Famous Chemistry Poems by Famous Poets

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

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This Compost

by Walt Whitman
 1
SOMETHING startles me where I thought I was safest; 
I withdraw from the still woods I loved; 
I will not go now on the pastures to walk; 
I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea; 
I will not touch my flesh to the earth, as to other flesh, to renew me.

O how...Read more of this...

Millenial Hymn to Lord Shiva

by Kathleen Raine
 Earth no longer
hymns the Creator,
the seven days of wonder,
the Garden is over —
all the stories are told,
the seven seals broken
all that begins
must have its ending,
our striving, desiring,
our living and dying,
for Time, the bringer
of abundant days
is Time the destroyer —
In the Iron Age
the Kali Yuga
To whom can we pray
at the end of an era
but the Lord Shiva,
the Liberator, the purifier?

Our...Read more of this...

Having it Out with Melancholy

by Jane Kenyon
 1FROM THE NURSERY


When I was born, you waited 
behind a pile of linen in the nursery, 
and when we were alone, you lay down 
on top of me, pressing
the bile of desolation into every pore.


And from that day on 
everything under the sun and moon 
made me sad -- even the yellow 
wooden beads that slid and spun 
along...Read more of this...

Identity

by A R Ammons
 1) An individual spider web
identifies a species:

an order of instinct prevails
 through all accidents of circumstance,
  though possibility is
high along the peripheries of
spider
   webs:
   you can go all
  around the fringing attachments

  and find
disorder ripe,
entropy rich, high levels of random,
 numerous occasions of accident:

2) the possible settings
of a web are infinite:

 how...Read more of this...

Song of the Redwood-Tree

by Walt Whitman
 1
A CALIFORNIA song! 
A prophecy and indirection—a thought impalpable, to breathe, as air; 
A chorus of dryads, fading, departing—or hamadryads departing; 
A murmuring, fateful, giant voice, out of the earth and sky, 
Voice of a mighty dying tree in the Redwood forest dense.

Farewell, my brethren, 
Farewell, O earth and sky—farewell, ye neighboring waters; 
My time has ended, my term...Read more of this...

The Butter Factory

by Les Murray
 It was built of things that must not mix:
paint, cream, and water, fire and dusty oil.
You heard the water dreaming in its large
kneed pipes, up from the weir. And the cordwood
our fathers cut for the furnace stood in walls
like the sleeper-stacks of a continental railway.

The cream arrived in lorried tides; its procession
crossed a platform of workers' stagecraft: Come here
Friday-Legs!...Read more of this...

Eidólons

by Walt Whitman
 I MET a Seer, 
Passing the hues and objects of the world, 
The fields of art and learning, pleasure, sense, To glean Eidólons. 
 Put in thy chants, said he, 
No more the puzzling hour, nor day—nor segments, parts, put in,
Put first before the rest, as light for all, and entrance-song of all, That of
 Eidólons. 
 Ever the...Read more of this...

The Dependencies

by Howard Nemerov
 This morning, between two branches of a tree
Beside the door, epeira once again
Has spun and signed his tapestry and trap.
I test his early-warning system and
It works, he scrambles forth in sable with
The yellow hieroglyph that no one knows
The meaning of. And I remember now
How yesterday at dusk the nighthawks came
Back as they do about this time each year,
Grey squadrons...Read more of this...

Elegy: Walking the Line

by Edgar Bowers
 Every month or so, Sundays, we walked the line,
The limit and the boundary. Past the sweet gum
Superb above the cabin, along the wall—
Stones gathered from the level field nearby
When first we cleared it. (Angry bumblebees
Stung the two mules. They kicked. Thirteen, I ran.)
And then the field: thread-leaf maple, deciduous
Magnolia, hybrid broom, and, further down,
In light shade, one Franklinia Alatamaha
In...Read more of this...

Ashes of Soldiers

by Walt Whitman
 ASHES of soldiers! 
As I muse, retrospective, murmuring a chant in thought, 
Lo! the war resumes—again to my sense your shapes, 
And again the advance of armies. 

Noiseless as mists and vapors,
From their graves in the trenches ascending, 
From the cemeteries all through Virginia and Tennessee, 
From every point of the compass, out of the countless unnamed graves, 
In...Read more of this...

Two Gardens in Linndale

by Edwin Arlington Robinson
 Two brothers, Oakes and Oliver, 
Two gentle men as ever were, 
Would roam no longer, but abide 
In Linndale, where their fathers died, 
And each would be a gardener.

“Now first we fence the garden through, 
With this for me and that for you,” 
Said Oliver.—“Divine!” said Oakes, 
“And I, while I raise artichokes, 
Will do what I was born...Read more of this...

Witness

by Eavan Boland
 Against the enormous rocks of a rough coast
The ocean rams itself in pitched assault
And spastic rage to which there is no halt;
Foam-white brigades collapse; but the huge host

Has infinite reserves; at each attack
The impassive cliffs look down in gray disdain
At scenes of sacrifice, unrelieved pain,
Figured in froth, aquamarine and black.

Something in the blood-chemistry of life,
Unspeakable, impressive, undeterred,
Expresses itself without...Read more of this...

October 16

by David Lehman
 What can you say about the Mets
down three games to none
one run down with six outs to go
Cedeno singles steals second Mora walks
they pull off a double steal
and Olerud singles them home
off the previously unhittable John Rocker
(look at his eyes, he's so intense
he looks cross-eyed) and we're still alive
and I'm still fourteen years old
and the kids in the movie...Read more of this...

For Australia

by Henry Lawson
 Now, with the wars of the world begun, they'll listen to you and me, 
Now while the frightened nations run to the arms of democracy, 
Now, when our blathering fools are scared, and the years have proved us right – 
All unprovided and unprepared, the Outpost of the White! 

"Get the people – no matter how," that is the...Read more of this...

Blight

by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Give me truths;
For I am weary of the surfaces,
And die of inanition. If I knew
Only the herbs and simples of the wood,
Rue, cinquefoil, gill, vervain and agrimony,
Blue-vetch and trillium, hawkweed, sassafras,
Milkweeds and murky brakes, quaint pipes and sun-dew,
And rare and virtuous roots, which in these woods
Draw untold juices from the common earth,
Untold, unknown, and I could surely spell
Their fragrance, and...Read more of this...

Implications of One Plus One

by Marge Piercy
 Sometimes we collide, tectonic plates merging, 
continents shoving, crumpling down into the molten 
veins of fire deep in the earth and raising 
tons of rock into jagged crests of Sierra. 

Sometimes your hands drift on me, milkweed's 
airy silk, wingtip's feathery caresses, 
our lips grazing, a drift of desires gathering 
like fog over warm water, thickening to rain. 

Sometimes...Read more of this...

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