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Best Famous Resignation Poems

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

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Written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow | Create an image from this poem

Resignation

THERE is no flock however watched and tended  
But one dead lamb is there! 
There is no fireside howsoe'er defended  
But has one vacant chair! 

The air is full of farewells to the dying 5 
And mournings for the dead; 
The heart of Rachel for her children crying  
Will not be comforted! 

Let us be patient! These severe afflictions 
Not from the ground arise 10 
But oftentimes celestial benedictions 
Assume this dark disguise. 

We see but dimly through the mists and vapors; 
Amid these earthly damps 
What seem to us but sad funereal tapers 15 
May be heaven's distant lamps. 

There is no Death! What seems so is transition; 
This life of mortal breath 
Is but a suburb of the life elysian  
Whose portal we call Death. 20 

She is not dead ¡ªthe child of our affection ¡ª 
But gone unto that school 
Where she no longer needs our poor protection  
And Christ himself doth rule. 

In that great cloister's stillness and seclusion 25 
By guardian angels led  
Safe from temptation safe from sin's pollution  
She lives whom we call dead  

Day after day we think what she is doing 
In those bright realms of air; 30 
Year after year her tender steps pursuing  
Behold her grown more fair. 

Thus do we walk with her and keep unbroken 
The bond which nature gives  
Thinking that our remembrance though unspoken 35 
May reach her where she lives. 

Not as a child shall we again behold her; 
For when with raptures wild 
In our embraces we again enfold her  
She will not be a child; 40 

But a fair maiden in her Father's mansion  
Clothed with celestial grace; 
And beautiful with all the soul's expansion 
Shall we behold her face. 

And though at times impetuous with emotion 45 
And anguish long suppressed  
The swelling heart heaves moaning like the ocean  
That cannot be at rest ¡ª 

We will be patient and assuage the feeling 
We may not wholly stay; 50 
By silence sanctifying not concealing  
The grief that must have way.


Written by Elizabeth Jennings | Create an image from this poem

A Chorus

 Over the surging tides and the mountain kingdoms,
Over the pastoral valleys and the meadows,
Over the cities with their factory darkness,
Over the lands where peace is still a power,
Over all these and all this planet carries
A power broods, invisible monarch, a stranger
To some, but by many trusted. Man's a believer
Until corrupted. This huge trusted power
Is spirit. He moves in the muscle of the world,
In continual creation. He burns the tides, he shines
From the matchless skies. He is the day's surrender.
Recognize him in the eye of the angry tiger,
In the sign of a child stepping at last into sleep,
In whatever touches, graces and confesses,
In hopes fulfilled or forgotten, in promises

Kept, in the resignation of old men -
This spirit, this power, this holder together of space
Is about, is aware, is working in your breathing.
But most he is the need that shows in hunger
And in the tears shed in the lonely fastness.
And in sorrow after anger.
Written by Alan Seeger | Create an image from this poem

Maktoob

 A shell surprised our post one day 
And killed a comrade at my side. 
My heart was sick to see the way 
He suffered as he died. 

I dug about the place he fell, 
And found, no bigger than my thumb, 
A fragment of the splintered shell 
In warm aluminum. 

I melted it, and made a mould, 
And poured it in the opening, 
And worked it, when the cast was cold, 
Into a shapely ring. 

And when my ring was smooth and bright, 
Holding it on a rounded stick, 
For seal, I bade a Turco write 
Maktoob in Arabic. 

Maktoob! "'Tis written!" . . . So they think, 
These children of the desert, who 
From its immense expanses drink 
Some of its grandeur too. 

Within the book of Destiny, 
Whose leaves are time, whose cover, space, 
The day when you shall cease to be, 
The hour, the mode, the place, 

Are marked, they say; and you shall not 
By taking thought or using wit 
Alter that certain fate one jot, 
Postpone or conjure it. 

Learn to drive fear, then, from your heart. 
If you must perish, know, O man, 
'Tis an inevitable part 
Of the predestined plan. 

And, seeing that through the ebon door 
Once only you may pass, and meet 
Of those that have gone through before 
The mighty, the elite -- --- 

Guard that not bowed nor blanched with fear 
You enter, but serene, erect, 
As you would wish most to appear 
To those you most respect. 

So die as though your funeral 
Ushered you through the doors that led 
Into a stately banquet hall 
Where heroes banqueted; 

And it shall all depend therein 
Whether you come as slave or lord, 
If they acclaim you as their kin 
Or spurn you from their board. 

So, when the order comes: "Attack!" 
And the assaulting wave deploys, 
And the heart trembles to look back 
On life and all its joys; 

Or in a ditch that they seem near 
To find, and round your shallow trough 
Drop the big shells that you can hear 
Coming a half mile off; 

When, not to hear, some try to talk, 
And some to clean their guns, or sing, 
And some dig deeper in the chalk -- - 
I look upon my ring: 

And nerves relax that were most tense, 
And Death comes whistling down unheard, 
As I consider all the sense 
Held in that mystic word. 

And it brings, quieting like balm 
My heart whose flutterings have ceased, 
The resignation and the calm 
And wisdom of the East.
Written by Vernon Scannell | Create an image from this poem

Schoolroom On A Wet Afternoon

 The unrelated paragraphs of morning
Are forgotten now; the severed heads of kings
Rot by the misty Thames; the roses of York
And Lancaster are pressed between the leaves
Of history; ******* sleep in Africa.
The complexities of simple interest lurk
In inkwells and the brittle sticks of chalk:
Afternoon is come and English Grammar.

Rain falls as though the sky has been bereaved,
Stutters its inarticulate grief on glass
Of every lachrymose pane. The children read
Their books or make pretence of concentration,
Each bowed head seems bent in supplication
Or resignation to the fate that waits
In the unmapped forests of the future.
Is it their doomed innocence noon weeps for?

In each diminutive breast a human heart
Pumps out the necessary blood: desires,
Pains and ecstasies surf-ride each singing wave
Which breaks in darkness on the mental shores.
Each child is disciplined; absorbed and still
At his small desk. Yet lift the lid and see,
Amidst frayed books and pencils, other shapes:
Vicious rope, glaring blade, the gun cocked to kill.
Written by Thomas Chatterton | Create an image from this poem

The Resignation

 O God, whose thunder shakes the sky, 
Whose eye this atom globe surveys, 
To thee, my only rock, I fly, 
Thy mercy in thy justice praise. 

The mystic mazes of thy will, 
The shadows of celestial light, 
Are past the pow'r of human skill,-- 
But what th' Eternal acts is right. 

O teach me in the trying hour, 
When anguish swells the dewy tear, 
To still my sorrows, own thy pow'r, 
Thy goodness love, thy justice fear. 

If in this bosom aught but Thee 
Encroaching sought a boundless sway, 
Omniscience could the danger see, 
And Mercy look the cause away. 

Then why, my soul, dost thou complain? 
Why drooping seek the dark recess? 
Shake off the melancholy chain. 
For God created all to bless. 

But ah! my breast is human still; 
The rising sigh, the falling tear, 
My languid vitals' feeble rill, 
The sickness of my soul declare. 

But yet, with fortitude resigned, 
I'll thank th' inflicter of the blow; 
Forbid the sigh, compose my mind, 
Nor let the gush of mis'ry flow. 

The gloomy mantle of the night, 
Which on my sinking spirit steals, 
Will vanish at the morning light, 
Which God, my East, my sun reveals.


Written by William Matthews | Create an image from this poem

No Return

 I like divorce. I love to compose
letters of resignation; now and then
I send one in and leave in a lemon-
hued Huff or a Snit with four on the floor.
Do you like the scent of a hollyhock?
To each his own. I love a burning bridge.

