Famous Centuries Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Centuries poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous centuries poems. These examples illustrate what a famous centuries poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Yeats, William Butler
...e upon my knees
Is Sato's ancient blade, still as it was,
Still razor-keen, still like a looking-glass
Unspotted by the centuries;
That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn
From some court-lady's dress and round
The wodden scabbard bound and wound
Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn
My Soul. Why should the imagination of a man
Long past his prime remember things that are
Emblematical of love and war?
Think of ancestral night that can,
If but imagination scorn th...Read more of this...
by
Bryant, William Cullen
...ulder beneath them. Oh, there is not lost
One of earth's charms: upon her bosom yet,
After the flight of untold centuries,
The freshness of her far beginning lies
And yet shall lie. Life mocks the idle hate
Of his arch enemy Death---yea, seats himself
Upon the tyrant's throne---the sepulchre,
And of the triumphs of his ghastly foe
Makes his own nourishment. For he came forth
From thine own bosom, and shall have no end.
There have been hol...Read more of this...
by
Dickinson, Emily
...emed
A Swelling of the Ground--
The Roof was scarcely visible--
The Cornice--in the Ground--
Since then--'tis Centuries--and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity-- ...Read more of this...
by
Dickinson, Emily
...ing comes—
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?
The Feet, mechanical, go round—
Or Ground, or Air, or Ought—
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone—
This is the Hour of Lead—
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—
First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—
441
This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me...Read more of this...
by
Hugo, Victor
...ighted space
Arose to view; in that deserted place
A lone, abandoned hall with light aglow
The long neglect of centuries did show.
The castle-towers of Corbus in decay
Were girt by weeds and growths that had their way.
Couch-grass and ivy, and wild eglantine
In subtle scaling warfare all combine.
Subject to such attacks three hundred years,
The donjon yields, and ruin now appears,
E'en as by leprosy the wild boars die,
In moat the crumbled bat...Read more of this...
by
Carroll, Lewis
...s ageing day by day:
My Second's age is ended:
My Third enjoys an age, they say,
That never seems to fade away,
Through centuries extended.
My Whole? I need a poet's pen
To paint her myriad phases:
The monarch, and the slave, of men -
A mountain-summit, and a den
Of dark and deadly mazes -
A flashing light - a fleeting shade -
Beginning, end, and middle
Of all that human art hath made
Or wit devised! Go, seek HER aid,
If you would read my riddle!...Read more of this...
by
Wilde, Oscar
...ned with thorn!
O chalice of all common miseries!
Thou for our sakes that loved thee not hast borne
An agony of endless centuries,
And we were vain and ignorant nor knew
That when we stabbed thy heart it was our own real hearts we slew.
Being ourselves the sowers and the seeds,
The night that covers and the lights that fade,
The spear that pierces and the side that bleeds,
The lips betraying and the life betrayed;
The deep hath calm: the moon hath rest: but we
Lords of t...Read more of this...
by
Keats, John
...cs old,
Which sages and keen-eyed astrologers
Then living on the earth, with laboring thought
Won from the gaze of many centuries:
Now lost, save what we find on remnants huge
Of stone, or rnarble swart; their import gone,
Their wisdom long since fled.---Two wings this orb
Possess'd for glory, two fair argent wings,
Ever exalted at the God's approach:
And now, from forth the gloom their plumes immense
Rose, one by one, till all outspreaded were;
While still the dazzling g...Read more of this...
by
Bukowski, Charles
...e this morning,
as I was leaving,
for the track,
i saw my wif in bed,
just the
shape of
her head there
(not forgetting
centuries of the living
and the dead and
the dying,
the pyarimids,
Mozart dead
but his music still
there in the
room, weeds growing,
the earth turning,
the toteboard waiting for
me)
I saw the shape of my
wife's head,
she so still,
i ached for her life,
just being there
under the
covers.
i kissed her in the,
forehead,
got down the stairway,
got outside...Read more of this...
by
Angelou, Maya
...been steep.
But today, voices of old spirit sound
Speak to us in words profound,
Across the years, across the centuries,
Across the oceans, and across the seas.
They say, draw near to one another,
Save your race.
You have been paid for in a distant place,
The old ones remind us that slavery's chains
Have paid for our freedom again and again.
The night has been long,
The pit has been deep,
The night has been dark,
And the walls have been steep...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...vel,
Tying the Eastern to the Western sea,
The road between Europe and Asia.
(Ah Genoese, thy dream! thy dream!
