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Best Famous Throes Poems

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

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Written by Walt Whitman | Create an image from this poem

To You

 WHOEVER you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams, 
I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your feet and hands; 
Even now, your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners, troubles, follies, costume,
 crimes, dissipate away from you, 
Your true Soul and Body appear before me, 
They stand forth out of affairs—out of commerce, shops, law, science, work, forms,
 clothes, the house, medicine, print, buying, selling, eating, drinking, suffering, dying.
Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem; I whisper with my lips close to your ear, I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.
O I have been dilatory and dumb; I should have made my way straight to you long ago; I should have blabb’d nothing but you, I should have chanted nothing but you.
I will leave all, and come and make the hymns of you; None have understood you, but I understand you; None have done justice to you—you have not done justice to yourself; None but have found you imperfect—I only find no imperfection in you; None but would subordinate you—I only am he who will never consent to subordinate you; I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself.
Painters have painted their swarming groups, and the centre figure of all; From the head of the centre figure spreading a nimbus of gold-color’d light; But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-color’d light; From my hand, from the brain of every man and woman it streams, effulgently flowing forever.
O I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you! You have not known what you are—you have slumber’d upon yourself all your life; Your eye-lids have been the same as closed most of the time; What you have done returns already in mockeries; (Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not return in mockeries, what is their return?) The mockeries are not you; Underneath them, and within them, I see you lurk; I pursue you where none else has pursued you; Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the night, the accustom’d routine, if these conceal you from others, or from yourself, they do not conceal you from me; The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion, if these balk others, they do not balk me, The pert apparel, the deform’d attitude, drunkenness, greed, premature death, all these I part aside.
There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied in you; There is no virtue, no beauty, in man or woman, but as good is in you; No pluck, no endurance in others, but as good is in you; No pleasure waiting for others, but an equal pleasure waits for you.
As for me, I give nothing to any one, except I give the like carefully to you; I sing the songs of the glory of none, not God, sooner than I sing the songs of the glory of you.
Whoever you are! claim your own at any hazard! These shows of the east and west are tame, compared to you; These immense meadows—these interminable rivers—you are immense and interminable as they; These furies, elements, storms, motions of Nature, throes of apparent dissolution—you are he or she who is master or mistress over them, Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements, pain, passion, dissolution.
The hopples fall from your ankles—you find an unfailing sufficiency; Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest, whatever you are promulges itself; Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, nothing is scanted; Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you are picks its way.


Written by Walt Whitman | Create an image from this poem

Song of the Redwood-Tree

 1
A CALIFORNIA song! 
A prophecy and indirection—a thought impalpable, to breathe, as air; 
A chorus of dryads, fading, departing—or hamadryads departing; 
A murmuring, fateful, giant voice, out of the earth and sky, 
Voice of a mighty dying tree in the Redwood forest dense.
Farewell, my brethren, Farewell, O earth and sky—farewell, ye neighboring waters; My time has ended, my term has come.
2 Along the northern coast, Just back from the rock-bound shore, and the caves, In the saline air from the sea, in the Mendocino country, With the surge for bass and accompaniment low and hoarse, With crackling blows of axes, sounding musically, driven by strong arms, Riven deep by the sharp tongues of the axes—there in the Redwood forest dense, I heard the mighty tree its death-chant chanting.
The choppers heard not—the camp shanties echoed not; The quick-ear’d teamsters, and chain and jack-screw men, heard not, As the wood-spirits came from their haunts of a thousand years, to join the refrain; But in my soul I plainly heard.
Murmuring out of its myriad leaves, Down from its lofty top, rising two hundred feet high, Out of its stalwart trunk and limbs—out of its foot-thick bark, That chant of the seasons and time—chant, not of the past only, but the future.
3 You untold life of me, And all you venerable and innocent joys, Perennial, hardy life of me, with joys, ’mid rain, and many a summer sun, And the white snows, and night, and the wild winds; O the great patient, rugged joys! my soul’s strong joys, unreck’d by man; (For know I bear the soul befitting me—I too have consciousness, identity, And all the rocks and mountains have—and all the earth;) Joys of the life befitting me and brothers mine, Our time, our term has come.
Nor yield we mournfully, majestic brothers, We who have grandly fill’d our time; With Nature’s calm content, and tacit, huge delight, We welcome what we wrought for through the past, And leave the field for them.
For them predicted long, For a superber Race—they too to grandly fill their time, For them we abdicate—in them ourselves, ye forest kings! In them these skies and airs—these mountain peaks—Shasta—Nevadas, These huge, precipitous cliffs—this amplitude—these valleys grand—Yosemite, To be in them absorb’d, assimilated.
4 Then to a loftier strain, Still prouder, more ecstatic, rose the chant, As if the heirs, the Deities of the West, Joining, with master-tongue, bore part.
Not wan from Asia’s fetishes, Nor red from Europe’s old dynastic slaughter-house, (Area of murder-plots of thrones, with scent left yet of wars and scaffolds every where,) But come from Nature’s long and harmless throes—peacefully builded thence, These virgin lands—Lands of the Western Shore, To the new Culminating Man—to you, the Empire New, You, promis’d long, we pledge, we dedicate.
You occult, deep volitions, You average Spiritual Manhood, purpose of all, pois’d on yourself—giving, not taking law, You Womanhood divine, mistress and source of all, whence life and love, and aught that comes from life and love, You unseen Moral Essence of all the vast materials of America, (age upon age, working in Death the same as Life,) You that, sometimes known, oftener unknown, really shape and mould the New World, adjusting it to Time and Space, You hidden National Will, lying in your abysms, conceal’d, but ever alert, You past and present purposes, tenaciously pursued, may-be unconscious of yourselves, Unswerv’d by all the passing errors, perturbations of the surface; You vital, universal, deathless germs, beneath all creeds, arts, statutes, literatures, Here build your homes for good—establish here—These areas entire, Lands of the Western Shore, We pledge, we dedicate to you.
For man of you—your characteristic Race, Here may be hardy, sweet, gigantic grow—here tower, proportionate to Nature, Here climb the vast, pure spaces, unconfined, uncheck’d by wall or roof, Here laugh with storm or sun—here joy—here patiently inure, Here heed himself, unfold himself (not others’ formulas heed)—here fill his time, To duly fall, to aid, unreck’d at last, To disappear, to serve.
Thus, on the northern coast, In the echo of teamsters’ calls, and the clinking chains, and the music of choppers’ axes, The falling trunk and limbs, the crash, the muffled shriek, the groan, Such words combined from the Redwood-tree—as of wood-spirits’ voices ecstatic, ancient and rustling, The century-lasting, unseen dryads, singing, withdrawing, All their recesses of forests and mountains leaving, From the Cascade range to the Wasatch—or Idaho far, or Utah, To the deities of the Modern henceforth yielding, The chorus and indications, the vistas of coming humanity—the settlements, features all, In the Mendocino woods I caught.
5 The flashing and golden pageant of California! The sudden and gorgeous drama—the sunny and ample lands; The long and varied stretch from Puget Sound to Colorado south; Lands bathed in sweeter, rarer, healthier air—valleys and mountain cliffs; The fields of Nature long prepared and fallow—the silent, cyclic chemistry; The slow and steady ages plodding—the unoccupied surface ripening—the rich ores forming beneath; At last the New arriving, assuming, taking possession, A swarming and busy race settling and organizing every where; Ships coming in from the whole round world, and going out to the whole world, To India and China and Australia, and the thousand island paradises of the Pacific; Populous cities—the latest inventions—the steamers on the rivers—the railroads—with many a thrifty farm, with machinery, And wool, and wheat, and the grape—and diggings of yellow gold.
6 But more in you than these, Lands of the Western Shore! (These but the means, the implements, the standing-ground,) I see in you, certain to come, the promise of thousands of years, till now deferr’d, Promis’d, to be fulfill’d, our common kind, the Race.
The New Society at last, proportionate to Nature, In Man of you, more than your mountain peaks, or stalwart trees imperial, In Woman more, far more, than all your gold, or vines, or even vital air.
Fresh come, to a New World indeed, yet long prepared, I see the Genius of the Modern, child of the Real and Ideal, Clearing the ground for broad humanity, the true America, heir of the past so grand, To build a grander future.
Written by Amy Lowell | Create an image from this poem

In Darkness

 Must all of worth be travailled for, and those
Life's brightest stars rise from a troubled sea?
Must years go by in sad uncertainty
Leaving us doubting whose the conquering blows,
Are we or Fate the victors? Time which shows
All inner meanings will reveal, but we
Shall never know the upshot.
Ours to be Wasted with longing, shattered in the throes, The agonies of splendid dreams, which day Dims from our vision, but each night brings back; We strive to hold their grandeur, and essay To be the thing we dream.
Sudden we lack The flash of insight, life grows drear and gray, And hour follows hour, nerveless, slack.
Written by John Wilmot | Create an image from this poem

Tunbridge Wells

 At five this morn, when Phoebus raised his head
From Thetis' lap, I raised myself from bed,
And mounting steed, I trotted to the waters
The rendesvous of fools, buffoons, and praters,
Cuckolds, whores, citizens, their wives and daughters.
My squeamish stomach I with wine had bribed To undertake the dose that was prescribed; But turning head, a sudden curséd view That innocent provision overthrew, And without drinking, made me purge and spew.
From coach and six a thing unweildy rolled, Whose lumber, card more decently would hold.
As wise as calf it looked, as big as bully, But handled, proves a mere Sir Nicholas Cully; A bawling fop, a natural Nokes, and yet He dares to censure as if he had wit.
To make him more ridiculous, in spite Nature contrived the fool should be a knight.
Though he alone were dismal signet enough, His train contributed to set him off, All of his shape, all of the selfsame stuff.
No spleen or malice need on them be thrown: Nature has done the business of lampoon, And in their looks their characters has shown.
Endeavoring this irksome sight to balk, And a more irksome noise, their silly talk, I silently slunk down t' th' Lower Walk, But often when one would Charybdis shun, Down upon Scilla 'tis one's fate to run, For here it was my curséd luck to find As great a fop, though of another kind, A tall stiff fool that walked in Spanish guise: The buckram puppet never stirred its eyes, But grave as owl it looked, as woodcock wise.
He scorns the empty talking of this mad age, And speaks all proverbs, sentences, and adage; Can with as much solemnity buy eggs As a cabal can talk of their intrigues; Master o' th' Ceremonies, yet can dispense With the formality of talking sense.
From hence unto the upper walk I ran, Where a new scene of foppery began.
A tribe of curates, priests, canonical elves, Fit company for none besides themselves, Were got together.
Each his distemper told, Scurvy, stone, strangury; some were so bold To charge the spleen to be their misery, And on that wise disease brought infamy.
But none had modesty enough t' complain Their want of learning, honesty, and brain, The general diseases of that train.
These call themselves ambassadors of heaven, And saucily pretend commissions given; But should an Indian king, whose small command Seldom extends beyond ten miles of land, Send forth such wretched tools in an ambassage, He'd find but small effects of such a message.
Listening, I found the cob of all this rabble Pert Bays, with his importance comfortable.
He, being raised to an archdeaconry By trampling on religion, liberty, Was grown to great, and looked too fat and jolly, To be disturbed with care and melancholy, Though Marvell has enough exposed his folly.
He drank to carry off some old remains His lazy dull distemper left in 's veins.
Let him drink on, but 'tis not a whole flood Can give sufficient sweetness to his blood To make his nature of his manners good.
Next after these, a fulsome Irish crew Of silly Macs were offered to my view.
The things did talk, but th' hearing what they said I did myself the kindness to evade.
Nature has placed these wretches beneath scorn: They can't be called so vile as they are born.
Amidst the crowd next I myself conveyed, For now were come, whitewash and paint being laid, Mother and daughter, mistress and the maid, And squire with wig and pantaloon displayed.
But ne'er could conventicle, play, or fair For a true medley, with this herd compare.
Here lords, knights, squires, ladies and countesses, Chandlers, mum-bacon women, sempstresses Were mixed together, nor did they agree More in their humors than their quality.
Here waiting for gallant, young damsel stood, Leaning on cane, and muffled up in hood.
The would-be wit, whose business was to woo, With hat removed and solemn scrape of shoe Advanceth bowing, then genteelly shrugs, And ruffled foretop into order tugs, And thus accosts her: "Madam, methinks the weather Is grown much more serene since you came hither.
You influence the heavens; but should the sun Withdraw himself to see his rays outdone By your bright eyes, they would supply the morn, And make a day before the day be born.
" With mouth screwed up, conceited winking eyes, And breasts thrust forward, "Lord, sir!" she replies.
"It is your goodness, and not my deserts, Which makes you show this learning, wit, and parts.
" He, puzzled, butes his nail, both to display The sparkling ring, and think what next to say, And thus breaks forth afresh: "Madam, egad! Your luck at cards last night was very bad: At cribbage fifty-nine, and the next show To make the game, and yet to want those two.
God damn me, madam, I'm the son of a whore If in my life I saw the like before!" To peddler's stall he drags her, and her breast With hearts and such-like foolish toys he dressed; And then, more smartly to expound the riddle Of all his prattle, gives her a Scotch fiddle.
Tired with this dismal stuff, away I ran Where were two wives, with girl just fit for man - Short-breathed, with pallid lips and visage wan.
Some curtsies past, and the old compliment Of being glad to see each other, spent, With hand in hand they lovingly did walk, And one began thus to renew the talk: "I pray, good madam, if it may be thought No rudeness, what cause was it hither brought Your ladyship?" She soon replying, smiled, "We have a good estate, but have no child, And I'm informed these wells will make a barren Woman as fruitful as a cony warren.
" The first returned, "For this cause I am come, For I can have no quietness at home.
My husband grumbles though we have got one, This poor young girl, and mutters for a son.
And this is grieved with headache, pangs, and throes; Is full sixteen, and never yet had those.
" She soon replied, "Get her a husband, madam: I married at that age, and ne'er had 'em; Was just like her.
Steel waters let alone: A back of steel will bring 'em better down.
" And ten to one but they themselves will try The same means to increase their family.
Poor foolish fribble, who by subtlety Of midwife, truest friend to lechery, Persuaded art to be at pains and charge To give thy wife occasion to enlarge Thy silly head! For here walk Cuff and Kick, With brawny back and legs and potent prick, Who more substantially will cure thy wife, And on her half-dead womb bestow new life.
From these the waters got the reputation Of good assistants unto generation.
Some warlike men were now got into th' throng, With hair tied back, singing a bawdy song.
Not much afraid, I got a nearer view, And 'twas my chance to know the dreadful crew.
They were cadets, that seldom can appear: Damned to the stint of thirty pounds a year.
With hawk on fist, or greyhound led in hand, The dogs and footboys sometimes they command.
But now, having trimmed a cast-off spavined horse, With three hard-pinched-for guineas in their purse, Two rusty pistols, scarf about the ****, Coat lined with red, they here presume to swell: This goes for captain, that for colonel.
So the Bear Garden ape, on his steed mounted, No longer is a jackanapes accounted, But is, by virtue of his trumpery, then Called by the name of "the young gentleman.
" Bless me! thought I, what thing is man, that thus In all his shapes, he is ridiculous? Ourselves with noise of reason we do please In vain: humanity's our worst disease.
Thrice happy beasts are, who, because they be Of reason void, and so of foppery.
Faith, I was so ashamed that with remorse I used the insolence to mount my horse; For he, doing only things fit for his nature, Did seem to me by much the wiser creature.
Written by Carolyn Kizer | Create an image from this poem

On a Line from Valéry (The Gulf War)

 The whole green sky is dying.
The last tree flares With a great burst of supernatural rose Under a canopy of poisonous airs.
Could we imagine our return to prayers To end in time before time's final throes, The green sky dying as the last tree flares? But we were young in judgement, old in years Who could make peace; but it was war we chose, To spread its canopy of poisoning airs.
Not all our children's pleas and women's fears Could steer us from this hell.
And now God knows His whole green sky is dying as it flares.
Our crops of wheat have turned to fields of tares.
This dreadful century staggers to its close And the sky dies for us, its poisoned heirs.
All rain was dust.
Its granules were our tears.
Throats burst as universal winter rose To kill the whole green sky, the last tree bare Beneath its canopy of poisoned air.


Written by Barry Tebb | Create an image from this poem

TO BRENDA WILLIAMS ‘WRITING AGAINST THE GRAIN'

 It was Karl Shapiro who wrote in his ‘Defence of Ignorance’ how many poets

Go mad or seem to be so and the majority think we should all be in jail

Or mental hospital and you have ended up in both places - fragile as bone china,

Your pale skin taut, your fingers clasped tight round a cup, sitting in a pool

Of midnight light, your cats stretched flat on your desk top’s scatter

Under the laughing eyes of Sexton and Lowell beneath Rollie McKenna’s seamless shutter.
Other nights you hunch in your rocking chair, spilling rhythms Silently as a bat weaves through midnight’s jade waves Your sibylline tongue tapping every twist or the syllable count Deftly as Whistler mixed tints for Nocturnes’ nuances or shade Or Hokusai tipped every wave crest.
You pause when down the hall a cat snatches at a forbidden plant, “Schubert, Schubert”, you whisper urgently for it is night and there are neighbours.
The whistle of the forgotten kettle shrills: you turn down the gas And scurry back to your poem as you would to a sick child And ease the pain of disordered lines.
The face of your mother smiles like a Madonna bereft And the faces of our children are always somewhere As you focus your midnight eyes soft with tears.
You create to survive, a Balzac writing against the clock A Baudelaire writing against the bailiff’s knock A Val?ry in the throes of ‘Narcisse Parle’.
When a far clock chimes you sigh and set aside the page: There is no telephone to ring or call: I am distant and sick, Frail as an old stick Our spirits rise and fall like the barometer’s needle Jerk at a finger tapping on glass Flashbacks or inspiration cry out at memory loss.
You peer through a magnifying glass at the typeface Your knuckles white with pain as the sonnet starts to strain Like a child coming to birth, the third you never bore.
All births, all babies, all poems are the same in coming The spark of inspiration or spurt of semen, The silent months of gestation, the waiting and worrying Until the final agony of creation: for our first son’s Birth at Oakes we had only a drawer for a crib.
Memories blur: all I know is that it was night And at home as you always insisted, against all advice But mine.
I remember feebly holding the mask in place As the Indian woman doctor brutally stitched you without an anaesthetic And the silence like no other when even the midwives Had left: the child slept and we crept round his make-shift cradle.
At Brudenell Road again it was night in the cold house With bare walls and plug-in fires: Bob, the real father Paced the front, deep in symphonic thought: Isaiah slept: I waited and watched - an undiagnosed breech The doctor’s last minute discovery - made us rush And scatter to have you admitted.
I fell asleep in the silent house and woke to a chaos Of blood and towels and discarded dressings and a bemused five year old.
We brought you armsful of daffodils, Easter’s remainders.
“Happy Easter, are the father?” Staff beamed As we sat by the bedside, Bob, myself and John MacKendrick, Brecht and Rilke’s best translator Soon to die by his own hand.
Poetry is born in the breech position Poems beget poems.
Written by John Clare | Create an image from this poem

I Am

 I am: yet what I am none cares or knows
 My friends forsake me like a memory lost,
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
 They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love's frenzied, stifled throes—
And yet I am, and live—like vapors tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
 Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
 But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
Even the dearest, that I love the best,
Are strange—nay, rather stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes, where man hath never trod, A place where woman never smiled or wept— There to abide with my Creator, God, And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept, Untroubling, and untroubled where I lie, The grass below—above the vaulted sky.
Written by William Cullen Bryant | Create an image from this poem

The Crowded Street

LET me move slowly through the street  
Filled with an ever-shifting train  
Amid the sound of steps that beat 
The murmuring walks like autumn rain.
How fast the flitting figures come! 5 The mild the fierce the stony face; Some bright with thoughtless smiles and some Where secret tears have left their trace.
They pass¡ªto toil to strife to rest; To halls in which the feast is spread; 10 To chambers where the funeral guest In silence sits beside the dead.
And some to happy homes repair Where children pressing cheek to cheek With mute caresses shall declare 15 The tenderness they cannot speak.
And some who walk in calmness here Shall shudder as they reach the door Where one who made their dwelling dear Its flower its light is seen no more.
20 Youth with pale cheek and slender frame And dreams of greatness in thine eye! Go'st thou to build an early name Or early in the task to die? Keen son of trade with eager brow! 25 Who is now fluttering in thy snare? Thy golden fortunes tower they now Or melt the glittering spires in air? Who of this crowd to-night shall tread The dance till daylight gleam again? 30 Who sorrow o'er the untimely dead? Who writhe in throes of mortal pain? Some famine-struck shall think how long The cold dark hours how slow the light; And some who flaunt amid the throng 35 Shall hide in dens of shame to-night.
Each where his tasks or pleasures call They pass and heed each other not.
There is who heeds who holds them all In His large love and boundless thought.
40 These struggling tides of life that seem In wayward aimless course to tend Are eddies of the mighty stream That rolls to its appointed end.
Written by Duncan Campbell Scott | Create an image from this poem

From Shadow

 Now the November skies,
And the clouds that are thin and gray,
That drop with the wind away;
A flood of sunlight rolls,
In a tide of shallow light,
Gold on the land and white
On the water, dim and warm in the wood;
Then it is gone, and the wan
Clear of the shade
Covers fields and barren and glade.
The peace of labor done, Is wide in the gracious earth; The harvest is won; Past are the tears and the mirth; And we feel in the tenuous air How far beyond thought or prayer Is the grace of silent things, That work for the world alway, Neither for fear nor for pay, And when labor is over, rest.
The moil of our fretted life Is borne anew to the soul, Borne with its cark and strife, Its burden of care and dread, Its glories elusive and strange; And the weight of the weary whole Presses it down, till we cry: Where is the fruit of our deeds? Why should we struggle to build Towers against death on the plain? All things possess their lives Save man, whose task and desire Transcend his power and his will.
The question is over and still; Nothing replies: but the earth Takes on a lovelier hue From a cloud that neighbored the sun, That the sun burned down and through, Till it glowed like a seraph's wing; The fields that were gray and dun Are warm in the flowing light; Fair in the west the night Strikes in with vibrant star.
Something has stirred afar In the shadow that winter flings; A message comes up to the soul From the soul of inanimate things: A message that widens and grows Till it touches the deeds of man, Till we see in the torturous throes Some dawning glimmer of plan; Till we feel in the deepening night The hand of the angel Content, That stranger of calmness and light, With his brow over us bent, Who moves with his eyes on the earth, Whose robe of lambent green, A tissue of herb and its sheen, Tells the mother who gave him birth.
The message plays through his power, Till it flames exultant in thought, As the quince-tree triumphs in flower.
The fruit that is checked and marred Goes under the sod: The good lives here in the world; It persists,-- it is God.
Written by Sir Philip Sidney | Create an image from this poem

Sonnet I: Loving In Truth

 Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show, 
That she (dear She) might take some pleasure of my pain: 
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know, 
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain; 

I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe, 
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain: 
Oft turning others' leaves, to see if thence would flow 
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sun-burn'd brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting Invention's stay, Invention, Nature's child, fled step-dame Study's blows, And others' feet still seem'd but strangers in my way.
Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes, Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite-- "Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart and write.
"

Book: Shattered Sighs