10 Best Famous Quatrains Poems

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

• All Famous Quatrains Poems

 I pull the bed slowly open, I
open the lips of the bed, get
the stack of fresh underpants
out of the suitcase—peach, white,
cherry, quince, pussy willow, I
choose a color and put them on,
I travel with the stack for the stack's caress,
dry and soft. I enter the soft
birth-lips of the bed, take off my
glasses, and the cabbage-roses on the curtain
blur to Keats's peonies, the
ochre willow holds a cloud
the way a skeleton holds flesh
and it passes, does not hold it.
The bed fits me like a walnut shell its
meat, my hands touch the upper corners,
the lower, my feet. It is so silent
I hear the choirs of wild silence, the
maenads of the atoms. Is this what it feels like
to have a mother? The sheets are heavy
cream, whipped. Ah, here is my mother,
or rather here she is not, so this is
paradise. But surely that
was paradise, when her Jell-O nipple was the
size of my own fist, in front of my
face—out of its humped runkles those
several springs of milk, so fierce
almost fearsome. What did I think
in that brain gridded for thought, its cups
loaded with languageless rennet? And at night,
when they timed me, four hours of screaming, not a
minute more, four, those quatrains of
icy yell, then the cold tap water
to get me over my shameless hunger,
what was it like to be there when that
hunger was driven into my structure at such
heat it alloyed that iron? Where have I
been while this person is leading my life
with her patience, will and order? In the garden;
on the bee and under the bee; in the
crown gathering cumulus and
flensing it from the boughs, weeping a
rehearsal for the rotting and casting off of our
flesh, the year we slowly throw it
off like clothing by the bed covers of our lover, and dive under.

 One said: Thy life is thine to make or mar,
To flicker feebly, or to soar, a star;
 It lies with thee -- the choice is thine, is thine,
To hit the ties or drive thy auto-car.

I answered Her: The choice is mine -- ah, no!
We all were made or marred long, long ago.
 The parts are written; hear the super wail:
"Who is stage-managing this cosmic show?"

Blind fools of fate and slaves of circumstance,
Life is a fiddler, and we all must dance.
 From gloom where mocks that will-o'-wisp, Free-will
I heard a voice cry: "Say, give us a chance."

Chance! Oh, there is no chance! The scene is set.
Up with the curtain! Man, the marionette,
 Resumes his part. The gods will work the wires.
They've got it all down fine, you bet, you bet!

It's all decreed -- the mighty earthquake crash,
The countless constellations' wheel and flash;
 The rise and fall of empires, war's red tide;
The composition of your dinner hash.

There's no haphazard in this world of ours.
Cause and effect are grim, relentless powers.
 They rule the world. (A king was shot last night;
Last night I held the joker and both bowers.)

From out the mesh of fate our heads we thrust.
We can't do what we would, but what we must.
 Heredity has got us in a cinch --
(Consoling thought when you've been on a "bust".)

Hark to the song where spheral voices blend:
"There's no beginning, never will be end."
 It makes us nutty; hang the astral chimes!
The tables spread; come, let us dine, my friend.

 I

As eons of incalculable strife 
Are in the vision of one moment caught, 
So are the common, concrete things of life 
Divinely shadowed on the walls of Thought. 


II

We shriek to live, but no man ever lives
Till he has rid the ghost of human breath; 
We dream to die, but no man ever dies 
Till he has quit the road that runs to death.

 I

As long as Fame's imperious music rings 
Will poets mock it with crowned words august; 
And haggard men will clamber to be kings 
As long as Glory weighs itself in dust. 

II

Drink to the splendor of the unfulfilled, 
Nor shudder for the revels that are done: 
The wines that flushed Lucullus are all spilled, 
The strings that Nero fingered are all gone. 

III

We cannot crown ourselves with everything, 
Nor can we coax the Fates for us to quarrel: 
No matter what we are, or what we sing, 
Time finds a withered leaf in every laurel.