Centuries after thou art laid in thy grave,
The shore thou foundest verifies thy dream!)
5
Passage to India!
Struggles of many a captain—tales of many a sailor dead!
Over my mood, stealing and spreading they come,
Like clouds and cloudlets in the unreach’d sky.
Along all history, down the slopes,
As a rivulet running, sinking now, and now again t...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...granite-blocks;
I see at Memphis mummy-pits, containing mummies, embalm’d, swathed in linen cloth, lying
there
many centuries;
I look on the fall’n Theban, the large-ball’d eyes, the side-drooping neck, the hands
folded
across the breast.
I see the menials of the earth, laboring;
I see the prisoners in the prisons;
I see the defective human bodies of the earth;
I see the blind, the deaf and dumb, idiots, hunchbacks, lunatics;
I see the pirates, thieves, betray...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...aw of nature—there is no law stronger than she is.
12
The main shapes arise!
Shapes of Democracy, total—result of centuries;
Shapes, ever projecting other shapes;
Shapes of turbulent manly cities;
Shapes of the friends and home-givers of the whole earth,
Shapes bracing the earth, and braced with the whole earth....Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...
And here shall ye inhabit, Powerful Matrons!
In your vast state, vaster than all the old;
Echoed through long, long centuries to come,
To sound of different, prouder songs, with stronger themes,
Practical, peaceful life—the people’s life—the People themselves,
Lifted, illumin’d, bathed in peace—elate, secure in peace.
8
Away with themes of war! away with War itself!
Hence from my shuddering sight, to never more return, that show of blacken’d, mutilated
corpses!
...Read more of this...
by
Chesterton, G K
...unning past.
One dim ancestral jewel hung
On his ruined armour grey,
He rent and cast it at her feet:
Where, after centuries, with slow feet,
Men came from hall and school and street
And found it where it lay.
"Mother of God," the wanderer said,
"I am but a common king,
Nor will I ask what saints may ask,
To see a secret thing.
"The gates of heaven are fearful gates
Worse than the gates of hell;
Not I would break the splendours barred
Or seek to know the thing ...Read more of this...
by
Masefield, John
...g state of things,
And made it ill. I answer, No,
States are not made, nor patched; they grow,
Grow slow through centuries of pain
And grow correctly in the main,
But only grow by certain laws
Of certain bits in certain jaws.
You want to doctor that. Let be.
You cannot patch a growing tree.
Put these two words beneath your hat,
These two: securus judicat.
The social states of human kinds
Are made by multitudes of minds,
And after multitude...Read more of this...
by
Kipling, Rudyard
...e lines they followed sixteen hundred years ago.
Then Julius Fabricius died as even Prefects do,
And after certain centuries, Imperial Rome died too.
Then did robbers enter Britain from across the Northern main
And our Lower River-field was won by Ogier the Dane.
Well could Ogier work his war-boat --well could Ogier wield his
brand--
Much he knew of foaming waters--not so much of farming land.
So he called to him a Hobden of the old unaltered blood,
Saying:...Read more of this...
by
Brooks, Gwendolyn
...ngs. The darkness. Drawn
Darkness, or dirty light. The soil that stirs.
The soil that looks the soil of centuries.
And for that matter the general oldness. Old
Wood. Old marble. Old tile. Old old old.
Note homekind Oldness! Not Lake Forest, Glencoe.
Nothing is sturdy, nothing is majestic,
There is no quiet drama, no rubbed glaze, no
Unkillable infirmity of such
A tasteful turn as lately they have left,
Glencoe, Lake Forest, and to w...Read more of this...
by
Schiller, Friedrich von
...'er-changing pole in the phenomena's flight.
Bodies and voices are lent by writing to thought ever silent,
Over the centuries' stream bears it the eloquent page.
Then to the wondering gaze dissolves the cloud of the fancy,
And the vain phantoms of night yield to the dawning of day.
Man now breaks through his fetters, the happy one! Oh, let him never
Break from the bridle of shame, when from fear's fetters he breaks
Freedom! is reason's cry,--ay, freedom! The wild ...Read more of this...
by
Akhmatova, Anna
...of pain:
It's the very trade of mine.
And I know how to teach,
That the unexpected happened,
How to tame for centuries
Her, whose love is so rapid.
You want glory? Ask from me
For advice for this your plight,
Only it is but a trap,
There's no joy here and no light.
Well, go home, and forget
This our meeting, I implore,
And for your sin, my dear one,
I'll respond before the Lord.
x x x
From memory of you I will remove that day,
...Read more of this...
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