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Famous Chart Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry
...Only the song of a secret bird.

The green land's name that a charm encloses, 
It never was writ in the traveller's chart,
And sweet on its trees as the fruit that grows is,
It never was sold in the merchant's mart.
The swallows of dreams through its dim fields dart,
And sleep's are the tunes in its tree-tops heard;
No hound's note wakens the wildwood hart,
Only the song of a secret bird.


ENVOI

In the world of dreams I have chosen my part,
To sleep for a season...Read more of this...
by Swinburne, Algernon Charles



...ind me in an hour.
What time upon her airy bounds I hung,
One half the garden of her globe was flung
Unrolling as a chart unto my view-
Tenantless cities of the desert too!
Ianthe, beauty crowded on me then,
And half I wish'd to be again of men."

"My Angelo! and why of them to be?
A brighter dwelling-place is here for thee-
And greener fields than in yon world above,
And woman's loveliness- and passionate love."

"But, list, Ianthe! when the air so soft
Fail'd, a...Read more of this...
by Poe, Edgar Allan
...e cooling year kindles her heart;
With a warm passage to the summer station
Love pricks the course in lights across the chart.

Year after year a speck on the map, divided
By a whole hemisphere, summons her to come;
Season after season, sure and safely guided,
Going away she is also coming home.

And being home, memory becomes a passion
With which she feeds her brood and straws her nest,
Aware of ghosts that haunt the heart's possession
And exiled love mourning within...Read more of this...
by Hope, Alec Derwent (A D)
...ee
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile—the Winds—
To a heart in port—
Done with the Compass—
Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden—
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor—Tonight—
In Thee!

253

You see I cannot see—your lifetime—
I must guess—
How many times it ache for me—today—Confess—
How many times for my far sake
The brave eyes film—
But I guess guessing hurts—
Mine—get so dim!

Too vague—the face—
My own—so patient—covers—
Too far—the strength—
M...Read more of this...
by Dickinson, Emily
...ller and the road seem one
With the errand to be done;—
That were a man's and lover's part,
That were Freedom's whitest chart....Read more of this...
by Emerson, Ralph Waldo



...red part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

 Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

 The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not le...Read more of this...
by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...eelings ran;
(And song is but the eloquence of truth:)
Then forth uprose that lone wayfaring man;
But dauntless he, nor chart, nor journey's plan
In woods required, whose trained eye was keen,
As eagle of the wilderness, to scan
His path by mountain, swamp, or deep ravine,
Or ken far friendly huts on good savannas green.

Old Albert saw him from the valley's side--
His pirogue launch'd--his pilgrimage begun--
Far, like the red-bird's wing he seem'd to glide;
Then dived, a...Read more of this...
by Campbell, Thomas
...s with me;
  Your golden constellations lying apart
They neither hailed nor greeted heartily,
    Nor noted on their chart.
"And yet to you and not to me belong
  Those finer instincts that, like second sight
And hearing, catch creation's undersong,
      And see by inner light.
"You are a well, whereon I, gazing, see
  Reflections of the upper heavens—a well
From whence come deep, deep echoes up to me—
      Some underwave's low swell.
"I cannot soar into the hei...Read more of this...
by Ingelow, Jean
...ty follies flung aside
That won you to me, and beneath your gaze,
Naked of reticence and shorn of pride, 
Spread like a chart my little wicked ways.
I, that had been to you, had you remained, 
But one more waking from a recurrent dream,
Cherish no less the certain stakes I gained,
And walk your memory's halls, austere, supreme,
A ghost in marble of a girl you knew
Who would have loved you in a day or two....Read more of this...
by St Vincent Millay, Edna
...
then stopped to wreathe the rain-smashed clematis
back on the trellis
for no one's sake except its own.
I know the chart nailed to the wallboards
the icy kettle squatting on the burner.
The hands that hammered in those nails
emptied that kettle one last time
are these two hands
and they have caught the baby leaping
from between trembling legs
and they have worked the vacuum aspirator
and stroked the sweated temples
and steered the boat there through this hot
misblott...Read more of this...
by Rich, Adrienne
...you ever since
you said Good evening to his grandfather clock under
the impression that it was him,
And you look at his chart and it says SHRDLU QWERTYOP,
and you say Well, why SHRDNTLU QWERTYOP? and he
says one set of glasses won't do.
You need two.
One for reading Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason and
Keats's "Endymion" with,
And the other for walking around without saying Hello
to strange wymion with.
So you spend your time taking off your seeing glasses to pu...Read more of this...
by Nash, Ogden
...with accents mild and clear, 
Words of warning, words of cheer, 
But tedious to the bridegroom's ear. 
He knew the chart 
Of the sailor's heart, 
All its pleasures and its griefs, 
All its shallows and rocky reefs, 
All those secret currents, that flow 
With such resistless undertow, 
And lift and drift, with terrible force, 
The will from its moorings and its course. 
Therefore he spake, and thus said he: -- 
"Like unto ships far off at sea, 
Outward or homeward bou...Read more of this...
by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...could have put you in my heart, 
If but I could have wrapped you in myself, 
How glad I should have been! 
And now the chart 
Of memory unrolls again to me 
The course of our journey here, before we had to part. 

