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Famous Buoy Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Burns, Robert
...a warm existence finds,
And all mechanics’ many-apron’d kinds.
Some other rarer sorts are wanted yet,
The lead and buoy are needful to the net:
The caput mortuum of gross desires
Makes a material for mere knights and squires;
The martial phosphorus is taught to flow,
She kneads the lumpish philosophic dough,
Then marks th’ unyielding mass with grave designs,
Law, physic, politics, and deep divines;
Last, she sublimes th’ Aurora of the poles,
The flashing elements of fema...Read more of this...



by Carman, Bliss
...the quake of a new desire 
Takes hold on us down in the gloom. 

No more can the filmy drift 
Nor draughty currents buoy 
Our whim to its bent, nor lift 
Our heart to the height of its joy. 

When sheering down to the Line 
Come polar tides from the North, 
Thy silver folk of the brine 
Must glimmer and forth. 

Down in the crumbling mill 
Grinding eternally, 
We are the type of thy will 
To the tribes of the sea. 

II
Soul, what art thou in the tribes of the ...Read more of this...

by Dryden, John
...h years:
Long since, the rising rebels he withstood
In regions waste, beyond the Jordan's flood:
Unfortunately brave to buoy the state;
But sinking underneath his master's fate:
In exile with his god-like prince he mourn'd:
For him he suffer'd, and with him return'd.
The court he practis'd, not the courtier's art:
Large was his wealth, but larger was his heart:
Which well the noblest objects knew to choose,
The fighting warrior, and recording Muse.
His bed could once ...Read more of this...

by Pope, Alexander
...e,
In various Shapes of Parsons, Criticks, Beaus;
But Sense surviv'd, when merry Jests were past;
For rising Merit will buoy up at last.
Might he return, and bless once more our Eyes,
New Blackmores and new Milbourns must arise;
Nay shou'd great Homer lift his awful Head,
Zoilus again would start up from the Dead.
Envy will Merit as its Shade pursue,
But like a Shadow, proves the Substance true;
For envy'd Wit, like Sol Eclips'd, makes known
Th' opposing Body's Grossn...Read more of this...

by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...From rock to rock upon the glooming quay,
The town was hush’d beneath us: lower down
The bay was oily calm; the harbour-buoy,
Sole star of phosphorescence in the calm,
With one green sparkle ever and anon
Dipt by itself, and we were glad at heart....Read more of this...



by Clampitt, Amy
...While you walk the water's edge,
turning over concepts
I can't envision, the honking buoy
serves notice that at any time
the wind may change,
the reef-bell clatters
its treble monotone, deaf as Cassandra
to any note but warning. The ocean,
cumbered by no business more urgent 
than keeping open old accounts
that never balanced,
goes on shuffling its millenniums
of quartz, granite, and basalt.
 It behaves
toward the permutations of nov...Read more of this...

by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...re they to me without meaning.
Feeling is deep and still; and the word that floats on the surface
Is as the tossing buoy, that betrays where the anchor is hidden.
Therefore trust to thy heart, and to what the world calls illusions.
Gabriel truly is near thee; for not far away to the southward,
On the banks of the Teche, are the towns of St. Maur and St. Martin.
There the long-wandering bride shall be given again to her bridegroom,
There the long-absent...Read more of this...

by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...br>E. coast of Cape Ann,
Massachusetts. Salvages is pronounced to rhyme with assuages.
Groaner: a whistling buoy.) 


