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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Years of the Modern

by Walt Whitman
 YEARS of the modern! years of the unperform’d! 
Your horizon rises—I see it parting away for more august dramas; 
I see not America only—I see not only Liberty’s nation, but other nations
 preparing; 
I see tremendous entrances and exits—I see new combinations—I see the solidarity
 of
 races; 
I see that force advancing with irresistible power on the world’s stage;
(Have...Read more of this...

Mont Blanc

by Percy Bysshe Shelley
 (Lines written in the Vale of Chamouni)

1

The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark - now glittering - now reflecting gloom -
Now lending splendor, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters, - with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume
In the wild...Read more of this...

The Song of the Borderguard

by Robert Duncan
 The man with his lion under the shed of wars
sheds his belief as if he shed tears.
The sound of words waits -
a barbarian host at the borderline of sense.

The enamord guards desert their posts
harkening to the lion-smell of a poem
that rings in their ears. 

-Dreams, a certain guard said
were never designd so
to re-arrange an empire.

Along about six o'clock I...Read more of this...

The Poets Corner

by Laura Riding Jackson
 Here where the end of bone is no end of song
And the earth is bedecked with immortality
In what was poetry
And now is pride beside
And nationality,
Here is a battle with no bravery
But if the coward's tongue has gone
Swording his own lusty lung.
Listen if there is victory
Written into a library
Waving the books in banners
Soldierly at last, for the lines
Go marching on,...Read more of this...

The Boundaries Of Humanity

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 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 will rest then
His insecure feet,
And with him sport
Tempest and cloud.

Though with firm sinewy
Limbs...Read more of this...

You left me -- Sire -- two Legacies --

by Emily Dickinson
 You 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...

Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni

by Percy Bysshe Shelley
 I
The everlasting universe of things 
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark--now glittering--now reflecting gloom--
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters--with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume,
In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
Where woods...Read more of this...

To a Very Wise Man

by Siegfried Sassoon
 I

Fires in the dark you build; tall quivering flames 
In the huge midnight forest of the unknown. 
Your soul is full of cities with dead names, 
And blind-faced, earth-bound gods of bronze and stone 
Whose priests and kings and lust-begotten lords
Watch the procession of their thundering hosts, 
Or guard relentless fanes with flickering swords 
And wizardry of ghosts. 

II

In...Read more of this...

For The Twentieth Century

by Frank Bidart
 Bound, hungry to 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...Read more of this...

A Journey Through The Moonlight

by Russell Edson
 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...Read more of this...

The Artists Duty

by Kenneth Patchen
 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...Read more of this...

Passport

by Mahmoud Darwish
 They did not recognize me in the shadows
That suck away my color in this Passport
And to them my wound was an exhibit
For a tourist Who loves to collect photographs
They did not recognize me,
Ah . . . Don’t leave 
The palm of my hand without the sun
Because the trees recognize me
Don’t leave me pale like the moon!

All the birds that...Read more of this...

Martha Washington

by Sidney Lanier
 Written for the "Martha Washington Court Journal".



Down cold snow-stretches of our bitter time,
When windy shams and the rain-mocking sleet
Of Trade have cased us in such icy rime
That hearts are scarcely hot enough to beat,
Thy fame, O Lady of the lofty eyes,
Doth fall along the age, like as a lane
Of Spring, in whose most generous boundaries
Full many a frozen virtue...Read more of this...

Wittgensteins Ladder

by David Lehman
 "My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: 
 anyone who understands them eventually recognizes them as 
 nonsensical, when he has used them -- as steps -- to climb 
 up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder 
 after he has climbed up it.)" -- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus 

1. 

The first time...Read more of this...

Duino Elegies: The Fourth Elegy

by Rainer Maria Rilke
 O trees of life, oh, what when winter comes?
We are not of one mind. Are not like birds
in unison migrating. And overtaken,
overdue, we thrust ourselves into the wind
and fall to earth into indifferent ponds.
Blossoming and withering we comprehend as one.
And somewhere lions roam, quite unaware,
in their magnificence, of any weaknesss.

But we, while wholly concentrating on one thing,
already feel the...Read more of this...

The Spider holds a Silver Ball

by Emily Dickinson
 The Spider holds a Silver Ball
In unperceived Hands --
And dancing softly to Himself
His Yarn of Pearl -- unwinds --

He plies from Nought to Nought --
In unsubstantial Trade --
Supplants our Tapestries with His --
In half the period --

An Hour to rear supreme
His Continents of Light --
Then dangle from the Housewife's Broom --
His Boundaries -- forgot --...Read more of this...

Birth-Dues

by Robinson Jeffers
 Joy is a trick in the air; pleasure is merely 
 contemptible, the dangled
Carrot the ass follows to market or precipice;
But limitary pain -- the rock under the tower 
 and the hewn coping
That takes thunder at the head of the turret-
Terrible and real. Therefore a mindless dervish 
 carving himself
With knives will seem to have conquered the world.


The...Read more of this...

Tortures

by Wislawa Szymborska
 Nothing has changed.
The body is susceptible to pain,
it must eat and breathe air and sleep,
it has thin skin and blood right underneath,
an adequate stock of teeth and nails,
its bones are breakable, its joints are stretchable.
In tortures all this is taken into account. 

Nothing has changed.
The body shudders as it shuddered
before the founding of Rome and after,
in the twentieth century...Read more of this...

The German Parnassus

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 in the wares before you spread,
Types of all things may be read.

'NEATH the shadow

Of these bushes,
On the meadow

Where the cooling water gushes.
Phoebus gave me, when a boy,
All life's fullness to enjoy.
So, in silence, as the God
Bade them with his sov'reign nod,
Sacred Muses train'd my days
To his praise.--
With the bright and silv'ry flood
Of Parnassus stirr'd my blood,
And the seal so...Read more of this...

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