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Best Famous Steeled Poems

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

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Written by Thomas Hardy | Create an image from this poem

Hap

If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh:  "Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!"

Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.
But not so.
How arrives it joy lies slain, And why unblooms the best hope ever sown? —Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain, And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan.
.
.
.
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.


Written by Sylvia Plath | Create an image from this poem

By Candlelight

 This is winter, this is night, small love --
A sort of black horsehair,
A rough, dumb country stuff
Steeled with the sheen
Of what green stars can make it to our gate.
I hold you on my arm.
It is very late.
The dull bells tongue the hour.
The mirror floats us at one candle power.
This is the fluid in which we meet each other, This haloey radiance that seems to breathe And lets our shadows wither Only to blow Them huge again, violent giants on the wall.
One match scratch makes you real.
At first the candle will not bloom at all -- It snuffs its bud To almost nothing, to a dull blue dud.
I hold my breath until you creak to life, Balled hedgehog, Small and cross.
The yellow knife Grows tall.
You clutch your bars.
My singing makes you roar.
I rock you like a boat Across the Indian carpet, the cold floor, While the brass man Kneels, back bent, as best he can Hefting his white pillar with the light That keeps the sky at bay, The sack of black! It is everywhere, tight, tight! He is yours, the little brassy Atlas -- Poor heirloom, all you have, At his heels a pile of five brass cannonballs, No child, no wife.
Five balls! Five bright brass balls! To juggle with, my love, when the sky falls.
Written by Robert Lowell | Create an image from this poem

The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket

 (For Warren Winslow, Dead At Sea)
 Let man have dominion over the fishes of the sea and
 the fowls of the air and the beasts and the whole earth,
 and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth.
I A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket-- The sea was still breaking violently and night Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet, When the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net.
Light Flashed from his matted head and marble feet, He grappled at the net With the coiled, hurdling muscles of his thighs: The corpse was bloodless, a botch of reds and whites, Its open, staring eyes Were lustreless dead-lights Or cabin-windows on a stranded hulk Heavy with sand.
We weight the body, close Its eyes and heave it seaward whence it came, Where the heel-headed dogfish barks it nose On Ahab's void and forehead; and the name Is blocked in yellow chalk.
Sailors, who pitch this portent at the sea Where dreadnaughts shall confess Its heel-bent deity, When you are powerless To sand-bag this Atlantic bulwark, faced By the earth-shaker, green, unwearied, chaste In his steel scales: ask for no Orphean lute To pluck life back.
The guns of the steeled fleet Recoil and then repeat The hoarse salute.
II Whenever winds are moving and their breath Heaves at the roped-in bulwarks of this pier, The terns and sea-gulls tremble at your death In these home waters.
Sailor, can you hear The Pequod's sea wings, beating landward, fall Headlong and break on our Atlantic wall Off 'Sconset, where the yawing S-boats splash The bellbuoy, with ballooning spinnakers, As the entangled, screeching mainsheet clears The blocks: off Madaket, where lubbers lash The heavy surf and throw their long lead squids For blue-fish? Sea-gulls blink their heavy lids Seaward.
The winds' wings beat upon the stones, Cousin, and scream for you and the claws rush At the sea's throat and wring it in the slush Of this old Quaker graveyard where the bones Cry out in the long night for the hurt beast Bobbing by Ahab's whaleboats in the East.
III All you recovered from Poseidon died With you, my cousin, and the harrowed brine Is fruitless on the blue beard of the god, Stretching beyond us to the castles in Spain, Nantucket's westward haven.
To Cape Cod Guns, cradled on the tide, Blast the eelgrass about a waterclock Of bilge and backwash, roil the salt and sand Lashing earth's scaffold, rock Our warships in the hand Of the great God, where time's contrition blues Whatever it was these Quaker sailors lost In the mad scramble of their lives.
They died When time was open-eyed, Wooden and childish; only bones abide There, in the nowhere, where their boats were tossed Sky-high, where mariners had fabled news Of IS, the whited monster.
What it cost Them is their secret.
In the sperm-whale's slick I see the Quakers drown and hear their cry: "If God himself had not been on our side, If God himself had not been on our side, When the Atlantic rose against us, why, Then it had swallowed us up quick.
" IV This is the end of the whaleroad and the whale Who spewed Nantucket bones on the thrashed swell And stirred the troubled waters to whirlpools To send the Pequod packing off to hell: This is the end of them, three-quarters fools, Snatching at straws to sail Seaward and seaward on the turntail whale, Spouting out blood and water as it rolls, Sick as a dog to these Atlantic shoals: Clamavimus, O depths.
Let the sea-gulls wail For water, for the deep where the high tide Mutters to its hurt self, mutters and ebbs.
Waves wallow in their wash, go out and out, Leave only the death-rattle of the crabs, The beach increasing, its enormous snout Sucking the ocean's side.
This is the end of running on the waves; We are poured out like water.
Who will dance The mast-lashed master of Leviathans Up from this field of Quakers in their unstoned graves? V When the whale's viscera go and the roll Of its corruption overruns this world Beyond tree-swept Nantucket and Wood's Hole And Martha's Vineyard, Sailor, will your sword Whistle and fall and sink into the fat? In the great ash-pit of Jehoshaphat The bones cry for the blood of the white whale, The fat flukes arch and whack about its ears, The death-lance churns into the sanctuary, tears The gun-blue swingle, heaving like a flail, And hacks the coiling life out: it works and drags And rips the sperm-whale's midriff into rags, Gobbets of blubber spill to wind and weather, Sailor, and gulls go round the stoven timbers Where the morning stars sing out together And thunder shakes the white surf and dismembers The red flag hammered in the mast-head.
Hide, Our steel, Jonas Messias, in Thy side.
VI OUR LADY OF WALSINGHAM There once the penitents took off their shoes And then walked barefoot the remaining mile; And the small trees, a stream and hedgerows file Slowly along the munching English lane, Like cows to the old shrine, until you lose Track of your dragging pain.
The stream flows down under the druid tree, Shiloah's whirlpools gurgle and make glad The castle of God.
Sailor, you were glad And whistled Sion by that stream.
But see: Our Lady, too small for her canopy, Sits near the altar.
There's no comeliness at all or charm in that expressionless Face with its heavy eyelids.
As before, This face, for centuries a memory, Non est species, neque decor, Expressionless, expresses God: it goes Past castled Sion.
She knows what God knows, Not Calvary's Cross nor crib at Bethlehem Now, and the world shall come to Walsingham.
VII The empty winds are creaking and the oak splatters and splatters on the cenotaph, The boughs are trembling and a gaff Bobs on the untimely stroke Of the greased wash exploding on a shoal-bell In the old mouth of the Atlantic.
It's well; Atlantic, you are fouled with the blue sailors, sea-monsters, upward angel, downward fish: Unmarried and corroding, spare of flesh Mart once of supercilious, wing'd clippers, Atlantic, where your bell-trap guts its spoil You could cut the brackish winds with a knife Here in Nantucket, and cast up the time When the Lord God formed man from the sea's slime And breathed into his face the breath of life, And blue-lung'd combers lumbered to the kill.
The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.
Written by Rudyard Kipling | Create an image from this poem

Cleared

 Help for a patriot distressed, a spotless spirit hurt,
Help for an honourable clan sore trampled in the dirt!
From Queenstown Bay to Donegal, O listen to my song,
The honourable gentlemen have suffered grievous wrong.
Their noble names were mentioned -- O the burning black disgrace! -- By a brutal Saxon paper in an Irish shooting-case; They sat upon it for a year, then steeled their heart to brave it, And "coruscating innocence" the learned Judges gave it.
Bear witness, Heaven, of that grim crime beneath the surgeon's knife, The honourable gentlemen deplored the loss of life! Bear witness of those chanting choirs that burk and shirk and snigger, No man laid hand upon the knife or finger to the trigger! Cleared in the face of all mankind beneath the winking skies, Like ph]oenixes from Ph]oenix Park (and what lay there) they rise! Go shout it to the emerald seas -- give word to Erin now, Her honourable gentlemen are cleared -- and this is how: -- They only paid the Moonlighter his cattle-hocking price, They only helped the murderer with counsel's best advice, But -- sure it keeps their honour white -- the learned Court believes They never gave a piece of plate to murderers and thieves.
They never told the ramping crowd to card a woman's hide, They never marked a man for death -- what fault of theirs he died? -- They only said "intimidate", and talked and went away -- By God, the boys that did the work were braver men than they! Their sin it was that fed the fire -- small blame to them that heard -- The "bhoys" get drunk on rhetoric, and madden at a word -- They knew whom they were talking at, if they were Irish too, The gentlemen that lied in Court, they knew, and well they knew.
They only took the Judas-gold from Fenians out of jail, They only fawned for dollars on the blood-dyed Clanna-Gael.
If black is black or white is white, in black and white it's down, They're only traitors to the Queen and rebels to the Crown.
"Cleared", honourable gentlemen! Be thankful it's no more: -- The widow's curse is on your house, the dead are at your door.
On you the shame of open shame, on you from North to South The hand of every honest man flat-heeled across your mouth.
"Less black than we were painted"? -- Faith, no word of black was said; The lightest touch was human blood, and that, you know, runs red.
It's sticking to your fist to-day for all your sneer and scoff, And by the Judge's well-weighed word you cannot wipe it off.
Hold up those hands of innocence -- go, scare your sheep together, The blundering, tripping tups that bleat behind the old bell-wether; And if they snuff the taint and break to find another pen, Tell them it's tar that glistens so, and daub them yours again! "The charge is old"? -- As old as Cain -- as fresh as yesterday; Old as the Ten Commandments -- have ye talked those laws away? If words are words, or death is death, or powder sends the ball, You spoke the words that sped the shot -- the curse be on you all.
"Our friends believe"? -- Of course they do -- as sheltered women may; But have they seen the shrieking soul ripped from the quivering clay? They! -- If their own front door is shut, they'll swear the whole world's warm; What do they know of dread of death or hanging fear of harm? The secret half a county keeps, the whisper in the lane, The shriek that tells the shot went home behind the broken pane, The dry blood crisping in the sun that scares the honest bees, And shows the "bhoys" have heard your talk -- what do they know of these? But you -- you know -- ay, ten times more; the secrets of the dead, Black terror on the country-side by word and whisper bred, The mangled stallion's scream at night, the tail-cropped heifer's low.
Who set the whisper going first? You know, and well you know! My soul! I'd sooner lie in jail for murder plain and straight, Pure crime I'd done with my own hand for money, lust, or hate, Than take a seat in Parliament by fellow-felons cheered, While one of those "not provens" proved me cleared as you are cleared.
Cleared -- you that "lost" the League accounts -- go, guard our honour still, Go, help to make our country's laws that broke God's law at will -- One hand stuck out behind the back, to signal "strike again"; The other on your dress-shirt-front to show your heart is clane.
If black is black or white is white, in black and white it's down, You're only traitors to the Queen and rebels to the Crown.
If print is print or words are words, the learned Court perpends: -- We are not ruled by murderers, but only -- by their friends.
Written by Gerard Manley Hopkins | Create an image from this poem

St. Alphonsus Rodriguez

 Laybrother of the Society of Jesus


Honour is flashed off exploit, so we say; 
And those strokes once that gashed flesh or galled shield
Should tongue that time now, trumpet now that field, 
And, on the fighter, forge his glorious day.
On Christ they do and on the martyr may; But be the war within, the brand we wield Unseen, the heroic breast not outward-steeled, Earth hears no hurtle then from fiercest fray.
Yet God (that hews mountain and continent, Earth, all, out; who, with trickling increment, Veins violets and tall trees makes more and more) Could crowd career with conquest while there went Those years and years by of world without event That in Majorca Alfonso watched the door.


Written by William Shakespeare | Create an image from this poem

Sonnet 112: Your love and pity doth th impression fill

 Your love and pity doth th' impression fill
Which vulgar scandal stamped upon my brow;
For what care I who calls me well or ill,
So you o'ergreen my bad, my good allow?
You are my all the world, and I must strive
To know my shames and praises from your tongue;
None else to me, nor I to none alive,
That my steeled sense or changes, right or wrong.
In so profound abysm I throw all care Of others' voices that my adder's sense To critic and to flatterer stoppèd are.
Mark how with my neglect I do dispense.
You are so strongly in my purpose bred, That all the world besides, methinks, are dead.
Written by Robert William Service | Create an image from this poem

The Law Of The Yukon

 This is the law of the Yukon, and ever she makes it plain:
"Send not your foolish and feeble; send me your strong and your sane --
Strong for the red rage of battle; sane for I harry them sore;
Send me men girt for the combat, men who are grit to the core;
Swift as the panther in triumph, fierce as the bear in defeat,
Sired of a bulldog parent, steeled in the furnace heat.
Send me the best of your breeding, lend me your chosen ones; Them will I take to my bosom, them will I call my sons; Them will I gild with my treasure, them will I glut with my meat; But the others -- the misfits, the failures -- I trample under my feet.
Dissolute, damned and despairful, crippled and palsied and slain, Ye would send me the spawn of your gutters -- Go! take back your spawn again.
"Wild and wide are my borders, stern as death is my sway; From my ruthless throne I have ruled alone for a million years and a day; Hugging my mighty treasure, waiting for man to come, Till he swept like a turbid torrent, and after him swept -- the scum.
The pallid pimp of the dead-line, the enervate of the pen, One by one I weeded them out, for all that I sought was -- Men.
One by one I dismayed them, frighting them sore with my glooms; One by one I betrayed them unto my manifold dooms.
Drowned them like rats in my rivers, starved them like curs on my plains, Rotted the flesh that was left them, poisoned the blood in their veins; Burst with my winter upon them, searing forever their sight, Lashed them with fungus-white faces, whimpering wild in the night; "Staggering blind through the storm-whirl, stumbling mad through the snow, Frozen stiff in the ice-pack, brittle and bent like a bow; Featureless, formless, forsaken, scented by wolves in their flight, Left for the wind to make music through ribs that are glittering white; Gnawing the black crust of failure, searching the pit of despair, Crooking the toe in the trigger, trying to patter a prayer; Going outside with an escort, raving with lips all afoam, Writing a cheque for a million, driveling feebly of home; Lost like a louse in the burning .
.
.
or else in the tented town Seeking a drunkard's solace, sinking and sinking down; Steeped in the slime at the bottom, dead to a decent world, Lost 'mid the human flotsam, far on the frontier hurled; In the camp at the bend of the river, with its dozen saloons aglare, Its gambling dens ariot, its gramophones all ablare; Crimped with the crimes of a city, sin-ridden and bridled with lies, In the hush of my mountained vastness, in the flush of my midnight skies.
Plague-spots, yet tools of my purpose, so natheless I suffer them thrive, Crushing my Weak in their clutches, that only my Strong may survive.
"But the others, the men of my mettle, the men who would 'stablish my fame Unto its ultimate issue, winning me honor, not shame; Searching my uttermost valleys, fighting each step as they go, Shooting the wrath of my rapids, scaling my ramparts of snow; Ripping the guts of my mountains, looting the beds of my creeks, Them will I take to my bosom, and speak as a mother speaks.
I am the land that listens, I am the land that broods; Steeped in eternal beauty, crystalline waters and woods.
Long have I waited lonely, shunned as a thing accurst, Monstrous, moody, pathetic, the last of the lands and the first; Visioning camp-fires at twilight, sad with a longing forlorn, Feeling my womb o'er-pregnant with the seed of cities unborn.
Wild and wide are my borders, stern as death is my sway, And I wait for the men who will win me -- and I will not be won in a day; And I will not be won by weaklings, subtle, suave and mild, But by men with the hearts of vikings, and the simple faith of a child; Desperate, strong and resistless, unthrottled by fear or defeat, Them will I gild with my treasure, them will I glut with my meat.
"Lofty I stand from each sister land, patient and wearily wise, With the weight of a world of sadness in my quiet, passionless eyes; Dreaming alone of a people, dreaming alone of a day, When men shall not rape my riches, and curse me and go away; Making a bawd of my bounty, fouling the hand that gave -- Till I rise in my wrath and I sweep on their path and I stamp them into a grave.
Dreaming of men who will bless me, of women esteeming me good, Of children born in my borders of radiant motherhood, Of cities leaping to stature, of fame like a flag unfurled, As I pour the tide of my riches in the eager lap of the world.
" This is the Law of the Yukon, that only the Strong shall thrive; That surely the Weak shall perish, and only the Fit survive.
Dissolute, damned and despairful, crippled and palsied and slain, This is the Will of the Yukon, -- Lo, how she makes it plain!
Written by Claude McKay | Create an image from this poem

French Leave

 No servile little fear shall daunt my will 
This morning.
I have courage steeled to say I will be lazy, conqueringly still, I will not lose the hours in toil this day.
The roaring world without, careless of souls, Shall leave me to my placid dream of rest, My four walls shield me from its shouting ghouls, And all its hates have fled my quiet breast.
And I will loll here resting, wide awake, Dead to the world of work, the world of love, I laze contented just for dreaming's sake With not the slightest urge to think or move.
How tired unto death, how tired I was! Now for a day I put my burdens by, And like a child amidst the meadow grass Under the southern sun, I languid lie And feel the bed about me kindly deep, My strength ooze gently from my hollow bones, My worried brain drift aimlessly to sleep, Like softening to a song of tuneful tones.
Written by Anne Bronte | Create an image from this poem

Stanzas

 Oh, weep not, love! each tear that springs
In those dear eyes of thine,
To me a keener suffering brings,
Than if they flowed from mine.
And do not droop! however drear The fate awaiting thee; For my sake combat pain and care, And cherish life for me! I do not fear thy love will fail; Thy faith is true, I know; But, oh, my love! thy strength is frail For such a life of woe.
Were't not for this, I well could trace (Though banished long from thee,) Life's rugged path, and boldly face The storms that threaten me.
Fear not for me -­ I've steeled my mind Sorrow and strife to greet; Joy with my love I leave behind, Care with my friends I meet.
A mother's sad reproachful eye, A father's scowling brow -­ But he may frown and she may sigh: I will not break my vow! I love my mother, I revere My sire, but fear not me­ Believe that Death alone can tear This faithful heart from thee.
Written by Gerard Manley Hopkins | Create an image from this poem

In Honour Of St. Alphonsus Rodriguez

 Laybrother of the Society of Jesus


Honour is flashed off exploit, so we say;
And those strokes once that gashed flesh or galled shield
Should tongue that time now, trumpet now that field,
And, on the fighter, forge his glorious day.
On Christ they do and on the martyr may; But be the war within, the brand we wield Unseen, the heroic breast not outward-steeled, Earth hears no hurtle then from fiercest fray.
Yet God (that hews mountain and continent, Earth, all, out; who, with trickling increment, Veins violets and tall trees makes more and more) Could crowd career with conquest while there went Those years and years by of world without event That in Majorca Alfonso watched the door.

Book: Shattered Sighs