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Best Famous Whirr Poems

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

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Written by Wystan Hugh (W H) Auden | Create an image from this poem

As I Walked Out One Evening

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.
And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
'Love has no ending.
'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,
'I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.
'The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.
'
But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.
'In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.
'In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.
'Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.
'O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.
'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.
'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.
'O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.
'O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.
'
It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.


Written by Walt Whitman | Create an image from this poem

Artilleryman's Vision The

 WHILE my wife at my side lies slumbering, and the wars are over long, 
And my head on the pillow rests at home, and the vacant midnight passes, 
And through the stillness, through the dark, I hear, just hear, the breath of my infant, 
There in the room, as I wake from sleep, this vision presses upon me: 
The engagement opens there and then, in fantasy unreal;
The skirmishers begin—they crawl cautiously ahead—I hear the irregular snap!
 snap! 
I hear the sounds of the different missiles—the short t-h-t! t-h-t! of the
 rifle
 balls; 
I see the shells exploding, leaving small white clouds—I hear the great shells
 shrieking
 as
 they pass; 
The grape, like the hum and whirr of wind through the trees, (quick, tumultuous, now the
 contest
 rages!) 
All the scenes at the batteries themselves rise in detail before me again;
The crashing and smoking—the pride of the men in their pieces; 
The chief gunner ranges and sights his piece, and selects a fuse of the right time; 
After firing, I see him lean aside, and look eagerly off to note the effect; 
—Elsewhere I hear the cry of a regiment charging—(the young colonel leads
 himself
 this
 time, with brandish’d sword;) 
I see the gaps cut by the enemy’s volleys, (quickly fill’d up, no delay;)
I breathe the suffocating smoke—then the flat clouds hover low, concealing all; 
Now a strange lull comes for a few seconds, not a shot fired on either side; 
Then resumed, the chaos louder than ever, with eager calls, and orders of officers; 
While from some distant part of the field the wind wafts to my ears a shout of applause,
 (some
 special success;) 
And ever the sound of the cannon, far or near, (rousing, even in dreams, a devilish
 exultation,
 and
 all the old mad joy, in the depths of my soul;)
And ever the hastening of infantry shifting positions—batteries, cavalry, moving
 hither
 and
 thither; 
(The falling, dying, I heed not—the wounded, dripping and red, I heed not—some
 to the
 rear
 are hobbling;) 
Grime, heat, rush—aid-de-camps galloping by, or on a full run; 
With the patter of small arms, the warning s-s-t of the rifles, (these in my vision
 I
 hear or
 see,) 
And bombs busting in air, and at night the vari-color’d rockets.
Written by Jorie Graham | Create an image from this poem

Le Manteau De Pascal

 I have put on my great coat it is cold.
It is an outer garment.
Coarse, woolen.
Of unknown origin.
* It has a fine inner lining but it is as an exterior that you see it — a grace.
* I have a coat I am wearing.
It is a fine admixture.
The woman who threw the threads in the two directions has made, skillfully, something dark-true, as the evening calls the bird up into the branches of the shaven hedgerows, to twitter bodily a makeshift coat — the boxelder cut back stringently by the owner that more might grow next year, and thicker, you know — the birds tucked gestures on the inner branches — and space in the heart, not shade-giving, not chronological.
.
.
Oh transformer, logic, where are you here in this fold, my name being called-out now but back, behind, in the upper world.
.
.
.
* I have a coat I am wearing I was told to wear it.
Someone knelt down each morning to button it up.
I looked at their face, down low, near me.
What is longing? what is a star? Watched each button a peapod getting tucked back in.
Watched harm with its planeloads folded up in the sleeves.
Watched grappling hooks trawl through the late-night waters.
Watched bands of stations scan unable to ascertain.
There are fingers, friend, that never grow sluggish.
They crawl up the coat and don't miss an eyehole.
Glinting in kitchenlight.
Supervised by the traffic god.
Hissed at by grassblades that wire-up outside their stirring rhetoric — this is your land, this is my my — * You do understanding, don't you, by looking? The coat, which is itself a ramification, a city, floats vulnerably above another city, ours, the city on the hill (only with hill gone), floats in illustration of what once was believed, and thus was visible — (all things believed are visible) — floats a Jacob's ladder with hovering empty arms, an open throat, a place where a heart might beat if it wishes, pockets that hang awaiting the sandy whirr of a small secret, folds where the legs could be, with their kneeling mechanism, the floating fatigue of an after-dinner herald, not guilty of any treason towards life except fatigue, a skillfully cut coat, without chronology, filled with the sensation of being suddenly completed — as then it is, abruptly, the last stitch laid in, the knot bit off — hung there in Gravity, as if its innermost desire, numberless the awaitings flickering around it, the other created things also floating but not of the same order, no, not like this form, built so perfectly to mantle the body, the neck like a vase awaiting its cut flower, a skirting barely visible where the tucks indicate the mild loss of bearing in the small of the back, the grammar, so strict, of the two exact shoulders — and the law of the shouldering — and the chill allowed to skitter up through, and those crucial spots where the fit cannot be perfect — oh skirted loosening aswarm with lessenings, with the mild pallors of unaccomplishment, flaps night-air collects in, folds.
.
.
But the night does not annul its belief in, the night preserves its love for, this one narrowing of infinity, that floats up into the royal starpocked blue its ripped, distracted supervisor — this coat awaiting recollection, this coat awaiting the fleeting moment, the true moment, the hill,the vision of the hill, and then the moment when the prize is lost, and the erotic tinglings of the dream of reason are left to linger mildly in the weave of the fabric according to the rules, the wool gabardine mix, with its grammatical weave, never never destined to lose its elasticity, its openness to abandonment, its willingness to be disturbed.
* July 11 .
.
.
Oaks: the organization of this tree is difficult.
Speaking generally no doubt the determining planes are concentric, a system of brief contiguous and continuous tangents, whereas those of the cedar wd.
roughly be called horizontals and those of the beech radiating but modified by droop and by a screw-set towards jutting points.
But beyond this since the normal growth of the boughs is radiating there is a system of spoke-wise clubs of green — sleeve-pieces.
And since the end shoots curl and carry young scanty leaf-stars these clubs are tapered, and I have seen also pieces in profile with chiseled outlines, the blocks thus made detached and lessening towards the end.
However the knot-star is the chief thing: it is whorled, worked round, and this is what keeps up the illusion of the tree.
Oaks differ much, and much turns on the broadness of the leaves, the narrower giving the crisped and starry and catharine-wheel forms, the broader the flat-pieced mailed or chard-covered ones, in wh.
it is possible to see composition in dips, etc.
But I shall study them further.
It was this night I believe but possibly the next that I saw clearly the impossibility of staying in the Church of England.
* How many coats do you think it will take? The coat was a great-coat.
The Emperor's coat was.
How many coats do you think it will take? The undercoat is dry.
What we now want is? The sky can analyse the coat because of the rips in it.
The sky shivers through the coat because of the rips in it.
The rips in the sky ripen through the rips in the coat.
There is no quarrel.
* I take off my coat and carry it.
* There is no emergency.
* I only made that up.
* Behind everything the sound of something dripping The sound of something: I will vanish, others will come here, what is that? The canvas flapping in the wind like the first notes of our absence An origin is not an action though it occurs at the very start Desire goes travelling into the total dark of another's soul looking for where it breaks off I was a hard thing to undo * The life of a customer What came on the paper plate overheard nearby an impermanence of structure watching the lip-reading had loved but couldn't now recognize * What are the objects, then, that man should consider most important? What sort of a question is that he asks them.
The eye only discovers the visible slowly.
It floats before us asking to be worn, offering "we must think about objects at the very moment when all their meaning is abandoning them" and "the title provides a protection from significance" and "we are responsible for the universe.
" * I have put on my doubting, my wager, it is cold.
It is an outer garment, or, conversely a natural covering, so coarse and woolen, also of unknown origin, a barely apprehensible dilution of evening into an outer garment, or, conversely a natural covering, to twitter bodily a makeshift coat, that more might grow next year, and thicker, you know, not shade-giving, not chronological, my name being called out now but from out back, behind, an outer garment, so coarse and woolen, also of unknown origin, not shade-giving, not chronological, each harm with its planeloads folded up in the sleeves, you do understand, don't you, by looking? the jacob's ladder with its floating arms its open throat, that more might grow next year, and thicker, you know, filled with the sensation of being suddenly completed, the other created things also floating but not of the same order, not shade-giving, not chronological, you do understand, don't you, by looking? a neck like a vase awaiting its cut flower, filled with the sensation of being suddenly completed, the moment the prize is lost, the erotic tingling, the wool-gabardine mix, its grammatical weave — you do understand, don't you, by looking? — never never destined to lose its elasticity, it was this night I believe but possibly the next I saw clearly the impossibility of staying filled with the sensation of being suddenly completed, also of unknown origin, not shade-giving, not chronological since the normal growth of boughs is radiating a system of spoke-wise clubs of green — sleeve pieces — never never destined to lose its elasticity my name being called out now but back, behind, hissing how many coats do you think it will take "or try with eyesight to divide" (there is no quarrel) behind everything the sound of something dripping a system of spoke-wise clubs of green — sleeve pieces filled with the sensation of suddenly being completed the wool gabardine mix, the grammatical weave, the never-never-to-lose-its-elasticity: my name flapping in the wind like the first note of my absence hissing how many coats do you think it will take are you a test case is it an emergency flapping in the wind the first note of something overheard nearby an impermanence of structure watching the lip-reading, there is no quarrel, I will vanish, others will come here, what is that, never never to lose the sensation of suddenly being completed in the wind — the first note of our quarrel — it was this night I believe or possibly the next filled with the sensation of being suddenly completed, I will vanish, others will come here, what is that now floating in the air before us with stars a test case that I saw clearly the impossibility of staying
Written by Walt Whitman | Create an image from this poem

Beat! Beat! Drums!

 1
BEAT! beat! drums!—Blow! bugles! blow! 
Through the windows—through doors—burst like a ruthless force, 
Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation; 
Into the school where the scholar is studying; 
Leave not the bridegroom quiet—no happiness must he have now with his bride;
Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, plowing his field or gathering his grain; 
So fierce you whirr and pound, you drums—so shrill you bugles blow.
2 Beat! beat! drums!—Blow! bugles! blow! Over the traffic of cities—over the rumble of wheels in the streets: Are beds prepared for sleepers at night in the houses? No sleepers must sleep in those beds; No bargainers’ bargains by day—no brokers or speculators—Would they continue? Would the talkers be talking? would the singer attempt to sing? Would the lawyer rise in the court to state his case before the judge? Then rattle quicker, heavier drums—you bugles wilder blow.
3 Beat! beat! drums!—Blow! bugles! blow! Make no parley—stop for no expostulation; Mind not the timid—mind not the weeper or prayer; Mind not the old man beseeching the young man; Let not the child’s voice be heard, nor the mother’s entreaties; Make even the trestles to shake the dead, where they lie awaiting the hearses, So strong you thump, O terrible drums—so loud you bugles blow.
Written by Walt Whitman | Create an image from this poem

Longings for Home

 O MAGNET-SOUTH! O glistening, perfumed South! My South! 
O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse, and love! Good and evil! O all dear to me! 
O dear to me my birth-things—All moving things, and the trees where I was
 born—the
 grains,
 plants, rivers; 
Dear to me my own slow sluggish rivers where they flow, distant, over flats of silvery
 sands,
 or
 through swamps; 
Dear to me the Roanoke, the Savannah, the Altamahaw, the Pedee, the Tombigbee, the Santee,
 the
 Coosa, and the Sabine;
O pensive, far away wandering, I return with my Soul to haunt their banks again; 
Again in Florida I float on transparent lakes—I float on the Okeechobee—I cross
 the
 hummock land, or through pleasant openings, or dense forests; 
I see the parrots in the woods—I see the papaw tree and the blossoming titi; 
Again, sailing in my coaster, on deck, I coast off Georgia—I coast up the Carolinas, 
I see where the live-oak is growing—I see where the yellow-pine, the scented
 bay-tree, the
 lemon and orange, the cypress, the graceful palmetto;
I pass rude sea-headlands and enter Pamlico Sound through an inlet, and dart my vision
 inland; 
O the cotton plant! the growing fields of rice, sugar, hemp! 
The cactus, guarded with thorns—the laurel-tree, with large white flowers; 
The range afar—the richness and barrenness—the old woods charged with mistletoe
 and
 trailing moss, 
The piney odor and the gloom—the awful natural stillness, (Here in these dense swamps
 the
 freebooter carries his gun, and the fugitive slave has his conceal’d hut;)
O the strange fascination of these half-known, half-impassable swamps, infested by
 reptiles,
 resounding with the bellow of the alligator, the sad noises of the night-owl and the
 wild-cat,
 and
 the whirr of the rattlesnake; 
The mocking-bird, the American mimic, singing all the forenoon—singing through the
 moon-lit
 night, 
The humming-bird, the wild turkey, the raccoon, the opossum; 
A Tennessee corn-field—the tall, graceful, long-leav’d corn—slender,
 flapping,
 bright
 green with tassels—with beautiful ears, each well-sheath’d in its husk; 
An Arkansas prairie—a sleeping lake, or still bayou;
O my heart! O tender and fierce pangs—I can stand them not—I will depart; 
O to be a Virginian, where I grew up! O to be a Carolinian! 
O longings irrepressible! O I will go back to old Tennessee, and never wander more!


