, 
and the empires of tobacco, sugar, and bananas, 
until a black woman, shawled like a buzzard, 
climbed up the stairs and knocked at the door 
of his dream, whispering in the ear of the keyhole: 
"Let me in, I'm finished with praying, I'm the Revolution. 
I am the darker, the older America." 

She was as beautiful as a stone in the sunrise, 
her voice had the gutturals of machine guns 
across khaki deserts where the cactus flower 
detonates like grenades, her sex was the slit throat 
of an Indian, her hair had the blue-black sheen of the crow. 
She was a black umbrella blown inside out 
by the wind of revolution, La Madre Dolorosa, 
a black rose of sorrow, a black mine of silence, 
raped wife, empty mother, Aztec virgin 
transfixed by arrows from a thousand guitars, 
a stone full of silence, which, if it gave tongue 
to the tortures done in the name of the Father, 
would curdle the blood of the marauding wolf, 
the fountain of generals, poets, and cripples 
who danced without moving over their graves 
with each revolution; her Caesarean was stitched 
by the teeth of machine guns,and every sunset 
she carried the Caribbean's elliptical basin 
as she had once carried the penitential napkins 
to be the footbath of dictators, Trujillo, Machado, 
and those whose faces had yellowed like posters 
on municipal walls. Now she stroked his hair 
until it turned white, but she would not understand 
that he wanted no other power but peace, 
that he wanted a revolution without any bloodshed, 
he wanted a history without any memory, 
streets without statues, 
and a geography without myth. He wanted no armies 
but those regiments of bananas, thick lances of cane, 
and he sobbed,"I am powerless, except for love." 
She faded from him, because he could not kill; 
she shrunk to a bat that hung day and night 
in the back of his brain. He rose in his dream. 
(to be continued)
Written by Jim Carroll | Create an image from this poem

8 Fragments For Kurt Cobain

 1/
Genius is not a generous thing
In return it charges more interest than any amount of royalties can cover
And it resents fame
With bitter vengeance 

Pills and powdres only placate it awhile
Then it puts you in a place where the planet's poles reverse
Where the currents of electricity shift 

Your Body becomes a magnet and pulls to it despair and rotten teeth,
Cheese whiz and guns 

Whose triggers are shaped tenderly into a false lust
In timeless illusion 

2/
The guitar claws kept tightening, I guess on your heart stem.
The loops of feedback and distortion, threaded right thru
Lucifer's wisdom teeth, and never stopped their reverbrating
In your mind 

And from the stage
All the faces out front seemed so hungry
With an unbearably wholesome misunderstanding

From where they sat, you seemed so far up there
High and live and diving

And instead you were swamp crawling
Down, deeper
Until you tasted the Earth's own blood
And chatted with the Buzzing-eyed insects that heroin breeds 

3/
You should have talked more with the monkey
He's always willing to negotiate
I'm still paying him off...
The greater the money and fame
The slower the Pendulum of fortune swings

Your will could have sped it up...
But you left that in a plane
Because it wouldn't pass customs and immigration

4/
Here's synchronicity for you:

Your music's tape was inside my walkman
When my best friend from summer camp
Called with the news about you

I listened them...
It was all there!
Your music kept cutting deeper and deeper valleys of sound
Less and less light
Until you hit solid rock

The drill bit broke
and the valley became
A thin crevice, impassible in time,
As time itself stopped. 

And the walls became cages of brilliant notes
Pressing in...
Pressure
That's how diamonds are made
And that's WHERE it sometimes all collapses
Down in on you

5/
Then I translated your muttered lyrics
And the phrases were curious:
Like "incognito libido"
And "Chalk Skin Bending"

The words kept getting smaller and smaller
Until
Separated from their music
Each letter spilled out into a cartridge
Which fit only in the barrel of a gun

6/
And you shoved the barrel in as far as possible
Because that's where the pain came from
That's where the demons were digging

The world outside was blank
Its every cause was just a continuation
Of another unsolved effect

7/
But Kurt...
Didn't the thought that you would never write another song
Another feverish line or riff
Make you think twice?
That's what I don't understand
Because it's kept me alive, above any wounds

8/
If only you hadn't swallowed yourself into a coma in Roma...
You could have gone to Florence
And looked into the eyes of Bellinni or Rafael's Portraits

Perhaps inside them
You could have found a threshold back to beauty's arms
Where it all began...

No matter that you felt betrayed by her

That is always the cost
As Frank said,
Of a young artist's remorseless passion

Which starts out as a kiss
And follows like a curse
Written by Sylvia Plath | Create an image from this poem

Aftermath

 Compelled by calamity's magnet
They loiter and stare as if the house
Burnt-out were theirs, or as if they thought
Some scandal might any minute ooze
From a smoke-choked closet into light;
No deaths, no prodigious injuries
Glut these hunters after an old meat,
Blood-spoor of the austere tragedies.

Mother Medea in a green smock
Moves humbly as any housewife through
Her ruined apartments, taking stock
Of charred shoes, the sodden upholstery:
Cheated of the pyre and the rack,
The crowd sucks her last tear and turns away.
Written by Walt Whitman | Create an image from this poem

Longings for Home

 O MAGNET-SOUTH! O glistening, perfumed South! My South! 
O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse, and love! Good and evil! O all dear to me! 
O dear to me my birth-things—All moving things, and the trees where I was
 born—the
 grains,
 plants, rivers; 
Dear to me my own slow sluggish rivers where they flow, distant, over flats of silvery
 sands,
 or
 through swamps; 
Dear to me the Roanoke, the Savannah, the Altamahaw, the Pedee, the Tombigbee, the Santee,
 the
 Coosa, and the Sabine;
O pensive, far away wandering, I return with my Soul to haunt their banks again; 
Again in Florida I float on transparent lakes—I float on the Okeechobee—I cross
 the
 hummock land, or through pleasant openings, or dense forests; 
I see the parrots in the woods—I see the papaw tree and the blossoming titi; 
Again, sailing in my coaster, on deck, I coast off Georgia—I coast up the Carolinas, 
I see where the live-oak is growing—I see where the yellow-pine, the scented
 bay-tree, the
 lemon and orange, the cypress, the graceful palmetto;
I pass rude sea-headlands and enter Pamlico Sound through an inlet, and dart my vision
 inland; 
O the cotton plant! the growing fields of rice, sugar, hemp! 
The cactus, guarded with thorns—the laurel-tree, with large white flowers; 
The range afar—the richness and barrenness—the old woods charged with mistletoe
 and
 trailing moss, 
The piney odor and the gloom—the awful natural stillness, (Here in these dense swamps
 the
 freebooter carries his gun, and the fugitive slave has his conceal’d hut;)
O the strange fascination of these half-known, half-impassable swamps, infested by
 reptiles,
 resounding with the bellow of the alligator, the sad noises of the night-owl and the
 wild-cat,
 and
 the whirr of the rattlesnake; 
The mocking-bird, the American mimic, singing all the forenoon—singing through the
 moon-lit
 night, 
The humming-bird, the wild turkey, the raccoon, the opossum; 
A Tennessee corn-field—the tall, graceful, long-leav’d corn—slender,
 flapping,
 bright
 green with tassels—with beautiful ears, each well-sheath’d in its husk; 
An Arkansas prairie—a sleeping lake, or still bayou;
O my heart! O tender and fierce pangs—I can stand them not—I will depart; 
O to be a Virginian, where I grew up! O to be a Carolinian! 
O longings irrepressible! O I will go back to old Tennessee, and never wander more!


Written by Michael Ondaatje | Create an image from this poem

Bearhug

 Griffin calls to come and kiss him goodnight
I yell ok. Finish something I'm doing,
then something else, walk slowly round
the corner to my son's room.
He is standing arms outstretched
waiting for a bearhug. Grinning.

Why do I give my emotion an animal's name,
give it that dark squeeze of death?
This is the hug which collects
all his small bones and his warm neck against me.
The thin tough body under the pyjamas
locks to me like a magnet of blood.

How long was he standing there
like that, before I came?
Written by Anne Sexton | Create an image from this poem

The Wedding Ring Dance

 I dance in circles holding
the moth of the marriage,
thin, sticky, fluttering
its skirts, its webs.
The moth oozing a tear,
or is it a drop of urine?
The moth, grinning like a pear,
or is it teeth
clamping the iron maiden shut?

The moth,
who is my mother,
who is my father,
who was my lover,
floats airily out of my hands
and I dance slower,
pulling off the fat diamond engagement ring,
pulling off the elopement wedding ring,
and holding them, clicking them
in thumb and forefinger,
the indent of twenty-five years,
like a tiny rip of a tiny earthquake.
Underneath the soil lies the violence,
the shift, the crack of continents,
the anger,
and above only a cut,
a half-inch space to stick a pencil in.

The finger is scared
but it keeps its long numb place.
And I keep dancing,
a sort of waltz,
clicking the two rings,
all of a life at its last cough,
as I swim through the air of the kitchen,
and the same radio plays its songs
and I make a small path through them
with my bare finger and my funny feet,
doing the undoing dance,
on April 14th, 1973,
letting my history rip itself off me
and stepping into
something unknown
and transparent,
but all ten fingers stretched outward,
flesh extended as metal
waiting for a magnet.
Written by Sasha Skenderija | Create an image from this poem

Weirdos

Deep and unreachable in their darknesses, 
capriciously childish and tender
when we write to each other,
while we talk about one of us
who is not around.

I grew up with some of them,
others, who I met as grown-up people,
I could unerringly pick out in their photo albums 
on group pictures of their school classes. 
They've always been like that.

They remember every detail I've ever told them about myself, 
and even some I left untold.
There's always one of them around to remind me
of important things about myself
when I sink or soar too high
in my petty existential delirium.

Some of them had nearly given up on themselves
and on me: they fell in and grew together with their own lunacies pulling me and lifting me up
as a magnet picks up iron filings,
or a comb torn bits of paper.

People
that I love,
scattered along the meridians 
and along their abysses: 
among monsters of normalcy.
Written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow | Create an image from this poem

Memories

 Oft I remember those I have known
In other days, to whom my heart was lead
As by a magnet, and who are not dead,
But absent, and their memories overgrown
With other thoughts and troubles of my own,
As graves with grasses are, and at their head
The stone with moss and lichens so o'er spread,
Nothing is legible but the name alone.
And is it so with them? After long years.
Do they remember me in the same way,
And is the memory pleasant as to me?
I fear to ask; yet wherefore are my fears?
Pleasures, like flowers, may wither and decay,
And yet the root perennial may be.
Written by Aleister Crowley | Create an image from this poem

The Quest

 High, hollowed in green
above the rocks of reason
lies the crater lake
whose ice the dreamer breaks
to find a summer season.

'He will plunge like a plummet down
far into hungry tides'
they cry, but as the sea
climbs to a lunar magnet
so the dreamer pursues
the lake where love resides.

Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry