10 Best Famous Quieted Poems

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

• All Famous Quieted Poems

 Thank Heaven! the crisis- 
The danger is past, 
And the lingering illness 
Is over at last- 
And the fever called "Living" 
Is conquered at last. 
Sadly, I know 
I am shorn of my strength, 
And no muscle I move 
As I lie at full length- 
But no matter!-I feel 
I am better at length. 

And I rest so composedly, 
Now, in my bed 
That any beholder 
Might fancy me dead- 
Might start at beholding me, 
Thinking me dead. 

The moaning and groaning, 
The sighing and sobbing, 
Are quieted now, 
With that horrible throbbing 
At heart:- ah, that horrible, 
Horrible throbbing! 

The sickness- the nausea- 
The pitiless pain- 
Have ceased, with the fever 
That maddened my brain- 
With the fever called "Living" 
That burned in my brain. 

And oh! of all tortures 
That torture the worst 
Has abated- the terrible 
Torture of thirst 
For the naphthaline river 
Of Passion accurst:- 
I have drunk of a water 
That quenches all thirst:- 

Of a water that flows, 
With a lullaby sound, 
From a spring but a very few 
Feet under ground- 
From a cavern not very far 
Down under ground. 

And ah! let it never 
Be foolishly said 
That my room it is gloomy 
And narrow my bed; 
For man never slept 
In a different bed- 
And, to sleep, you must slumber 
In just such a bed. 

My tantalized spirit 
Here blandly reposes, 
Forgetting, or never 
Regretting its roses- 
Its old agitations 
Of myrtles and roses: 

For now, while so quietly 
Lying, it fancies 
A holier odor 
About it, of pansies- 
A rosemary odor, 
Commingled with pansies- 
With rue and the beautiful 
Puritan pansies. 

And so it lies happily, 
Bathing in many 
A dream of the truth 
And the beauty of Annie- 
Drowned in a bath 
Of the tresses of Annie. 

She tenderly kissed me, 
She fondly caressed, 
And then I fell gently 
To sleep on her breast- 
Deeply to sleep 
From the heaven of her breast. 

When the light was extinguished, 
She covered me warm, 
And she prayed to the angels 
To keep me from harm- 
To the queen of the angels 
To shield me from harm. 

And I lie so composedly, 
Now, in my bed, 
(Knowing her love) 
That you fancy me dead- 
And I rest so contentedly, 
Now, in my bed, 
(With her love at my breast) 
That you fancy me dead- 
That you shudder to look at me, 
Thinking me dead. 

But my heart it is brighter 
Than all of the many 
Stars in the sky, 
For it sparkles with Annie- 
It glows with the light 
Of the love of my Annie- 
With the thought of the light 
Of the eyes of my Annie.

 I
When I considered it too closely, when I wore it like an element
 and smelt it like water,
Life is become less lovely, the net nearer than the skin, a
 little troublesome, a little terrible.

I pledged myself awhile ago not to seek refuge, neither in death
 nor in a walled garden,
In lies nor gated loyalties, nor in the gates of contempt, that
 easily lock the world out of doors.

Here on the rock it is great and beautiful, here on the foam-wet
 granite sea-fang it is easy to praise
Life and water and the shining stones: but whose cattle are the
 herds of the people that one should love them?

If they were yours, then you might take a cattle-breeder's
 delight in the herds of the future. Not yours.
Where the power ends let love, before it sours to jealousy.
 Leave the joys of government to Caesar.

Who is born when the world wanes, when the brave soul of the
 world falls on decay in the flesh increasing
Comes one with a great level mind, sufficient vision, sufficient
 blindness, and clemency for love.

This is the breath of rottenness I smelt; from the world
 waiting, stalled between storms, decaying a little,
Bitterly afraid to be hurt, but knowing it cannot draw the
 savior Caesar but out of the blood-bath.

The apes of Christ lift up their hands to praise love: but
 wisdom without love is the present savior,
Power without hatred, mind like a many-bladed machine subduing
 the world with deep indifference.

The apes of Christ itch for a sickness they have never known;
 words and the little envies will hardly
Measure against that blinding fire behind the tragic eyes they
 have never dared to confront.

II
Point Lobos lies over the hollowed water like a humped whale
 swimming to shoal; Point Lobos
Was wounded with that fire; the hills at Point Sur endured it;
 the palace at Thebes; the hill Calvary.

Out of incestuous love power and then ruin. A man forcing the
 imaginations of men,
Possessing with love and power the people: a man defiling his
 own household with impious desire.

King Oedipus reeling blinded from the palace doorway, red tears
 pouring from the torn pits
Under the forehead; and the young Jew writhing on the domed hill
 in the earthquake, against the eclipse

Frightfully uplifted for having turned inward to love the
 people: -that root was so sweet O dreadful agonist? -
I saw the same pierced feet, that walked in the same crime to
 its expiation; I heard the same cry.

A bad mountain to build your world on. Am I another keeper of
 the people, that on my own shore,
On the gray rock, by the grooved mass of the ocean, the
 sicknesses I left behind me concern me?

Here where the surf has come incredible ways out of the splendid
 west, over the deeps
Light nor life sounds forever; here where enormous sundowns
 flower and burn through color to quietness;

Then the ecstasy of the stars is present? As for the people, I
 have found my rock, let them find theirs.
Let them lie down at Caesar's feet and be saved; and he in his
 time reap their daggers of gratitude.

III
Yet I am the one made pledges against the refuge contempt, that
 easily locks the world out of doors.
This people as much as the sea-granite is part of the God from
 whom I desire not to be fugitive.

I see them: they are always crying. The shored Pacific makes
 perpetual music, and the stone mountains
Their music of silence, the stars blow long pipings of light:
 the people are always crying in their hearts.

One need not pity; certainly one must not love. But who has seen
 peace, if he should tell them where peace
Lives in the world...they would be powerless to understand; and
 he is not willing to be reinvolved.

IV
How should one caught in the stone of his own person dare tell
 the people anything but relative to that?
But if a man could hold in his mind all the conditions at once,
 of man and woman, of civilized

And barbarous, of sick and well, of happy and under torture, of
 living and dead, of human and not
Human, and dimly all the human future: -what should persuade him
 to speak? And what could his words change?

The mountain ahead of the world is not forming but fixed. But
 the man's words would be fixed also,
Part of that mountain, under equal compulsion; under the same
 present compulsion in the iron consistency.

And nobody sees good or evil but out of a brain a hundred
 centuries quieted, some desert
Prophet's, a man humped like a camel, gone mad between the mud-
 walled village and the mountain sepulchres.

V
Broad wagons before sunrise bring food into the city from the
 open farms, and the people are fed.
They import and they consume reality. Before sunrise a hawk in
 the desert made them their thoughts.

VI
Here is an anxious people, rank with suppressed
 bloodthirstiness. Among the mild and unwarlike
Gautama needed but live greatly and be heard, Confucius needed
 but live greatly and be heard:

This people has not outgrown blood-sacrifice, one must writhe on
 the high cross to catch at their memories;
The price is known. I have quieted love; for love of the people
 I would not do it. For power I would do it.

--But that stands against reason: what is power to a dead man,
 dead under torture? --What is power to a man
Living, after the flesh is content? Reason is never a root,
 neither of act nor desire.

For power living I would never do it; they'are not delightful to
 touch, one wants to be separate. For power
After the nerves are put away underground, to lighten the
 abstract unborn children toward peace...

A man might have paid anguish indeed. Except he had found the
 standing sea-rock that even this last
Temptation breaks on; quieter than death but lovelier; peace
 that quiets the desire even of praising it.

VII
Yet look: are they not pitiable? No: if they lived forever they
 would be pitiable:
But a huge gift reserved quite overwhelms them at the end; they
 are able then to be still and not cry.

And having touched a little of the beauty and seen a little of
 the beauty of things, magically grow
Across the funeral fire or the hidden stench of burial
 themselves into the beauty they admired,

Themselves into the God, themselves into the sacred steep
 unconsciousness they used to mimic
Asleep between lamp's death and dawn, while the last drunkard
 stumbled homeward down the dark street.

They are not to be pitied but very fortunate; they need no
 savior, salvation comes and takes them by force,
It gathers them into the great kingdoms of dust and stone, the
 blown storms, the stream's-end ocean.

With this advantage over their granite grave-marks, of having
 realized the petulant human consciousness
Before, and then the greatness, the peace: drunk from both
 pitchers: these to be pitied? These not fortunate

But while he lives let each man make his health in his mind, to
 love the coast opposite humanity
And so be freed of love, laying it like bread on the waters; it
 is worst turned inward, it is best shot farthest.

Love, the mad wine of good and evil, the saint's and murderer's,
 the mote in the eye that makes its object
Shine the sun black; the trap in which it is better to catch the
 inhuman God than the hunter's own image.

 The day comes slowly in the railyard 
behind the ice factory. It broods on 
one cinder after another until each 
glows like lead or the eye of a dog 
possessed of no inner fire, the brown 
and greasy pointer who raises his muzzle 
a moment and sighing lets it thud 
down on the loading dock. In no time 
the day has crossed two sets of tracks, 
a semi-trailer with no tractor, and crawled 
down three stories of the bottling plant 
at the end of the alley. It is now 
less than five hours until mid-day 
when nothing will be left in doubt, 
each scrap of news, each banished carton, 
each forgotten letter, its ink bled of lies, 
will stare back at the one eye that sees 
it all and never blinks. But for now 
there is water settling in a clean glass 
on the shelf beside the razor, the slap 
of bare feet on the floor above. Soon 
the scent of rivers borne across roof 
after roof by winds without names, 
the aroma of opened beds better left 
closed, of mouths without teeth, of light 
rustling among the mice droppings 
at the back of a bin of potatoes. 

* 

The old man who sleeps among the cases 
of empty bottles in a little nest of rags 
and newspapers at the back of the plant 
is not an old man. He is twenty years 
younger than I am now putting this down 
in permanent ink on a yellow legal pad 
during a crisp morning in October. 
When he fell from a high pallet, his sleeve 
caught on a nail and spread his arms 
like a figure out of myth. His head 
tore open on a spear of wood, and he 
swore in French. No, he didn't want 
a doctor. He wanted toilet paper 
and a drink, which were fetched. He used 
the tiny bottle of whisky to straighten 
out his eyes and the toilet paper to clean 
his pants, fouled in the fall, and he did 
both with seven teenage boys looking on 
in wonder and fear. At last the blood 
slowed and caked above his ear, and he 
never once touched the wound. Instead, 
in a voice no one could hear, he spoke 
to himself, probably in French, and smoked 
sitting back against a pallet, his legs 
thrust out on the damp cement floor. 

* 

In his white coveralls, crisp and pressed, 
Teddy the Polack told us a fat tit 
would stop a toothache, two a headache. 
He told it to anyone who asked, and grinned -- 
the small eyes watering at the corners -- 
as Alcibiades might have grinned 
when at last he learned that love leads 
even the body beloved to a moment 
in the present when desire calms, the skin 
glows, the soul takes the light of day, 
even a working day in 1944. 
For Baharozian at seventeen the present 
was a gift. Seeing my ashen face, 
the cold sweats starting, he seated me 
in a corner of the boxcar and did 
both our jobs, stacking the full cases 
neatly row upon row and whistling 
the songs of Kate Smith. In the bathroom 
that night I posed naked before the mirror, 
the new cross of hair staining my chest, 
plunging to my groin. That was Wednesday, 
for every Wednesday ended in darkness. 

* 

One of those teenage boys was my brother. 
That night as we lay in bed, the lights 
out, we spoke of Froggy, of how at first 
we thought he would die and how little 
he seemed to care as the blood rose 
to fill and overflow his ear. Slowly 
the long day came over us and our breath 
quieted and eased at last, and we slept. 
When I close my eyes now his bare legs 
glow before me again, pure and lovely 
in their perfect whiteness, the buttocks 
dimpled and firm. I see again the rope 
of his sex, unwrinkled, flushed and swaying, 
the hard flat belly as he raises his shirt 
to clean himself. He gazes at no one 
or nothing, but seems instead to look off 
into a darkness I hadn't seen, a pool 
of shadow that forms before his eyes, 
in my memory now as solid as onyx. 

* 

I began this poem in the present 
because nothing is past. The ice factory, 
the bottling plant, the cindered yard 
all gave way to a low brick building 
a block wide and windowless where they 
designed gun mounts for personnel carriers 
that never made it to Korea. My brother 
rises early, and on clear days he walks 
to the corner to have toast and coffee. 
Seventeen winters have melted into an earth 
of stone, bottle caps, and old iron to carry 
off the hard remains of Froggy Frenchman 
without a blessing or a stone to bear it. 
A little spar of him the size of a finger, 
pointed and speckled as though blood-flaked, 
washed ashore from Lake Erie near Buffalo 
before the rest slipped down the falls out 
into the St. Lawrence. He could be at sea, 
he could be part of an ocean, by now 
he could even be home. This morning I 
rose later than usual in a great house 
full of sunlight, but I believe it came 
down step by step on each wet sheet 
of wooden siding before it crawled 
from the ceiling and touched my pillow 
to waken me. When I heave myself 
out of this chair with a great groan of age 
and stand shakily, the three mice still 
in the wall. From across the lots 
the wind brings voices I can't make out, 
scraps of song or sea sounds, daylight 
breaking into dust, the perfume of waiting 
rain, of onions and potatoes frying.

 I was a queen, and I have lost my crown;
A wife, and I have broken all my vows;
A lover, and I ruined him I loved: --
There is no other havoc left to do.

A little month ago I was a queen,
And mothers held their babies up to see
When I came riding out of Camelot.
The women smiled, and all the world smiled too.

And now, what woman's eyes would smile on me?
I still am beautiful, and yet what child
Would think of me as some high, heaven-sent thing,
An angel, clad in gold and miniver?

The world would run from me, and yet am I
No different from the queen they used to love.
If water, flowing silver over stones,
Is forded, and beneath the horses' feet
Grows turbid suddenly, it clears again,
And men will drink it with no thought of harm.
Yet I am branded for a single fault.

I was the flower amid a toiling world,
Where people smiled to see one happy thing,
And they were proud and glad to raise me high;
They only asked that I should be right fair,
A little kind, and gowned wondrously,
And surely it were little praise to me
If I had pleased them well throughout my life.

I was a queen, the daughter of a king.
The crown was never heavy on my head,
It was my right, and was a part of me.
The women thought me proud, the men were kind,
And bowed right gallantly to kiss my hand,
And watched me as I passed them calmly by,
Along the halls I shall not tread again.
What if, to-night, I should revisit them?
The warders at the gates, the kitchen-maids,
The very beggars would stand off from me,

And I, their queen, would climb the stairs alone,
Pass through the banquet-hall, a loathed thing,
And seek my chambers for a hiding-place,
And I should find them but a sepulchre,
The very rushes rotted on the floors,
The fire in ashes on the freezing hearth.

I was a queen, and he who loved me best
Made me a woman for a night and day,
And now I go unqueened forevermore.
A queen should never dream on summer eves,
When hovering spells are heavy in the dusk: --
I think no night was ever quite so still,
So smoothly lit with red along the west,
So deeply hushed with quiet through and through.
And strangely clear, and deeply dyed with light,
The trees stood straight against a paling sky,
With Venus burning lamp-like in the west.

I walked alone amid a thousand flowers,
That drooped their heads and drowsed beneath the dew,
And all my thoughts were quieted to sleep.
Behind me, on the walk, I heard a step --
I did not know my heart could tell his tread,
I did not know I loved him till that hour.
Within my breast I felt a wild, sick pain,
The garden reeled a little, I was weak,
And quick he came behind me, caught my arms,
That ached beneath his touch; and then I swayed,
My head fell backward and I saw his face.

All this grows bitter that was once so sweet,
And many mouths must drain the dregs of it.
But none will pity me, nor pity him
Whom Love so lashed, and with such cruel thongs.

 When my love did what I would not, what I would not, 
I could hear his merry voice upon the wind, 
Crying, "e;Fairest, shut your eyes, for see you should not. 
Love is blind!" 

When my love said what I say not, what I say not, 
With a joyous laugh he quieted my fears, 
Whispering, "Fairest, hearken not, for hear you may not. 
Hath Love ears?" 

When my love said, "Will you longer let me seek it? 
Blind and deaf is she that doth not bid me come!" 
All my heart said murmuring, "Dearest, can I speak it? 
Love is dumb!

 Life is simple and gay
The bright sun rings with a quiet sound
The sound of the bells has quieted 
 down
This morning the light hits it all 
The footlights of my head are lit again
And the room I live in is finally bright

Just one beam is enough
Just one burst of laughter
My joy that shakes the house 
Restrains those wanting to die
By the notes of its song

I sing off-key
Ah it's funny 
My mouth open to every breeze 
Spews mad notes everywhere
That emerge I don't know how
To fly toward other ears

Listen I'm not crazy 
I laugh at the bottom of the stairs
Before the wide-open door
In the sunlight scattered 
On the wall among green vines 
And my arms are held out toward you

It's today I love you

 ONE night we were together, you and I, 
And had unsown Assyria for a lair, 
Before the walls of Babylon rose in air. 
How languid hills were heaped along the sky, 
And white bones marked the wells of alkali, 
When suddenly down the lion-path a sound . . . 
The wild man-odor . . . then a crouch, a bound, 
And the frail Thing fell quivering with a cry! 

Your yellow eyes burned beautiful with light: 
The dead man lying there quieted and white: 
I roared my triumph over the desert wide, 
Then stretched out, glad for the sands and satisfied; 
And through the long, star-stilled Assyrian night, 
I felt your body breathing by my side.

 Softly every night they come
 To the picture show,
That old couple, deaf and dumb
 In the second row;
Wistful watching, hand in hand,
 Proud they understand.

Shut-ins from the world away,
 All in all to each;
Knowing utter joy as they
 Read the lips of speech . . .
Would, I wonder, I be glum
 Were I deaf and dumb?

Were I quieted away,
 Far from din and shock?
Were I spared the need to say
 Silly things in talk?
Utter hush I would not mind . . .
 Happy they!--I'm blind.