Written by Erica Jong | Create an image from this poem

For an Earth-Landing

 the sky sinks its blue teeth
into the mountains.
Rising on pure will (the lurch & lift-off, the sudden swing into wide, white snow), I encourage the cable.
Past the wind & crossed tips of my skis & the mauve shadows of pines & the spoor of bears & deer, I speak to my fear, rising, riding, finding myself the only thing between snow & sky, the link that holds it all together.
Halfway up the wire, we stop, slide back a little (a whirr of pulleys).
Astronauts circle above us today in the television blue of space.
But the thin withers of alps are waiting to take us too, & this might be the moon! We move! Friends, this is a toy merely for reaching mountains merely for skiing down.
& now we're dangling like charms on the same bracelet or upsidedown tightrope people (a colossal circus!) or absurd winged walkers, angels in animal fur, with mittened hands waving & fear turning & the mountain like a fisherman, reeling us all in.
So we land on the windy peak, touch skis to snow, are married to our purple shadows, & ski back down to the unimaginable valley leaving no footprints.
Written by Carl Sandburg | Create an image from this poem

Memoir of a Proud Boy

 HE lived on the wings of storm.
The ashes are in Chihuahua.
Out of Ludlow and coal towns in Colorado Sprang a vengeance of Slav miners, Italians, Scots, Cornishmen, Yanks.
Killings ran under the spoken commands of this boy With eighty men and rifles on a hogback mountain.
They killed swearing to remember The shot and charred wives and children In the burnt camp of Ludlow, And Louis Tikas, the laughing Greek, Plugged with a bullet, clubbed with a gun butt.
As a home war It held the nation a week And one or two million men stood together And swore by the retribution of steel.
It was all accidental.
He lived flecking lint off coat lapels Of men he talked with.
He kissed the miners’ babies And wrote a Denver paper Of picket silhouettes on a mountain line.
He had no mother but Mother Jones Crying from a jail window of Trinidad: “All I want is room enough to stand And shake my fist at the enemies of the human race.
” Named by a grand jury as a murderer He went to Chihuahua, forgot his old Scotch name, Smoked cheroots with Pancho Villa And wrote letters of Villa as a rock of the people.
How can I tell how Don Magregor went? Three riders emptied lead into him.
He lay on the main street of an inland town.
A boy sat near all day throwing stones To keep pigs away.
The Villa men buried him in a pit With twenty Carranzistas.
There is drama in that point… …the boy and the pigs.
Griffith would make a movie of it to fetch sobs.
Victor Herbert would have the drums whirr In a weave with a high fiddle-string’s single clamor.
“And the muchacho sat there all day throwing stones To keep the pigs away,” wrote Gibbons to the Tribune.
Somewhere in Chihuahua or Colorado Is a leather bag of poems and short stories.
Written by Rupert Brooke | Create an image from this poem

Ante Aram

 Before thy shrine I kneel, an unknown worshipper,
Chanting strange hymns to thee and sorrowful litanies,
Incense of dirges, prayers that are as holy myrrh.
Ah, goddess, on thy throne of tears and faint low sighs, Weary at last to theeward come the feet that err, And empty hearts grown tired of the world's vanities.
How fair this cool deep silence to a wanderer Deaf with the roar of winds along the open skies! Sweet, after sting and bitter kiss of sea-water, The pale Lethean wine within thy chalices! I come before thee, I, too tired wanderer, To heed the horror of the shrine, the distant cries, And evil whispers in the gloom, or the swift whirr Of terrible wings -- I, least of all thy votaries, With a faint hope to see the scented darkness stir, And, parting, frame within its quiet mysteries One face, with lips than autumn-lilies tenderer, And voice more sweet than the far plaint of viols is, Or the soft moan of any grey-eyed lute-player.
Written by Sylvia Plath | Create an image from this poem

Goatsucker

 Old goatherds swear how all night long they hear
The warning whirr and burring of the bird
Who wakes with darkness and till dawn works hard
Vampiring dry of milk each great goat udder.
Moon full, moon dark, the chary dairy farmer Dreams that his fattest cattle dwindle, fevered By claw-cuts of the Goatsucker, alias Devil-bird, Its eye, flashlit, a chip of ruby fire.
So fables say the Goatsucker moves, masked from men's sight In an ebony air, on wings of witch cloth, Well-named, ill-famed a knavish fly-by-night, Yet it never milked any goat, nor dealt cow death And shadows only--cave-mouth bristle beset-- Cockchafers and the wan, green luna moth.
Written by Thomas Hardy | Create an image from this poem

The Milkmaid

 Under a daisied bank 
There stands a rich red ruminating cow, 
 And hard against her flank 
A cotton-hooded milkmaid bends her brow.
The flowery river-ooze Upheaves and falls; the milk purrs in the pail; Few pilgrims but would choose The peace of such a life in such a vale.
The maid breathes words--to vent, It seems, her sense of Nature's scenery, Of whose life, sentiment, And essence, very part itself is she.
She bends a glance of pain, And, at a moment, lets escape a tear; Is it that passing train, Whose alien whirr offends her country ear? - Nay! Phyllis does not dwell On visual and familiar things like these; What moves her is the spell Of inner themes and inner poetries: Could but by Sunday morn Her gay new gown come, meads might dry to dun, Trains shriek till ears were torn, If Fred would not prefer that Other One.

Book: Shattered Sighs