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Famous Byzantium Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry
...The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night walkers' song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.

Before me floats an image, man or shade,
Shade more than man, more image than a shade;
For Ha...Read more of this...
by Yeats, William Butler



...White founts falling in the Courts of the sun, 
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run; 
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared, 
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard; 
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips; 
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships. 
They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy, 
They have dash...Read more of this...
by Chesterton, G K
...ings, possessors, 
The wars of Tamerlane, the reign of Aurungzebe, 
The traders, rulers, explorers, Moslems, Venetians, Byzantium, the Arabs, Portuguese, 
The first travelers, famous yet, Marco Polo, Batouta the Moor,
Doubts to be solv’d, the map incognita, blanks to be fill’d, 
The foot of man unstay’d, the hands never at rest, 
Thyself, O soul, that will not brook a challenge. 

9
The medieval navigators rise before me, 
The world of 1492, with its awaken’d enterprise;
Some...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt
...hed
Did the masons go? Great Rome
Is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Had Byzantium, much praised in song
Only palaces for its inhabitans? Even in fabled Atlantis
The night the ocean engulfed it
The drowning still bawled for their slaves.

The young Alexander conquered India.
Was he alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Did he not have even a cook with him?

Philip of Spain wept when his armada
Went down. Was he the only one to weep?
Fred...Read more of this...
by Brecht, Bertolt
...chool but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

 III

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

 IV

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodi...Read more of this...
by Yeats, William Butler



...s. Probe every cloud.
Build power. Fortress America may yet for a long time stand, between the 
east and the west, like Byzantium.

--As for me: laugh at me. I agree with you. It is a foolish business to 
see the future and screech at it.
One should watch and not speak. And patriotism has run the world through 
so many blood-lakes: and we always fall in....Read more of this...
by Jeffers, Robinson
...death, until a lethargy
Fell on him, and his fellows thought him saved;
But on the third night he awoke to die;
And at Byzantium doth his body lie
Between two blossoming pomegranate trees,
Within the churchyard of the Genoese....Read more of this...
by Morris, William

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry