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Best Famous Perennial Poems

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

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Written by Max Ehrmann | Create an image from this poem

Desiderata

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.

Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.

Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.

And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.


Written by Aleister Crowley | Create an image from this poem

A Birthday

 "Aug." 10, 1911.

Full moon to-night; and six and twenty years
Since my full moon first broke from angel spheres!
A year of infinite love unwearying ---
No circling seasons, but perennial spring!
A year of triumph trampling through defeat,
The first made holy and the last made sweet
By this same love; a year of wealth and woe,
Joy, poverty, health, sickness --- all one glow
In the pure light that filled our firmament
Of supreme silence and unbarred extent,
Wherein one sacrament was ours, one Lord,
One resurrection, one recurrent chord,
One incarnation, one descending dove,
All these being one, and that one being Love!

You sent your spirit into tunes; my soul
Yearned in a thousand melodies to enscroll
Its happiness: I left no flower unplucked
That might have graced your garland. I induct
Tragedy, comedy, farce, fable, song,
Each longing a little, each a little long,
But each aspiring only to express
Your excellence and my unworthiness --- 
Nay! but my worthiness, since I was sense
And spirit too of that same excellence.

So thus we solved the earth's revolving riddle:
I could write verse, and you could play the fiddle,
While, as for love, the sun went through the signs,
And not a star but told him how love twines
A wreath for every decanate, degree,
Minute and second, linked eternally
In chains of flowers that never fading are,
Each one as sempiternal as a star.

Let me go back to your last birthday. Then
I was already your one man of men
Appointed to complete you, and fulfil
From everlasting the eternal will.
We lay within the flood of crimson light
In my own balcony that August night,
And conjuring the aright and the averse
Created yet another universe.

We worked together; dance and rite and spell
Arousing heaven and constraining hell.
We lived together; every hour of rest
Was honied from your tiger-lily breast.
We --- oh what lingering doubt or fear betrayed
My life to fate! --- we parted. Was I afraid?
I was afraid, afraid to live my love,
Afraid you played the serpent, I the dove,
Afraid of what I know not. I am glad 
Of all the shame and wretchedness I had,
Since those six weeks have taught me not to doubt you,
And also that I cannot live without you.

Then I came back to you; black treasons rear
Their heads, blind hates, deaf agonies of fear,
Cruelty, cowardice, falsehood, broken pledges,
The temple soiled with senseless sacrileges,
Sickness and poverty, a thousand evils,
Concerted malice of a million devils; ---
You never swerved; your high-pooped galleon
Went marvellously, majestically on
Full-sailed, while every other braver bark
Drove on the rocks, or foundered in the dark.

Then Easter, and the days of all delight!
God's sun lit noontide and his moon midnight,
While above all, true centre of our world,
True source of light, our great love passion-pearled
Gave all its life and splendour to the sea
Above whose tides stood our stability.

Then sudden and fierce, no monitory moan,
Smote the mad mischief of the great cyclone.
How far below us all its fury rolled!
How vainly sulphur tries to tarnish gold!
We lived together: all its malice meant
Nothing but freedom of a continent!

It was the forest and the river that knew
The fact that one and one do not make two. 
We worked, we walked, we slept, we were at ease,
We cried, we quarrelled; all the rocks and trees
For twenty miles could tell how lovers played,
And we could count a kiss for every glade.
Worry, starvation, illness and distress?
Each moment was a mine of happiness.

Then we grew tired of being country mice,
Came up to Paris, lived our sacrifice
There, giving holy berries to the moon,
July's thanksgiving for the joys of June.

And you are gone away --- and how shall I
Make August sing the raptures of July?
And you are gone away --- what evil star
Makes you so competent and popular?
How have I raised this harpy-hag of Hell's
Malice --- that you are wanted somewhere else?
I wish you were like me a man forbid,
Banned, outcast, nice society well rid
Of the pair of us --- then who would interfere
With us? --- my darling, you would now be here!

But no! we must fight on, win through, succeed,
Earn the grudged praise that never comes to meed,
Lash dogs to kennel, trample snakes, put bit
In the mule-mouths that have such need of it,
Until the world there's so much to forgive in
Becomes a little possible to live in.

