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Famous Compulsion Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry
...h the wings of the cherubim o'er us,
The ovum was human from which you were hatched.

No will of your own with its puny compulsion
Can summon the spirit that quickens the lyre;
It comes, if at all, like the Sibyl's convulsion
And touches the brain with a finger of fire.

So perhaps, after all, it's as well to he quiet
If you've nothing you think is worth saying in prose,
As to furnish a meal of their cannibal diet
To the critics, by publishing, as you propose.

But it's all o...Read more of this...
by Holmes, Oliver Wendell



...at hold the vital shears,
And turn the Adamantine spindle round,
On which the fate of gods and men is wound.
Such sweet compulsion doth in musick ly,
To lull the daughters of Necessity,
And keep unsteddy Nature to her law, 
And the low world in measur'd motion draw
After the heavenly tune, which none can hear
Of human mould with grosse unpurged ear;
And yet such musick worthiest were to blaze
The peerles height of her immortal praise,
Whose lustre leads us, and for her most f...Read more of this...
by Milton, John
...m alone can The States be fused into the compact
 organism of a Nation. 

To hold men together by paper and seal, or by compulsion, is no account; 
That only holds men together which aggregates all in a living principle, as the hold of
 the
 limbs of the body, or the fibres of plants.

Of all races and eras, These States, with veins full of poetical stuff, most need poets,
 and
 are to have the greatest, and use them the greatest; 
Their Presidents shall not be their common r...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt
...he inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Pr...Read more of this...
by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...ches wide
Open'd upon the dusk demesnes of night
And the bright Titan, phrenzied with new woes,
Unus'd to bend, by hard compulsion bent
His spirit to the sorrow of the time;
And all along a dismal rack of clouds,
Upon the boundaries of day and night,
He stretch'd himself in grief and radiance faint.
There as he lay, the Heaven with its stars
Look'd down on him with pity, and the voice
Of Coelus, from the universal space,
Thus whisper'd low and solemn in his ear:
"O brightest ...Read more of this...
by Keats, John



...wreaths folds over every nation: cruel works 
Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic 
Moving by compulsion each other, not as those in Eden, which, 
Wheel within wheel, in freedom revolve in harmony and peace....Read more of this...
by Blake, William
...y wreaths folds over every nation: cruel works
Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic
Moving by compulsion each other, not as those in Eden, which,
Wheel within wheel, in freedom revolve in harmony and peace....Read more of this...
by Blake, William
...ead of the world is not forming but fixed. But
 the man's words would be fixed also,
Part of that mountain, under equal compulsion; under the same
 present compulsion in the iron consistency.

And nobody sees good or evil but out of a brain a hundred
 centuries quieted, some desert
Prophet's, a man humped like a camel, gone mad between the mud-
 walled village and the mountain sepulchres.

V
Broad wagons before sunrise bring food into the city from the
 open farms, and the pe...Read more of this...
by Jeffers, Robinson
...but felt of late, 
When the fierce foe hung on our broken rear 
Insulting, and pursued us through the Deep, 
With what compulsion and laborious flight 
We sunk thus low? Th' ascent is easy, then; 
Th' event is feared! Should we again provoke 
Our stronger, some worse way his wrath may find 
To our destruction, if there be in Hell 
Fear to be worse destroyed! What can be worse 
Than to dwell here, driven out from bliss, condemned 
In this abhorred deep to utter woe! 
Where pa...Read more of this...
by Milton, John
...ects, and all his thoughts 
Of mischief, gratulating, thus excites. 
Thoughts, whither have ye led me! with what sweet 
Compulsion thus transported, to forget 
What hither brought us! hate, not love;nor hope 
Of Paradise for Hell, hope here to taste 
Of pleasure; but all pleasure to destroy, 
Save what is in destroying; other joy 
To me is lost. Then, let me not let pass 
Occasion which now smiles; behold alone 
The woman, opportune to all attempts, 
Her husband, for I view f...Read more of this...
by Milton, John
...vement?

    Turn your eyes toward yourself
and you'll find in yourself and in them
not only occasion for love
but compulsion to surrender.

    Meanwhile my tender care
bears witness I only live
to gaze at you spellbound and sigh,
to prove that for you I die.

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My Divine Lysis

    Divina Lysi mía:
perdona si me atrevo
a llamarte así, cuando
aun de ser tuya el nombre no merezco.

    A esto, no osadía
es llamarte así, puesto
que a ti te sobra...Read more of this...
by Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor
...ul ward of Sir Tristan du Bois,
Was now escaped, had supped with Guy Kyrec,
Had now a pardon of the Regent Duke
By half compulsion of a Paris mob,
Had turned the people's love upon himself
By smooth harangues, and now was bold to claim
That France was not the Kingdom of King John,
But, By our Lady, his, by right and worth,
And so was plotting treason in the State,
And laughing at weak Charles of Normandy.
Nay, these had been like good news to the King,
Were any man but bold e...Read more of this...
by Lanier, Sidney
...ple—Illustrates evil as well as good; 
How many hold despairingly yet to the models departed, caste, myths, obedience,
 compulsion, and
 to infidelity; 
How few see the arrived models, the Athletes, the Western States—or see freedom or
 spirituality—or hold any faith in results,
(But I see the Athletes—and I see the results of the war glorious and
 inevitable—and
 they again leading to other results;) 
How the great cities appear—How the Democratic masses, turbulent, wilful, ...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt

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Book: Reflection on the Important Things