I

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By...Read more of this...

by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...t the hardened skin, 
And could not wholly bring him under, more 
Than loud Southwesterns, rolling ridge on ridge, 
The buoy that rides at sea, and dips and springs 
For ever; till at length Sir Gareth's brand 
Clashed his, and brake it utterly to the hilt. 
'I have thee now;' but forth that other sprang, 
And, all unknightlike, writhed his wiry arms 
Around him, till he felt, despite his mail, 
Strangled, but straining even his uttermost 
Cast, and so hurled him headlong...Read more of this...

by Stevenson, Robert Louis
...cruelly was quenched, until at last
One ship, the looked-for pennant at its mast,
Bore gaily, and dropt safely past the buoy;
And lo! the loved one was not there - was dead.
Then would he watch no more; no more the sea
With myriad vessels, sail by sail, perplex
His eyes and mock his longing. Weary head,
Take now thy rest; eyes, close; for no more me
Shall hopes untried elate, or ruined vex.

For thus on love I waited; thus for love
Strained all my senses eagerly a...Read more of this...

by Southey, Robert
..., 
They did not move the Inchcape Bell.

The Abbot of Aberbrothok 
Had placed that bell on the Inchcape Rock; 
On a buoy in the storm it floated and swung, 
And over the waves its warning rung.

When the Rock was hid by the surge’s swell, 
The Mariners heard the warning Bell; 
And then they knew the perilous Rock, 
And blest the Abbot of Aberbrothok

The Sun in the heaven was shining gay, 
All things were joyful on that day; 
The sea-birds scream’d as they wheel’d rou...Read more of this...

by Hopkins, Gerard Manley
...aven
And fail and scatter all away.
Unclean and seeming unforgiven
My prayers I scarcely call to pray.
I cannot buoy my heart above; 
Above I cannot entrance win.
I reckon precedents of love, 
But feel the long success of sin.

My heaven is brass and iron my earth: 
Yea, iron is mingled with my clay, 
So harden'd is it in this dearth
Which praying fails to do away.
Nor tears, nor tears this clay uncouth
Could mould, if any tears there were.
A warfare o...Read more of this...

by Robinson, Mary Darby
...amid
The wavy mountains, they beheld, alone ,
A LITTLE BOAT, now scarcely visible;
And now not seen at all; or, like a buoy,
Bounding, and buffetting, to reach the shore!

Now the full Moon, in crimson lustre shone
Upon the outstretch'd Ocean. The black clouds
Flew stiffly on, the wild blast following,
And, as they flew, dimming the angry main
With shadows horrible ! Still, the small boat
Struggled amid the waves, a sombre speck
Upon the wide domain of howling Death!
Sai...Read more of this...

by Kipling, Rudyard
...1896
They christened my brother of old--
 And a saintly name he bears--
They gave him his place to hold
 At the head of the belfry-stairs,
 Where the minister-towers stand
And the breeding kestrels cry.
 Would I change with my brother a league inland?
(Shoal! 'Ware shoal!) Not I!

In the flush of the hot June prime,
 O'ersleek flood-tides afire,
I hear...Read more of this...

by Baudelaire, Charles
...ent of sanity, 
That your womb of thought was not a tomb more frequently 
And that your Christian blood flowed around a buoy that was rhythmical, 

Like the numberless sounds of antique syllables, 
Where reigns in turn the father of songs, 
Phoebus, and the great Pan, the harvest sovereign....Read more of this...

by Hopkins, Gerard Manley
...ry
. . . . . . . . 
Through the velvety wind V-winged 
To the nest’s nook I balance and buoy
With a sweet joy of a sweet joy, 
Sweet, of a sweet, of a sweet joy 
Of a sweet—a sweet—sweet—joy.’...Read more of this...

by Laurence Dunbar, Paul
...e sea, and void the beach
Far and beyond where gaze can reach!
And it's weary, weary waiting, love.
I heard the bell-buoy ringing—
How long ago it seems!
(Oh, it's weary, weary waiting, love.)
And ever still, its knelling
Crashes in upon my dreams.
The banns were read, my frock was sewn;
Since then two seasons' winds have blown—
And it's weary, weary waiting, love.
The stretches of the ocean
Are bare and bleak to-day.
(Oh, it's weary, weary waiting, love.)
My ey...Read more of this...

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Book: Reflection on the Important Things