God alone knows if battle or surrender
Be the true courage; either has its splendour. 
But since we chose the first, God aid the right,
And damn me if I fail you in the fight!
God join again the ways that lie apart,
And bless the love of loyal heart to heart!
God keep us every hour in every thought,
And bring the vessel of our love to port!

These are my birthday wishes. Dawn's at hand,
And you're an exile in a lonely land.
But what were magic if it could not give
My thought enough vitality to live?
Do not then dream this night has been a loss!
All night I have hung, a god, upon the cross;
All night I have offered incense at the shrine;
All night you have been unutterably mine,
Miner in the memory of the first wild hour
When my rough grasp tore the unwilling flower
From your closed garden, mine in every mood,
In every tense, in every attitude,
In every possibility, still mine
While the sun's pomp and pageant, sign to sign,
Stately proceeded, mine not only so
In the glamour of memory and austral glow
Of ardour, but by image of my brow
Stronger than sense, you are even here and now
Miner, utterly mine, my sister and my wife,
Mother of my children, mistress of my life!

O wild swan winging through the morning mist!
The thousand thousand kisses that we kissed, 
The infinite device our love devised
If by some chance its truth might be surprised,
Are these all past? Are these to come? Believe me,
There is no parting; they can never leave me.
I have built you up into my heart and brain
So fast that we can never part again.
Why should I sing you these fantastic psalms
When all the time I have you in my arms?
Why? 'tis the murmur of our love that swells
Earth's dithyrambs and ocean's oracles.

But this is dawn; my soul shall make its nest
Where your sighs swing from rapture into rest
Love's thurible, your tiger-lily breast.
Written by Walt Whitman | Create an image from this poem

Song of the Redwood-Tree

 1
A CALIFORNIA song! 
A prophecy and indirection—a thought impalpable, to breathe, as air; 
A chorus of dryads, fading, departing—or hamadryads departing; 
A murmuring, fateful, giant voice, out of the earth and sky, 
Voice of a mighty dying tree in the Redwood forest dense.

Farewell, my brethren, 
Farewell, O earth and sky—farewell, ye neighboring waters; 
My time has ended, my term has come. 

2
Along the northern coast, 
Just back from the rock-bound shore, and the caves,
In the saline air from the sea, in the Mendocino country, 
With the surge for bass and accompaniment low and hoarse, 
With crackling blows of axes, sounding musically, driven by strong arms, 
Riven deep by the sharp tongues of the axes—there in the Redwood forest dense, 
I heard the mighty tree its death-chant chanting.

The choppers heard not—the camp shanties echoed not; 
The quick-ear’d teamsters, and chain and jack-screw men, heard not, 
As the wood-spirits came from their haunts of a thousand years, to join the refrain; 
But in my soul I plainly heard. 

Murmuring out of its myriad leaves,
Down from its lofty top, rising two hundred feet high, 
Out of its stalwart trunk and limbs—out of its foot-thick bark, 
That chant of the seasons and time—chant, not of the past only, but the future. 

3
You untold life of me, 
And all you venerable and innocent joys,
Perennial, hardy life of me, with joys, ’mid rain, and many a summer sun, 
And the white snows, and night, and the wild winds; 
O the great patient, rugged joys! my soul’s strong joys, unreck’d by man; 
(For know I bear the soul befitting me—I too have consciousness, identity, 
And all the rocks and mountains have—and all the earth;)
Joys of the life befitting me and brothers mine, 
Our time, our term has come. 

Nor yield we mournfully, majestic brothers, 
We who have grandly fill’d our time; 
With Nature’s calm content, and tacit, huge delight,
We welcome what we wrought for through the past, 
And leave the field for them. 

For them predicted long, 
For a superber Race—they too to grandly fill their time, 
For them we abdicate—in them ourselves, ye forest kings!
In them these skies and airs—these mountain peaks—Shasta—Nevadas, 
These huge, precipitous cliffs—this amplitude—these valleys grand—Yosemite, 
To be in them absorb’d, assimilated. 

4
Then to a loftier strain, 
Still prouder, more ecstatic, rose the chant,
As if the heirs, the Deities of the West, 
Joining, with master-tongue, bore part. 

Not wan from Asia’s fetishes, 
Nor red from Europe’s old dynastic slaughter-house, 
(Area of murder-plots of thrones, with scent left yet of wars and scaffolds every
 where,)
But come from Nature’s long and harmless throes—peacefully builded thence, 
These virgin lands—Lands of the Western Shore, 
To the new Culminating Man—to you, the Empire New, 
You, promis’d long, we pledge, we dedicate. 

You occult, deep volitions,
You average Spiritual Manhood, purpose of all, pois’d on yourself—giving, not taking
 law, 
You Womanhood divine, mistress and source of all, whence life and love, and aught that
 comes
 from life and love, 
You unseen Moral Essence of all the vast materials of America, (age upon age,
 working
 in Death the same as Life,) 
You that, sometimes known, oftener unknown, really shape and mould the New World,
 adjusting
 it to Time and Space, 
You hidden National Will, lying in your abysms, conceal’d, but ever alert,
You past and present purposes, tenaciously pursued, may-be unconscious of
 yourselves, 
Unswerv’d by all the passing errors, perturbations of the surface; 
You vital, universal, deathless germs, beneath all creeds, arts, statutes,
 literatures,

Here build your homes for good—establish here—These areas entire, Lands of the Western
 Shore, 
We pledge, we dedicate to you.

For man of you—your characteristic Race, 
Here may be hardy, sweet, gigantic grow—here tower, proportionate to Nature, 
Here climb the vast, pure spaces, unconfined, uncheck’d by wall or roof, 
Here laugh with storm or sun—here joy—here patiently inure, 
Here heed himself, unfold himself (not others’ formulas heed)—here fill
 his time,
To duly fall, to aid, unreck’d at last, 
To disappear, to serve. 

Thus, on the northern coast, 
In the echo of teamsters’ calls, and the clinking chains, and the music of choppers’ axes,

The falling trunk and limbs, the crash, the muffled shriek, the groan,
Such words combined from the Redwood-tree—as of wood-spirits’ voices ecstatic, ancient and
 rustling, 
The century-lasting, unseen dryads, singing, withdrawing, 
All their recesses of forests and mountains leaving, 
From the Cascade range to the Wasatch—or Idaho far, or Utah, 
To the deities of the Modern henceforth yielding,
The chorus and indications, the vistas of coming humanity—the settlements, features all, 
In the Mendocino woods I caught. 

5
The flashing and golden pageant of California! 
The sudden and gorgeous drama—the sunny and ample lands; 
The long and varied stretch from Puget Sound to Colorado south;
Lands bathed in sweeter, rarer, healthier air—valleys and mountain cliffs; 
The fields of Nature long prepared and fallow—the silent, cyclic chemistry; 
The slow and steady ages plodding—the unoccupied surface ripening—the rich ores forming
 beneath; 
At last the New arriving, assuming, taking possession, 
A swarming and busy race settling and organizing every where;
Ships coming in from the whole round world, and going out to the whole world, 
To India and China and Australia, and the thousand island paradises of the Pacific; 
Populous cities—the latest inventions—the steamers on the rivers—the railroads—with
 many a thrifty farm, with machinery, 
And wool, and wheat, and the grape—and diggings of yellow gold. 

6
But more in you than these, Lands of the Western Shore!
(These but the means, the implements, the standing-ground,) 
I see in you, certain to come, the promise of thousands of years, till now deferr’d, 
Promis’d, to be fulfill’d, our common kind, the Race. 

The New Society at last, proportionate to Nature, 
In Man of you, more than your mountain peaks, or stalwart trees imperial,
In Woman more, far more, than all your gold, or vines, or even vital air. 

Fresh come, to a New World indeed, yet long prepared, 
I see the Genius of the Modern, child of the Real and Ideal, 
Clearing the ground for broad humanity, the true America, heir of the past so grand, 
To build a grander future.
Written by Edgar Allan Poe | Create an image from this poem

The Valley Of Unrest

 Once it smiled a silent dell
Where the people did not dwell;
They had gone unto the wars,
Trusting to the mild-eyed stars,
Nightly, from their azure towers,
To keep watch above the flowers,
In the midst of which all day
The red sunlight lazily lay.
Now each visitor shall confess
The sad valley's restlessness.
Nothing there is motionless-
Nothing save the airs that brood
Over the magic solitude.
Ah, by no wind are stirred those trees
That palpitate like the chill seas
Around the misty Hebrides!
Ah, by no wind those clouds are driven
That rustle through the unquiet Heaven
Uneasily, from morn till even,
Over the violets there that lie
In myriad types of the human eye-
Over the lilies there that wave
And weep above a nameless grave!
They wave:- from out their fragrant tops
Eternal dews come down in drops.
They weep:- from off their delicate stems
Perennial tears descend in gems.
Written by Walt Whitman | Create an image from this poem

Ashes of Soldiers

 ASHES of soldiers! 
As I muse, retrospective, murmuring a chant in thought, 
Lo! the war resumes—again to my sense your shapes, 
And again the advance of armies. 

Noiseless as mists and vapors,
From their graves in the trenches ascending, 
From the cemeteries all through Virginia and Tennessee, 
From every point of the compass, out of the countless unnamed graves, 
In wafted clouds, in myraids large, or squads of twos or threes, or single ones, they
 come, 
And silently gather round me.

Now sound no note, O trumpeters! 
Not at the head of my cavalry, parading on spirited horses, 
With sabres drawn and glist’ning, and carbines by their thighs—(ah, my brave
 horsemen! 
My handsome, tan-faced horsemen! what life, what joy and pride, 
With all the perils, were yours!)

Nor you drummers—neither at reveille, at dawn, 
Nor the long roll alarming the camp—nor even the muffled beat for a burial; 
Nothing from you, this time, O drummers, bearing my warlike drums. 

But aside from these, and the marts of wealth, and the crowded promenade, 
Admitting around me comrades close, unseen by the rest, and voiceless,
The slain elate and alive again—the dust and debris alive, 
I chant this chant of my silent soul, in the name of all dead soldiers. 

Faces so pale, with wondrous eyes, very dear, gather closer yet; 
Draw close, but speak not. 

Phantoms of countless lost!
Invisible to the rest, henceforth become my companions! 
Follow me ever! desert me not, while I live. 

Sweet are the blooming cheeks of the living! sweet are the musical voices sounding! 
But sweet, ah sweet, are the dead, with their silent eyes. 

Dearest comrades! all is over and long gone;
But love is not over—and what love, O comrades! 
Perfume from battle-fields rising—up from foetor arising. 

Perfume therefore my chant, O love! immortal Love! 
Give me to bathe the memories of all dead soldiers, 
Shroud them, embalm them, cover them all over with tender pride!

Perfume all! make all wholesome! 
Make these ashes to nourish and blossom, 
O love! O chant! solve all, fructify all with the last chemistry. 

Give me exhaustless—make me a fountain, 
That I exhale love from me wherever I go, like a moist perennial dew,
For the ashes of all dead soldiers.


Written by Walt Whitman | Create an image from this poem

Scented Herbage of My Breast

 SCENTED herbage of my breast, 
Leaves from you I yield, I write, to be perused best afterwards, 
Tomb-leaves, body-leaves, growing up above me, above death, 
Perennial roots, tall leaves—O the winter shall not freeze you, delicate leaves, 
Every year shall you bloom again—out from where you retired, you shall emerge again;
O I do not know whether many, passing by, will discover you, or inhale your faint
 odor—but
 I
 believe a few will; 
O slender leaves! O blossoms of my blood! I permit you to tell, in your own way, of the
 heart
 that
 is under you; 
O burning and throbbing—surely all will one day be accomplish’d; 
O I do not know what you mean, there underneath yourselves—you are not happiness, 
You are often more bitter than I can bear—you burn and sting me,
Yet you are very beautiful to me, you faint-tinged roots—you make me think of Death, 
Death is beautiful from you—(what indeed is finally beautiful, except Death and
 Love?) 
—O I think it is not for life I am chanting here my chant of lovers—I think it
 must
 be for
 Death, 
For how calm, how solemn it grows, to ascend to the atmosphere of lovers, 
Death or life I am then indifferent—my Soul declines to prefer,
I am not sure but the high Soul of lovers welcomes death most; 
Indeed, O Death, I think now these leaves mean precisely the same as you mean; 
Grow up taller, sweet leaves, that I may see! grow up out of my breast! 
Spring away from the conceal’d heart there! 
Do not fold yourself so in your pink-tinged roots, timid leaves!
Do not remain down there so ashamed, herbage of my breast! 
Come, I am determin’d to unbare this broad breast of mine—I have long enough
 stifled
 and
 choked: 
—Emblematic and capricious blade, I leave you—now you serve me not; 
Away! I will say what I have to say, by itself, 
I will escape from the sham that was proposed to me,
I will sound myself and comrades only—I will never again utter a call, only their
 call, 
I will raise, with it, immortal reverberations through The States, 
I will give an example to lovers, to take permanent shape and will through The States; 
Through me shall the words be said to make death exhilarating; 
Give me your tone therefore, O Death, that I may accord with it,
Give me yourself—for I see that you belong to me now above all, and are folded
 inseparably
 together—you Love and Death are; 
Nor will I allow you to balk me any more with what I was calling life, 
For now it is convey’d to me that you are the purports essential, 
That you hide in these shifting forms of life, for reasons—and that they are mainly
 for
 you, 
That you, beyond them, come forth, to remain, the real reality,
That behind the mask of materials you patiently wait, no matter how long, 
That you will one day, perhaps, take control of all, 
That you will perhaps dissipate this entire show of appearance, 
That may-be you are what it is all for—but it does not last so very long; 
But you will last very long.
Written by Emily Dickinson | Create an image from this poem

For this -- accepted Breath

 For this -- accepted Breath --
Through it -- compete with Death --
The fellow cannot touch this Crown --
By it -- my title take --
Ah, what a royal sake
To my necessity -- stooped down!

No Wilderness -- can be
Where this attendeth me --
No Desert Noon --
No fear of frost to come
Haunt the perennial bloom --
But Certain June!

Get Gabriel -- to tell -- the royal syllable --
Get Saints -- with new -- unsteady tongue --
To say what trance below
Most like their glory show --
Fittest the Crown!
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 Philip Levine | Create an image from this poem

Berenda Slough

 Earth and water without form, 
change, or pause: as if the third 
day had not come, this calm norm 
of chaos denies the Word. 

One sees only a surface 
pocked with rushes, the starved clumps 
pressed between water and space -- 
rootless, perennial stumps 

fixed in position, entombed 
in nothing; it is too late 
to bring forth branches, to bloom 
or die, only the long wait 

lies ahead, a parody 
of perfection. Who denies 
this is creation, this sea 
constant before the stunned eye's 

insatiable gaze, shall find 
nothing he can comprehend. 
Here the mind beholds the mind 
as it shall be in the end.
Written by James Wright | Create an image from this poem

A Poem About George Doty In The Death House

 Lured by the wall, and drawn
To stare below the roof,
Where pigeons nest aloof
From prowling cats and men,
I count the sash and bar
Secured to granite stone,
And note the daylight gone,
Supper and silence near.

Close to the wall inside,
Immured, empty of love,
A man I have wondered of
Lies patient, vacant-eye.
A month and a day ago
He stopped his car and found
A girl on the darkening ground,
And killed her in the snow.

Beside his cell, I am told,
Hardy perennial bums
Complain till twilight comes
For hunger and for cold.
They hardly know of a day
That saw their hunger pass.
Bred to the dark, their flesh
Peacefully withers away.

The man who sits alone,
He is the one for wonder,
Who sways his fingers under
The cleanly shaven chin,
Who sees, in the shaving mirror
Pinned to the barren wall,
The uprooted ghost of all:
The simple, easy terror.

Caught between sky and earth,
Poor stupid animal,
Stripped naked to the wall,
He saw the blundered birth
Of daemons beyond sound.
Sick of the dark, he rose
For love, and now he goes
Back to the broken ground.

Now, as he grips the chain
And holds the wall, to bear
What no man ever bore,
He hears the bums complain;
But I mourn no soul but his,
Not even the bums who die,
Nor the homely girl whose cry
Crumbled his pleading kiss.

Book: Reflection on the Important Things