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Famous Colony Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Brackenridge, Hugh Henry
...rate those men who planted first 
The christian church in these remotest lands; 
From those high plains where spreads a colony, 
Gen'rous and free, from Massachusett-shores, 
To the cold lakes margin'd with snow: from that 
Long dreary tract of shady woods and hills, 
Where Hudson's icy stream rolls his cold wave, 
To those more sunny bowers where zephyrs breath, 
And round which flow in circling current swift 
The Delaware and Susquehannah streams. 
Thence to those smili...Read more of this...



by Brackenridge, Hugh Henry
...I name 
Thee Penn, the Solon of our western lands; 
Sagacious legislator, whom the world 
Admires tho' dead: an infant colony 
Nurs'd by thy care, now rises o'er the rest 
Like that tall Pyramid on Memphis' stand 
O'er all the lesser piles, they also great. 
Why should I name those heroes so well known 
Who peopled all the rest from Canada 
To Georgia's farthest coasts, West Florida 
Or Apalachian mountains, yet what streams 
Of blood were shed! What Indian hosts were sl...Read more of this...

by Heaney, Seamus
...egacy
Culminates inexorably.

II

And I am still imperially
Male, leaving you with pain,
The rending process in the colony,
The battering ram, the boom burst from within.
The act sprouted an obsinate fifth column
Whose stance is growing unilateral.
His heart beneath your heart is a wardrum
Mustering force. His parasitical
And ignmorant little fists already
Beat at your borders and I know they're cocked
At me across the water. No treaty
I foresee will salve...Read more of this...

by Khayyam, Omar
...Better to make one soul rejoice with glee,
Than plant a desert with a colony;
Rather one freeman bind with chains of love,
Than set a thousand prisoned captives free!...Read more of this...

by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...charioted,
Mad and maddening all that heard her in her fierce volubility,
Girt by half the tribes of Britain, near the colony Camulodune,
Yell'd and shriek'd between her daughters o'er a wild confederacy. 

`They that scorn the tribes and call us Britain's barbarous populaces,
Did they hear me, would they listen, did they pity me supplicating?
Shall I heed them in their anguish? shall I brook to be supplicated?
Hear Icenian, Catieuchlanian, hear Coritanian, Trinobant!
Mu...Read more of this...



by Muldoon, Paul
...passing is passing me by. 

I am with Raleigh, near the Atlantic,
Where we have built a stockade
Around our little colony.
Give him his scallop-shell of quiet,
His staff of faith to walk upon,
His scrip of joy, immortal diet—
We are some eighty souls
On whom Raleigh will hoist his sails.
He will return, years afterwards,
To wonder where and why
We might have altogether disappeared,
Only to glimpse us here and there
As one fair strand in her braid,
The blue in an ...Read more of this...

by Stevens, Wallace
...which all poems were incident, unless 
279 That prose should wear a poem's guise at last. 

IV 

The Idea of a Colony 

280 Nota: his soil is man's intelligence. 
281 That's better. That's worth crossing seas to find. 
282 Crispin in one laconic phrase laid bare 
283 His cloudy drift and planned a colony. 
284 Exit the mental moonlight, exit lex, 
285 Rex and principium, exit the whole 
286 Shebang. Exeunt omnes. Here was prose 
287 M...Read more of this...

by Marvell, Andrew
...n all the forms thou canst invent
Either to please me, or torment:
For thou alone to people me,
Art grown a num'rous colony;
And a collection choicer far
Than or Whitehall's, or Mantua's were.

But, of these pictures and the rest,
That at the entrance likes me best;
Where the same posture, and the look
Remains, with which I first was took:
A tender shepherdess, whose hair
Hangs loosely playing in the air,
Transplanting flowers from the green hill,
To crown h...Read more of this...

by Graham, Jorie
...le
into the world of things,
turning the list into its spatial-form at last,
into its archival many-headed, many-legged colony . . .
Oh look at you.
What is it you hold back? What piece of time is it the list
won't cover? You down there, in the theater of
operations -- you, throat of the world -- so diacritical -- 
(are we all waiting for the phone to ring?) -- 
(what will you say? are you home? are you expected soon?) -- 
oh wanderer back from break, all your...Read more of this...

by Boland, Eavan
...>

Out of my mouth they come:
The spurred and booted garrisons.
The men and women
they dispossessed.

What is a colony
if not the brutal truth
that when we speak
the graves open.

And the dead walk?...Read more of this...

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