10 Best Famous Potions Poems

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

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In The Small Hours

by Wole Soyinka
Blue diaphane, tobacco smoke
Serpentine on wet film and wood glaze,
Mutes chrome, wreathes velvet drapes,
Dims the cave of mirrors. Ghost fingers
Comb seaweed hair, stroke acquamarine veins
Of marooned mariners, captives
Of Circe's sultry notes. The barman
Dispenses igneous potions ?
Somnabulist, the band plays on.

Cocktail mixer, silvery fish
Dances for limpet clients.
Applause is steeped in lassitude,
Tangled in webs of lovers' whispers
And artful eyelash of the androgynous.
The hovering notes caress the night
Mellowed deep indigo ?still they play.

Departures linger. Absences do not
Deplete the tavern. They hang over the haze
As exhalations from receded shores. Soon,
Night repossesses the silence, but till dawn
The notes hold sway, smoky
Epiphanies, possessive of the hours.

This music's plaint forgives, redeems
The deafness of the world. Night turns
Homewards, sheathed in notes of solace, pleats
The broken silence of the heart.

Sonnet 119: What potions have I drunk of Siren tears

by William Shakespeare
 What potions have I drunk of Siren tears,
Distilled from limbecks foul as hell within,
Applying fears to hopes, and hopes to fears,
Still losing when I saw my self to win!
What wretched errors hath my heart committed,
Whilst it hath thought it self so blessèd never!
How have mine eyes out of their spheres been fitted
In the distraction of this madding fever!
O, benefit of ill, now I find true
That better is, by evil still made better;
And ruined love, when it is built anew,
Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater.
So I return rebuked to my content,
And gain by ills thrice more than I have spent.

The Big Boots Of Pain

by Anne Sexton
 There can be certain potions 
needled in the clock 
for the body's fall from grace, 
to untorture and to plead for. 
These I have known 
and would sell all my furniture 
and books and assorted goods 
to avoid, and more, more. 

But the other pain
I would sell my life to avoid 
the pain that begins in the crib 
with its bars or perhaps 
with your first breath 
when the planets drill 
your future into you 
for better of worse 
as you marry life 
and the love that gets doled out 
or doesn't. 

I find now, swallowing one teaspoon 
of pain, that it drops downward 
to the past where it mixes 
with last year's cupful 
and downward into a decade's quart 
and downward into a lifetime's ocean. 
I alternate treading water 
and deadman's float. 

The teaspoon ought to be hearable 
if it didn't mix into the reruns 
and thus enlarge into what it is not, 
a sea pest's sting turning promptly 
into the shark's neat biting off 
of a leg because the soul 
wears a magnifying glass. 
Kicking the heart 
with pain's big boots running up and down 
the intestines like a motorcycle racer. 

Yet one does get out of bed 
and start over, plunge into the day 
and put on a hopeful look 
and does not allow fear to build a wall 
between you and an old friend 
or a new friend and reach out your hand, 
shutting down the thought that 
an axe may cut it off unexpectedly. 
One learns not to blab about all this 
except to yourself or the typewriter keys 
who tell no one until they get brave 
and crawl off onto the printed page. 

I'm getting bored with it, 
I tell the typewriter, 
this constantly walking around 
in wet shoes and then, surprise! 
Somehow DECEASED keeps getting 
stamped in red over the word HOPE. 
And I who keep falling thankfully 
into each new pillow of belief, 
finding my Mercy Street, 
kissing it and tenderly gift-wrapping my love, 
am beginning to wonder just what 
the planets had in mind on November 9th, 1928. 
The pillows are ripped away, 
the hand guillotined, 
dog **** thrown into the middle of a laugh, 
a hornets' nest building into the hi-fi speaker 
and leaving me in silence, 
where, without music, 
I become a cracked orphan. 

Well, 
one gets out of bed 
and the planets don't always hiss 
or muck up the day, each day. 
As for the pain and its multiplying teaspoon, 
perhaps it is a medicine 
that will cure the soul 
of its greed for love 
next Thursday.

Potions

by Yusef Komunyakaa
 The old woman made mint
Candy for the children
Who'd bolt through her front door,
Silhouettes of the great blue

Heron. She sold ten-dollar potions
 From a half-lit kitchen. Chinese boxes
Furnished with fliers & sinkers. Sassafras
& lizard tongues. They'd walk out

Of the woods or drive in from cities,
Clutching lovesick dollar bills
At a side door that opened beside
A chinaberry tree. Did their eyes

Doubt under Orion as voices
Of the dead spoke? They carried
Photos, locks of hair, nail clippings,
& the first three words of a wish.

Sonnet 111: O for my sake do you with Fortune chide

by William Shakespeare
 O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public manners breeds.
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand.
Pity me then, and wish I were renewed,
Whilst like a willing patient I will drink
Potions of eisel 'gainst my strong infection;
No bitterness that I will bitter think,
Nor double penance to correct correction.
Pity me then, dear friend, and I assure ye
Even that your pity is enough to cure me.

Lullaby

by William Butler Yeats
 Beloved, may your sleep be sound
That have found it where you fed.
What were all the world's alarms
To mighty paris when he found
Sleep upon a golden bed
That first dawn in Helen's arms?

Sleep, beloved, such a sleep
As did that wild Tristram know
When, the potion's work being done,
Roe could run or doe could leap
Under oak and beechen bough,
Roe could leap or doe could run;

Such a sleep and sound as fell
Upon Eurotas' grassy bank
When the holy bird, that there
Accomplished his predestined will,
From the limbs of Leda sank
But not from her protecting care.

In The Small Hours

by
 Blue diaphane, tobacco smoke
Serpentine on wet film and wood glaze, 
Mutes chrome, wreathes velvet drapes,
Dims the cave of mirrors. Ghost fingers
Comb seaweed hair, stroke acquamarine veins 
Of marooned mariners, captives 
Of Circe's sultry notes. The barman
Dispenses igneous potions ?
Somnabulist, the band plays on. 

Cocktail mixer, silvery fish
Dances for limpet clients.
Applause is steeped in lassitude,
Tangled in webs of lovers' whispers
And artful eyelash of the androgynous.
The hovering notes caress the night 
Mellowed deep indigo ?still they play.

Departures linger. Absences do not
Deplete the tavern. They hang over the haze 
As exhalations from receded shores. Soon,
Night repossesses the silence, but till dawn
The notes hold sway, smoky
Epiphanies, possessive of the hours.

This music's plaint forgives, redeems 
The deafness of the world. Night turns
Homewards, sheathed in notes of solace, pleats
The broken silence of the heart.

Sonnet CXI

by William Shakespeare
 O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public manners breeds.
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand:
Pity me then and wish I were renew'd;
Whilst, like a willing patient, I will drink
Potions of eisel 'gainst my strong infection
No bitterness that I will bitter think,
Nor double penance, to correct correction.
Pity me then, dear friend, and I assure ye
Even that your pity is enough to cure me.

Sonnet CXIX

by William Shakespeare
 What potions have I drunk of Siren tears,
Distill'd from limbecks foul as hell within,
Applying fears to hopes and hopes to fears,
Still losing when I saw myself to win!
What wretched errors hath my heart committed,
Whilst it hath thought itself so blessed never!
How have mine eyes out of their spheres been fitted
In the distraction of this madding fever!
O benefit of ill! now I find true
That better is by evil still made better;
And ruin'd love, when it is built anew,
Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater.
So I return rebuked to my content
And gain by ill thrice more than I have spent.

Sonnet CXI: O for my sake do you with Fortune chide

by William Shakespeare
 O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public manners breeds.
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdu'd
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand.
Pity me then and wish I were renew'd;
Whilst, like a willing patient, I will drink
Potions of eisel 'gainst my strong infection;
No bitterness that I will bitter think,
Nor double penance, to correct correction.
Pity me then, dear friend, and I assure ye
Even that your pity is enough to cure me.
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