I like to watch the small boat go over
the falls -- it swirls in a circle
like a dog coiling for sleep, and its frail bow
pokes blindly out over the falls' lip
a little and a little more and then
too much, and then the boat's nose dives and butt

flips up so that the boat points doomily
down and the screams of the soon-to-be-dead
last longer by echo than the screamers do.
Let's go to the videotape, the news-
caster intones, and the control room does,
and the boat explodes again and again.
Written by Les Murray | Create an image from this poem

A Retrospect Of Humidity

 All the air conditioners now slacken
their hummed carrier wave. Once again
we've served our three months with remissions
in the steam and dry iron of this seaboard.
In jellied glare, through the nettle-rash season
we've watched the sky's fermenting laundry
portend downpours. Some came, and steamed away,
and we were clutched back into the rancid
saline midnights of orifice weather,
to damp grittiness and wiping off the air. 

Metaphors slump irritably together in
the muggy weeks. Shark and jellyfish shallows
become suburbs where you breathe a fat towel;
babies burst like tomatoes with discomfort
in the cotton-wrapped pointing street markets;
the Lycra-bulging surf drips from non-swimmers
miles from shore, and somehow includes soil.
Skins, touching, soak each other. Skin touching
any surface wets that and itself
in a kind of mutual digestion.
Throbbing heads grow lianas of nonsense. 

It's our annual visit to the latitudes
of rice, kerosene and resignation,
an averted, temporary visit
unrelated, for most, to the attitudes
of festive northbound jets gaining height -
closer, for some few, to the memory
of ulcers scraped with a tin spoon
or sweated faces bowing before dry
where the flesh is worn inside out,
all the hunger-organs clutched in rank nylon,
by those for whom exhaustion is spirit: 

an intrusive, heart-narrowing season
at this far southern foot of the monsoon.
As the kleenex flower, the hibiscus
drops its browning wads, we forget
annually, as one forgets a sickness.
The stifling days will never come again,
not now that we've seen the first sweater
tugged down on the beauties of division
and inside the rain's millions, a risen
loaf of cat on a cool night verandah.
Written by Robert William Service | Create an image from this poem

The Score

 I asked a silver sage
 With race nigh run:
'Tell me in old of age
 Your wisdom won?'
Said he: 'From fret and strife
 And vain vexation,
The all I've learned from life
 Is--Resignation.'

I asked a Bard who thrummed
 A harp clay-cold:
'How is your story summed
 Now you are old?'
Though golden voice was his,
 And fame had he,
He sighed: 'The finish is
 --Futility.'

I'm old; I have no wealth
 Toil to reward;
Yet for the boon of health
 I thank the Lord.
While Beauty I can see,
 To live is good;
And so life's crown to me
 Is--Gratitude
Written by John Berryman | Create an image from this poem

Dream Song 172: Your face broods

 Your face broods from my table, Suicide.
Your force came on like a torrent toward the end
of agony and wrath.
You were christened in the beginning Sylvia Plath
and changed that name for Mrs Hughes and bred
and went on round the bend

till the oven seemed the proper place for you.
I brood upon your face, the geography of grief,
hooded, till I allow
again your resignation from us now
though the screams of orphaned children fix me anew.
Your torment here was brief,

long falls your exit all repeatingly,
a poor exemplum, one more suicide,
to stack upon the others
till stricken Henry with his sisters & brothers
suddenly gone pauses to wonder why he
alone breasts the wronging tide.
Written by Erica Jong | Create an image from this poem

The Artist as an Old Man

 If you ask him he will talk for hours--
how at fourteen he hammered signs, fingers
raw with cold, and later painted bowers
in ladies' boudoirs; how he played checkers
for two weeks in jail, and lived on dark bread;
how he fled the border to a country
which disappeared wars ago; unfriended
crossed a continent while this century
began. He seldom speaks of painting now.
Young men have time and theories; old men work.
He has painted countless portraits. Sallow
nameless faces, made glistening in oil, smirk
above anonymous mantelpieces.
The turpentine has a familiar smell,
but his hand trembles with odd, new palsies.
Perched on the maulstick, it nears the easel.

He has come to like his resignation.
In his sketch books, ink-dark cossacks hear
the snorts of horses in the crunch of snow.
His pen alone recalls that years ago,
one horseman set his teeth and aimed his spear
which, poised, seemed pointed straight to pierce the sun.

Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry