10 Best Famous Persists Poems

Here is a collection of the top 10 all-time best famous Persists poems. This is a select list of the best famous Persists poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Persists poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of persists poems.

• All Famous Persists Poems

Written by Marianne Moore | Marriage This institution, perhaps one should say enterprise out of respect for which one says one need not change one's mind about a thing one has believed in, requiring public promises of one's intention to fulfill a private obligation: I wonder what Adam and Eve think of it by this time, this firegilt steel alive with goldenness; how bright it shows -- "of circular traditions and impostures, committing many spoils," requiring all one's criminal ingenuity to avoid! Psychology which explains everything explains nothing and we are still in doubt. Eve: beautiful woman -- I have seen her when she was so handsome she gave me a start, able to write simultaneously in three languages -- English, German and French and talk in the meantime; equally positive in demanding a commotion and in stipulating quiet: "I should like to be alone;" to which the visitor replies, "I should like to be alone; why not be alone together?" Below the incandescent stars below the incandescent fruit, the strange experience of beauty; its existence is too much; it tears one to pieces and each fresh wave of consciousness is poison. "See her, see her in this common world," the central flaw in that first crystal-fine experiment, this amalgamation which can never be more than an interesting possibility, describing it as "that strange paradise unlike flesh, gold, or stately buildings, the choicest piece of my life: the heart rising in its estate of peace as a boat rises with the rising of the water;" constrained in speaking of the serpent -- that shed snakeskin in the history of politeness not to be returned to again -- that invaluable accident exonerating Adam. And he has beauty also; it's distressing -- the O thou to whom, from whom, without whom nothing -- Adam; "something feline, something colubrine" -- how true! a crouching mythological monster in that Persian miniature of emerald mines, raw silk -- ivory white, snow white, oyster white and six others -- that paddock full of leopards and giraffes -- long lemonyellow bodies sown with trapezoids of blue. Alive with words, vibrating like a cymbal touched before it has been struck, he has prophesied correctly -- the industrious waterfall, "the speedy stream which violently bears all before it, at one time silent as the air and now as powerful as the wind." "Treading chasms on the uncertain footing of a spear," forgetting that there is in woman a quality of mind which is an instinctive manifestation is unsafe, he goes on speaking in a formal, customary strain of "past states," the present state, seals, promises, the evil one suffered, the good one enjoys, hell, heaven, everything convenient to promote one's joy." There is in him a state of mind by force of which, perceiving what it was not intended that he should, "he experiences a solemn joy in seeing that he has become an idol." Plagued by the nightingale in the new leaves, with its silence -- not its silence but its silences, he says of it: "It clothes me with a shirt of fire." "He dares not clap his hands to make it go on lest it should fly off; if he does nothing, it will sleep; if he cries out, it will not understand." Unnerved by the nightingale and dazzled by the apple, impelled by "the illusion of a fire effectual to extinguish fire," compared with which the shining of the earth is but deformity -- a fire "as high as deep as bright as broad as long as life itself," he stumbles over marriage, "a very trivial object indeed" to have destroyed the attitude in which he stood -- the ease of the philosopher unfathered by a woman. Unhelpful Hymen! "a kind of overgrown cupid" reduced to insignificance by the mechanical advertising parading as involuntary comment, by that experiment of Adam's with ways out but no way in -- the ritual of marriage, augmenting all its lavishness; its fiddle-head ferns, lotus flowers, opuntias, white dromedaries, its hippopotamus -- nose and mouth combined in one magnificent hopper, "the crested screamer -- that huge bird almost a lizard," its snake and the potent apple. He tells us that "for love that will gaze an eagle blind, that is like a Hercules climbing the trees in the garden of the Hesperides, from forty-five to seventy is the best age," commending it as a fine art, as an experiment, a duty or as merely recreation. One must not call him ruffian nor friction a calamity -- the fight to be affectionate: "no truth can be fully known until it has been tried by the tooth of disputation." The blue panther with black eyes, the basalt panther with blue eyes, entirely graceful -- one must give them the path -- the black obsidian Diana who "darkeneth her countenance as a bear doth, causing her husband to sigh," the spiked hand that has an affection for one and proves it to the bone, impatient to assure you that impatience is the mark of independence not of bondage. "Married people often look that way" -- "seldom and cold, up and down, mixed and malarial with a good day and bad." "When do we feed?" We occidentals are so unemotional, we quarrel as we feed; one's self is quite lost, the irony preserved in "the Ahasuerus t?te ? t?te banquet" with its "good monster, lead the way," with little laughter and munificence of humor in that quixotic atmosphere of frankness in which "Four o'clock does not exist but at five o'clock the ladies in their imperious humility are ready to receive you"; in which experience attests that men have power and sometimes one is made to feel it. He says, "what monarch would not blush to have a wife with hair like a shaving-brush? The fact of woman is not `the sound of the flute but every poison.'" She says, "`Men are monopolists of stars, garters, buttons and other shining baubles' -- unfit to be the guardians of another person's happiness." He says, "These mummies must be handled carefully -- `the crumbs from a lion's meal, a couple of shins and the bit of an ear'; turn to the letter M and you will find that `a wife is a coffin,' that severe object with the pleasing geometry stipulating space and not people, refusing to be buried and uniquely disappointing, revengefully wrought in the attitude of an adoring child to a distinguished parent." She says, "This butterfly, this waterfly, this nomad that has `proposed to settle on my hand for life.' -- What can one do with it? There must have been more time in Shakespeare's day to sit and watch a play. You know so many artists are fools." He says, "You know so many fools who are not artists." The fact forgot that "some have merely rights while some have obligations," he loves himself so much, he can permit himself no rival in that love. She loves herself so much, she cannot see herself enough -- a statuette of ivory on ivory, the logical last touch to an expansive splendor earned as wages for work done: one is not rich but poor when one can always seem so right. What can one do for them -- these savages condemned to disaffect all those who are not visionaries alert to undertake the silly task of making people noble? This model of petrine fidelity who "leaves her peaceful husband only because she has seen enough of him" -- that orator reminding you, "I am yours to command." "Everything to do with love is mystery; it is more than a day's work to investigate this science." One sees that it is rare -- that striking grasp of opposites opposed each to the other, not to unity, which in cycloid inclusiveness has dwarfed the demonstration of Columbus with the egg -- a triumph of simplicity -- that charitive Euroclydon of frightening disinterestedness which the world hates, admitting: "I am such a cow, if I had a sorrow, I should feel it a long time; I am not one of those who have a great sorrow in the morning and a great joy at noon;" which says: "I have encountered it among those unpretentious proteg?s of wisdom, where seeming to parade as the debater and the Roman, the statesmanship of an archaic Daniel Webster persists to their simplicity of temper as the essence of the matter: `Liberty and union now and forever;' the book on the writing-table; the hand in the breast-pocket."

Written by Lucy Maud Montgomery | Genius Genius, like gold and precious stones, is chiefly prized because of its rarity. Geniuses are people who dash of weird, wild, incomprehensible poems with astonishing facility, and get booming drunk and sleep in the gutter. Genius elevates its possessor to ineffable spheres far above the vulgar world and fills his soul with regal contempt for the gross and sordid things of earth. It is probably on account of this that people who have genius do not pay their board, as a general thing. Geniuses are very singular. If you see a young man who has frowsy hair and distraught look, and affects eccentricity in dress, you may set him down for a genius. If he sings about the degeneracy of a world which courts vulgar opulence and neglects brains, he is undoubtedly a genius. If he is too proud to accept assistance, and spurns it with a lordly air at the very same time that he knows he can't make a living to save his life, he is most certainly a genius. If he hangs on and sticks to poetry, notwithstanding sawing wood comes handier to him, he is a true genius. If he throws away every opportunity in life and crushes the affection and the patience of his friends and then protests in sickly rhymes of his hard lot, and finally persists, in spite of the sound advice of persons who have got sense but not any genius, persists in going up some infamous back alley dying in rags and dirt, he is beyond all question a genius. But above all things, to deftly throw the incoherent ravings of insanity into verse and then rush off and get booming drunk, is the surest of all the different signs of genius.

Written by Lisel Mueller | Immortality In Sleeping Beauty's castle the clock strikes one hundred years and the girl in the tower returns to the world. So do the servants in the kitchen, who don't even rub their eyes. The cook's right hand, lifted an exact century ago, completes its downward arc to the kitchen boy's left ear; the boy's tensed vocal cords finally let go the trapped, enduring whimper, and the fly, arrested mid-plunge above the strawberry pie fulfills its abiding mission and dives into the sweet, red glaze. As a child I had a book with a picture of that scene. I was too young to notice how fear persists, and how the anger that causes fear persists, that its trajectory can't be changed or broken, only interrupted. My attention was on the fly: that this slight body with its transparent wings and life-span of one human day still craved its particular share of sweetness, a century later.

Written by Francois Villon | The Ballad Of The Proverbs So rough the goat will scratch, it cannot sleep. So often goes the pot to the well that it breaks. So long you heat iron, it will glow; so heavily you hammer it, it shatters. So good is the man as his praise; so far he will go, and he's forgotten; so bad he behaves, and he's despised. So loud you cry Christmas, it comes. So glib you talk, you end up in contradictions. So good is your credit as the favors you got. So much you promise that you will back out. So doggedly you beg that your wish is granted; so high climbs the price when you want a thing; so much you want it that you pay the price; so familiar it gets to you, you want it no more. So loud you cry Christmas, it comes. So, you love a dog. Then feed it! So long a song will run that people learn it. So long you keep the fruit, it will rot. So hot the struggle for a spot that it is won; so cool you keep your act that your spirit freezes; so hurriedly you act that you run into bad luck; so tight you embrace that your catch slips away. So loud you cry Christmas, it comes. So you scoff and laugh, and the fun is gone. So you crave and spend, and lose your shirt. So candid you are, no blow can be too low. So good as a gift should a promise be. So, if you love God, you obey the Church. So, when you give much, you borrow much. So, shifting winds turn to storm. So loud you cry Christmas, it comes. Prince, so long as a fool persists, he grows wiser; so, round the world he goes, but return he will, so humbled and beaten back into servility. So loud you cry Christmas, it is here.

Written by Duncan Campbell Scott | From Shadow Now the November skies, And the clouds that are thin and gray, That drop with the wind away; A flood of sunlight rolls, In a tide of shallow light, Gold on the land and white On the water, dim and warm in the wood; Then it is gone, and the wan Clear of the shade Covers fields and barren and glade. The peace of labor done, Is wide in the gracious earth; The harvest is won; Past are the tears and the mirth; And we feel in the tenuous air How far beyond thought or prayer Is the grace of silent things, That work for the world alway, Neither for fear nor for pay, And when labor is over, rest. The moil of our fretted life Is borne anew to the soul, Borne with its cark and strife, Its burden of care and dread, Its glories elusive and strange; And the weight of the weary whole Presses it down, till we cry: Where is the fruit of our deeds? Why should we struggle to build Towers against death on the plain? All things possess their lives Save man, whose task and desire Transcend his power and his will. The question is over and still; Nothing replies: but the earth Takes on a lovelier hue From a cloud that neighbored the sun, That the sun burned down and through, Till it glowed like a seraph's wing; The fields that were gray and dun Are warm in the flowing light; Fair in the west the night Strikes in with vibrant star. Something has stirred afar In the shadow that winter flings; A message comes up to the soul From the soul of inanimate things: A message that widens and grows Till it touches the deeds of man, Till we see in the torturous throes Some dawning glimmer of plan; Till we feel in the deepening night The hand of the angel Content, That stranger of calmness and light, With his brow over us bent, Who moves with his eyes on the earth, Whose robe of lambent green, A tissue of herb and its sheen, Tells the mother who gave him birth. The message plays through his power, Till it flames exultant in thought, As the quince-tree triumphs in flower. The fruit that is checked and marred Goes under the sod: The good lives here in the world; It persists,-- it is God.

Written by Wallace Stevens | Negation Hi! The creator too is blind, Struggling toward his harmonious whole, Rejecting intermediate parts, Horrors and falsities and wrongs; Incapable master of all force, Too vague idealist, overwhelmed By an afflatus that persists. For this, then, we endure brief lives, The evanescent symmetries From that meticulous potter's thumb.

Written by D. H. Lawrence | Scent of Irises A faint, sickening scent of irises Persists all morning. Here in a jar on the table A fine proud spike of purple irises Rising above the class-room litter, makes me unable To see the class’s lifted and bended faces Save in a broken pattern, amid purple and gold and sable. I can smell the gorgeous bog-end, in its breathless Dazzle of may-blobs, when the marigold glare overcast you With fire on your cheeks and your brow and your chin as you dipped Your face in the marigold bunch, to touch and contrast you, Your own dark mouth with the bridal faint lady-smocks, Dissolved on the golden sorcery you should not outlast. You amid the bog-end’s yellow incantation, You sitting in the cowslips of the meadow above, Me, your shadow on the bog-flame, flowery may-blobs, Me full length in the cowslips, muttering you love; You, your soul like a lady-smock, lost, evanescent, You with your face all rich, like the sheen of a dove. You are always asking, do I remember, remember The butter-cup bog-end where the flowers rose up And kindled you over deep with a cast of gold? You ask again, do the healing days close up The open darkness which then drew us in, The dark which then drank up our brimming cup. You upon the dry, dead beech-leaves, in the fire of night Burnt like a sacrifice; you invisible; Only the fire of darkness, and the scent of you! —And yes, thank God, it still is possible The healing days shall close the darkness up Wherein we fainted like a smoke or dew. Like vapour, dew, or poison. Now, thank God, The fire of night is gone, and your face is ash Indistinguishable on the grey, chill day; The night had burst us out, at last the good Dark fire burns on untroubled, without clash Of you upon the dead leaves saying me Yea.

Written by John Burnside | Agoraphobia My whole world is all you refuse: a black light, angelic and cold on the path to the orchard, fox-runs and clouded lanes and the glitter of webbing, little owls snagged in the fruit nets out by the wire and the sense of another life, that persists when I go out into the yard and the cattle stand round me, obstinate and dumb. All afternoon, I've worked at the edge of your vision, mending fences, marking out our bounds. Now it is dusk, I turn back to the house and catch you, like the pale Eurydice of children's classics, venturing a glance at nothing, at this washed infinity of birchwoods and sky and the wet streets leading away to all you forget: the otherworld, lucid and cold with floodlights and passing trains and the noise of traffic and nothing like the map you sometimes study for its empty bridlepaths, its hill-tracks and lanes and roads winding down to a coast of narrow harbors, lit against the sea.

Written by Robert Frost | Sitting by a Bush in Broad Sunlight When I spread out my hand here today, I catch no more than a ray To feel of between thumb and fingers; No lasting effect of it lingers. There was one time and only the one When dust really took in the sun; And from that one intake of fire All creatures still warmly suspire. And if men have watched a long time And never seen sun-smitten slime Again come to life and crawl off, We not be too ready to scoff. God once declared he was true And then took the veil and withdrew, And remember how final a hush Then descended of old on the bush. God once spoke to people by name. The sun once imparted its flame. One impulse persists as our breath; The other persists as our faith.

Written by John Berryman | Dream Song 110: It was the blue and plain ones. I forget all that It was the blue & plain ones. I forget all that. My own clouds darkening hung. Besides, it wasn't serious. They took them in different rooms & fed them lies. 'She admitted you wanted to get rid of it.' 'He told us he told you to.' The Force, with its rapists con-men murderers, has been our Pride (trust Henry) eighty years;-” now Teddy was hard on. Still the tradition persists, beat up, beat on, take, take. Frame. Get set; cover up. The Saturday confessions are really something. Here was there less or nothing in question but horror. She left his brother's son two minutes but-” as I say I forget that-” during the time he drowned. The laundry lived and they lived, uncharged, and went their ways apart with the blessing of the N.Y. Police Force.