And oh, that you had never, never been 
Some of your selves, my love, that some 
Of your several faces I had never seen! 
And still they come before me, and they go, 
And I cry aloud in the moments that intervene. 

And oh, my love, as I rock for you to-nig...Read more of this...
by Lawrence, D. H.
...>
He has a corps of men in it, toiling and swearing,
Knocking, and measuring, and planing, and squaring,
Working from a chart with figures,
Comparing with their rules,
Setting this and that part together with their tools.
Tap! Tap! Tap!
Haste indeed!
So great is the need
That carpenters have been taken from the new church,
Joiners have been called from shaping pews and lecterns
To work of greater urgency.
Coffins!
Coffins is what they are making this bright Summer mor...Read more of this...
by Lowell, Amy
...and I at home; 
We have hands that fashion and heads that know, 
But our hearts we lost - how long ago! 
In a place no chart nor ship can show 
Under the sky's dome. 

This world is wild as an old wives' tale, 
And strange the plain things are, 
The earth is enough and the air is enough 
For our wonder and our war; 
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings 
And our peace is put in impossible things 
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings 
Round an incredibl...Read more of this...
by Chesterton, G K
...ack with the usual
symbols of prophecy, in excited Spanish:
an open palm upright, sectioned and numbered
like a butcher chart, delivered the future.
One night, in a fever, radiantly ill,
she say, "Bring me the book, the end has come."
She said, "I dreamt of whales and a storm,"
but for that dream, the book had no answer.
A next night I dreamed of three old women
featureless as silkworms, stitching my fate,
and I scream at them to come out of my house,
and I try be...Read more of this...
by Walcott, Derek
...ill be
Velocity or Pause
At Fundamental Signals
From Fundamental Laws.

To die is not to go --
On Doom's consummate Chart
No Territory new is staked --
Remain thou as thou art....Read more of this...
by Dickinson, Emily
...as strange, although
I never spoke a word. I burst empty of you,
letting you see how the air is so.
The doctors chart the riddle they ask of me
and I turn my head away. I do not know.

Yours is the only face I recognize.
Bone at my bone, you drink my answers in.
Six times a day I prize
your need, the animals of your lips, your skin
growing warm and plump. I see your eyes
lifting their tents. They are blue stones, they begin
to outgrow their mos...Read more of this...
by Sexton, Anne
...unhooked 
And broke the level line. 

And here we dwell together, side by side, 
Our places fixed for life upon the chart. 
Two islands that the roaring seas divide 
Are not more far apart....Read more of this...
by Coleridge, Mary Elizabeth
...
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile -- the Winds --
To a Heart in port --
Done with the Compass --
Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden --
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor -- Tonight --
In Thee!...Read more of this...
by Dickinson, Emily

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry