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Best Famous Untempered Poems

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

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Written by Paul Laurence Dunbar | Create an image from this poem

Life's Tragedy

 It may be misery not to sing at all, 
And to go silent through the brimming day; 
It may be misery never to be loved, 
But deeper griefs than these beset the way.

To sing the perfect song, 
And by a half-tone lost the key, 
There the potent sorrow, there the grief, 
The pale, sad staring of Life's Tragedy.

To have come near to the perfect love, 
Not the hot passion of untempered youth, 
But that which lies aside its vanity, 
And gives, for thy trusting worship, truth.

This, this indeed is to be accursed, 
For if we mortals love, or if we sing, 
We count our joys not by what we have, 
But by what kept us from that perfect thing.


Written by Edwin Arlington Robinson | Create an image from this poem

The Wandering Jew

 I saw by looking in his eyes 
That they remembered everything; 
And this was how I came to know 
That he was here, still wandering. 
For though the figure and the scene
Were never to be reconciled, 
I knew the man as I had known 
His image when I was a child. 

With evidence at every turn, 
I should have held it safe to guess
That all the newness of New York 
Had nothing new in loneliness; 
Yet here was one who might be Noah, 
Or Nathan, or Abimelech, 
Or Lamech, out of ages lost,—
Or, more than all, Melchizedek. 

Assured that he was none of these, 
I gave them back their names again, 
To scan once more those endless eyes 
Where all my questions ended then.
I found in them what they revealed 
That I shall not live to forget, 
And wondered if they found in mine 
Compassion that I might regret. 

Pity, I learned, was not the least
Of time’s offending benefits 
That had now for so long impugned 
The conservation of his wits: 
Rather it was that I should yield, 
Alone, the fealty that presents
The tribute of a tempered ear 
To an untempered eloquence. 

Before I pondered long enough 
On whence he came and who he was, 
I trembled at his ringing wealth
Of manifold anathemas; 
I wondered, while he seared the world, 
What new defection ailed the race, 
And if it mattered how remote 
Our fathers were from such a place.

Before there was an hour for me 
To contemplate with less concern 
The crumbling realm awaiting us 
Than his that was beyond return, 
A dawning on the dust of years
Had shaped with an elusive light 
Mirages of remembered scenes 
That were no longer for the sight. 

For now the gloom that hid the man 
Became a daylight on his wrath,
And one wherein my fancy viewed 
New lions ramping in his path. 
The old were dead and had no fangs, 
Wherefore he loved them—seeing not 
They were the same that in their time
Had eaten everything they caught. 

The world around him was a gift 
Of anguish to his eyes and ears, 
And one that he had long reviled 
As fit for devils, not for seers.
Where, then, was there a place for him 
That on this other side of death 
Saw nothing good, as he had seen 
No good come out of Nazareth? 

Yet here there was a reticence,
And I believe his only one, 
That hushed him as if he beheld 
A Presence that would not be gone. 
In such a silence he confessed 
How much there was to be denied;
And he would look at me and live, 
As others might have looked and died. 

As if at last he knew again 
That he had always known, his eyes 
Were like to those of one who gazed
On those of One who never dies. 
For such a moment he revealed 
What life has in it to be lost; 
And I could ask if what I saw, 
Before me there, was man or ghost.

He may have died so many times 
That all there was of him to see 
Was pride, that kept itself alive 
As too rebellious to be free; 
He may have told, when more than once
Humility seemed imminent, 
How many a lonely time in vain 
The Second Coming came and went. 

Whether he still defies or not 
The failure of an angry task
That relegates him out of time 
To chaos, I can only ask. 
But as I knew him, so he was; 
And somewhere among men to-day 
Those old, unyielding eyes may flash,
And flinch—and look the other way.

Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry