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Famous Boundaries Poems by Famous Poets

These are examples of famous Boundaries poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous boundaries poems. These examples illustrate what a famous boundaries poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).

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by Edson, Russell
...In sleep when an old man's body is no longer 
aware of his boundaries, and lies flattened by 
gravity like a mere of wax in its bed . . . It drips 
down to the floor and moves there like a tear down a 
cheek . . . Under the back door into the silver meadow, 
like a pool of sperm, frosty under the moon, as if in 
his first nature, boneless and absurd.

 The moon lifts him up into its white...Read more of this...



by Jeffers, Robinson
...the air; and 
 pleasure, but pleasure is contemptible;
And peace; and is based on solider than pain.
He has broken boundaries a little and that will 
estrange him; he is monstrous, but not
To the measure of the God.... But I having told 
 you--
However I suppose that few in the world have 
 energy to hear effectively-
Have paid my birth-dues; am quits with the 
 people....Read more of this...

by Rilke, Rainer Maria
...the pressure of another.
Hatred is our first response. And lovers,
are they not forever invading one another's
boundaries? -although they promised space,
hunting and homeland. Then, for a sketch
drawn at a moment's impulse, a ground of contrast
is prepared, painfully, so that we may see.
For they are most exact with us. We do not know
the contours of our feelings. We only know 
what shapes them from the outside. 

Who has not sat, afraid, before h...Read more of this...

by Bidart, Frank
...o pluck again from the thousand
technologies of ecstasy

boundlessness, the world that at a drop of water
rises without boundaries,

I push the PLAY button:—

...Callas, Laurel & Hardy, Szigeti

you are alive again,—

the slow movement of K.218
once again no longer

bland, merely pretty, nearly
banal, as it is

in all but Szigeti's hands

 *
Therefore you and I and Mozart
must thank the Twentieth Century, for

it made you pattern, form
whose infinite

repeatab...Read more of this...

by Keats, John
...to bend, by hard compulsion bent
His spirit to the sorrow of the time;
And all along a dismal rack of clouds,
Upon the boundaries of day and night,
He stretch'd himself in grief and radiance faint.
There as he lay, the Heaven with its stars
Look'd down on him with pity, and the voice
Of Coelus, from the universal space,
Thus whisper'd low and solemn in his ear:
"O brightest of my children dear, earth-born
And sky-engendered, son of mysteries
All unrevealed even to the po...Read more of this...



by Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...
Lies a solitary heap,
One white skull and seven dry bones,
On the margin of the stones,
Where a few grey rushes stand,
Boundaries of the sea and land:
Nor is heard one voice of wail
But the sea-mews, as they sail
O'er the billows of the gale;
Or the whirlwind up and down
Howling, like a slaughtered town,
When a king in glory rides
Through the pomp and fratricides:
Those unburied bones around
There is many a mournful sound;
There is no lament for him,
Like a sunless vapour, d...Read more of this...

by Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...with many a tower
And wall impregnable of beaming ice.
Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin
Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky
Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing
Its destined path, or in the mangled soil
Branchless and shattered stand; the rocks, drawn down
From yon remotest waste, have overthrown
The limits of the dead and living world,
Never to be reclaimed. The dwelling-place
Of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil
Their food an...Read more of this...

by Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...with many a tower
And wall impregnable of beaming ice.
Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin
Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky
Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing
Its destin'd path, or in the mangled soil
Branchless and shatter'd stand; the rocks, drawn down
From yon remotest waste, have overthrown
The limits of the dead and living world,
Never to be reclaim'd. The dwelling-place
Of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil;
Their food a...Read more of this...

by Darwish, Mahmoud
...my palm
To the door of the distant airport
All the wheatfields
All the prisons
All the white tombstones
All the barbed Boundaries
All the waving handkerchiefs
All the eyes
were with me,
But they dropped them from my passport

Stripped of my name and identity?
On soil I nourished with my own hands?
Today Job cried out
Filling the sky:
Don’t make and example of me again!
Oh, gentlemen, Prophets,
Don’t ask the trees for their names
Don’t ask the valleys who their mother is
>Fro...Read more of this...

by Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...asy?
That love, when limbs are interwoven,
And sleep, when the night of life is cloven,
And thought, to the world's dim boundaries clinging,
And music, when one beloved is singing,
Is death? Let us drain right joyously
The cup which the sweet bird fills for me.' 
He paused, and to my lips he bent
His own; like spirit his words went
Through all my limbs with the speed of fire;
And his keen eyes, glittering through mine,
Filled me with the flame divine
Which in their orbs w...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Amy
...e gift of deeper seeing;
Must spurn all ease, all hindering love,
All which could hold or bind; must prove
The farthest boundaries of thought,
And shun no end which these have brought;
Then die in satisfaction, knowing
That what was sown was worth the sowing.
I claim for all the goods I sell
That they will serve their purpose well,
And though you perish, they will live.
Full measure for your pay I give.
To-day you worked, you thought, in vain.
What since has h...Read more of this...

by Patchen, Kenneth
...So it is the duty of the artist to discourage all traces of shame
To extend all boundaries
To fog them in right over the plate
To kill only what is ridiculous
To establish problem
To ignore solutions
To listen to no one
To omit nothing
To contradict everything
To generate the free brain
To bear no cross
To take part in no crucifixion
To tinkle a warning when mankind strays
To explode upon all parties
To wound deeper than the soldier
To ...Read more of this...

by von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang
...WHEN the primeval
All-holy Father
Sows with a tranquil hand
From clouds, as they roll,
Bliss-spreading lightnings
Over the earth,
Then do I kiss the last
Hem of his garment,
While by a childlike awe
Fiil'd is my breast.

For with immortals
Ne'er may a mortal
Measure himself.
If he soar upwards
And if he touch
With his forehead the stars,
Nowhere wi...Read more of this...

by von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang
...t round them dart

Show the fierce destroyer's hand.

Oh neglect not what I say,

For I speak it lovingly!
From our boundaries haste away,

From the god's dread anger fly!
Cleanse once more the holy place,

Turn the savage train aside!
Earth contains upon its face

Many a spot unsanctified;
Here we only prize the good.

Stars unsullied round us burn.

If ye, in repentant mood,

From your wanderings would return,--
If ye fail to find the bliss

That ye found with u...Read more of this...

by Jackson, Laura Riding
...may they rest beyond
Suspicion now, the incomprehensibles
Traitorous in such talking
As chattered over their countries' boundaries.
The graves are gardened and the whispering
Stops at the hedges, there is singing
Of it in the ranks, there is a hush
Where the ground has limits
And the rest is loveliness.

And loveliness?
Death has an understanding of it
Loyal to many flags
And is a silent ally of any country
Beset in its mortal heart
With immortal poetry....Read more of this...

by Duncan, Robert
...oes not dream, is never asleep, 
is a wide-awake poem
waiting like a lover for the disrobing of the guard; 
the beautil boundaries of the empire
naked, rapt round in the smell of a lion.

(The barbarians have passt over the significant phrase) 

-When I was asleep, 
a certain guard says, 
a man shed his clothes as if he shed tears
and appeard as a lonely lion
waiting for a song under the shed-roof of wars.

I sang the song that he waited to hear, 
I, the Prize-Winner,...Read more of this...

by Szymborska, Wislawa
...the knees fly up,
it turns blue, swells, salivates and bleeds. 

Nothing has changed. Except for the course of boundaries,
the line of forests, coasts, deserts and glaciers.
Amid these landscapes traipses the soul,
disappears, comes back, draws nearer, moves away,
alien to itself, elusive, at times certain, at others uncertain of its own existence,
while the body is and is and is
and has no place of its own....Read more of this...

by Lehman, David
...enstein let the 
silence gather. Then he said, "this itself is the answer." 

7. 

Religion went beyond the boundaries of language, 
yet the impulse to run against "the walls of our cage," 
though "perfectly, absolutely useless," was not to be 
dismissed. A. J. Ayer, one of Oxford's ablest minds, 
was puzzled. If logic cannot prove a nonsensical 
conclusion, why didn't Wittgenstein abandon it, 
"along with the rest of metaphysics, as not worth 
ser...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...ts are these we so rapidly approach? 
I see men marching and countermarching by swift millions;
I see the frontiers and boundaries of the old aristocracies broken; 
I see the landmarks of European kings removed; 
I see this day the People beginning their landmarks, (all others give way;) 
—Never were such sharp questions ask’d as this day; 
Never was average man, his soul, more energetic, more like a God;
Lo! how he urges and urges, leaving the masses no rest; 
His daring foo...Read more of this...

by Dickinson, Emily
...left me -- Sire -- two Legacies --
A Legacy of Love
A Heavenly Father would suffice
Had He the offer of --

You left me Boundaries of Pain --
Capacious as the Sea --
Between Eternity and Time --
Your Consciousness -- and Me --...Read more of this...

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Book: Shattered Sighs