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Famous Conditions Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry
...egay of milliner's roses, 
And we cry with delight, "Oh, how sweet they do smell!"

Perhaps you will answer all needful conditions
For winning the laurels to which you aspire,
By docking the tails of the two prepositions
I' the style o' the bards you so greatly admire.

As for subjects of verse, they are only too plenty
For ringing the changes on metrical chimes;
A maiden, a moonbeam, a lover of twenty 
Have filled that great basket with bushels of rhymes.

Let me sho...Read more of this...
by Holmes, Oliver Wendell



...ld
A comely corpse, with beauty fair endued,
Know this for certain, that the same doth hold
A beauteous soul, with fair conditions thewed,
Fit to receive the seed of virtue strewed.
For all that fair is, is by nature good;
That is a sign to know the gentle blood.

Yet oft it falls that many a gentle mind
Dwells in deformed tabernacle drown'd,
Either by chance, against the course of kind,
Or through unaptness in the substance found,
Which it assumed of some stubborn gr...Read more of this...
by Spenser, Edmund
...ng in ye throat and brasting of ye head
And soche ye taste within ye mouth like one had been on dead,--Soche
be ye foul conditions that these unhappy men
Sware they will never drink no drop of nony drinke again.
Yet all so frail and vain a thing and weak withal is man
That he goeth on an oder tear whenever that he can.
And like ye evil quatern or ye hills that skirt ye skies,
Ye jag is reproductive and jags on jags arise.

Whenas Aurora from ye east in dewy splend...Read more of this...
by Field, Eugene
...nothing I abhor so
As mawmets of this ilk--
Give me the harmless morceau
That's made of true-blue milk!
No matter what conditions
Dyspeptic come to feaze,
The best of all physicians
Is apple-pie and cheese!

Though ribalds may decry 'em,
For these twin boons we stand,
Partaking thrice per diem
Of their fulness out of hand;
No enervating fashion
Shall cheat us of our right
To gratify our passion
With a mouthful at a bite!
We'll cut it square or bias,
Or any way we please,
And...Read more of this...
by Field, Eugene
...batting crown, says, "We";
robbed by a technicality.

When three players on a side play three positions
and modify conditions,
the massive run need not be everything.
"Going, going . . . "Is
it?Roger Maris
has it, running fast.You will
never see a finer catch.Well . . .
"Mickey, leaping like the devil"--why
gild it, although deer sounds better--
snares what was speeding towards its treetop nest,
one-handing the souvenir-to-be
meant to ...Read more of this...
by Moore, Marianne



...senger's-- 
The man made for the special life o' the world-- 
Do you forget him? I remember though! 
Consult our ship's conditions and you find 
One and but one choice suitable to all; 
The choice, that you unluckily prefer, 
Turning things topsy-turvy--they or it 
Going to the ground. Belief or unbelief 
Bears upon life, determines its whole course, 
Begins at its beginning. See the world 
Such as it is,--you made it not, nor I; 
I mean to take it as it is,--and you,...Read more of this...
by Browning, Robert
...br>



After forty years I remember

The first kiss I gave you

And most that you did not

Turn away or flinch or make

Conditions about any kisses

To follow but took my kiss

Simply as a gift.





58



It’s been a problem ever since

With everyone, no-one else was

So simple, always wanting more or

Less than I could give, when all

There was to follow was more of

The same but this is not meant

As a treatise on the epistemology

Of kissing but more on its

Metaphysi...Read more of this...
by Tebb, Barry
...strength, 
None but the wise or strong had gained it: 
Where now by Faith all arms are of a length; 
One size doth all conditions fit.

A peasant may believe as much
As a great Clerk, and reach the highest stature.
Thus dost thou make proud knowledge bend and crouch
While grace fills up uneven nature.

When creatures had no real light
Inherent in them, thou didst make the sun
Impute a lustre, and allow them bright; 
And in this show what Christ hath done.

Th...Read more of this...
by Herbert, George
...o competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

 Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime b...Read more of this...
by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...gured street
 He left me, with a kind of valediction,
 And faded on the blowing of the horn.


III

There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Being between two lives—unflowering, between
The live and the dead nettle.Read more of this...
by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...by hearsay

(b)
these meetings are a modest vow
to let each poet speak uncluttered
from establishment's traditions
and conditions where passions rippling
from the marrow can choose a space
to innocent themselves and long-held
tastes for carlos williams gurney
poems to siva (to name a few)

can surface in a side-attempt 
to show unexpected lineage from
the source to present patterns
of the poet - but at the core
of every poem read and comment made
it's not the poem or the poe...Read more of this...
by Gregory, Rg
...ong, armed-- 
But to be won by force--and many men 
Desired her; one good lack, no man desired. 
And these were the conditions of the King: 
That save he won the first by force, he needs 
Must wed that other, whom no man desired, 
A red-faced bride who knew herself so vile, 
That evermore she longed to hide herself, 
Nor fronted man or woman, eye to eye-- 
Yea--some she cleaved to, but they died of her. 
And one--they called her Fame; and one,--O Mother, 
How can ye k...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...tone of his own person dare tell
 the people anything but relative to that?
But if a man could hold in his mind all the conditions at once,
 of man and woman, of civilized

And barbarous, of sick and well, of happy and under torture, of
 living and dead, of human and not
Human, and dimly all the human future: -what should persuade him
 to speak? And what could his words change?

The mountain ahead of the world is not forming but fixed. But
 the man's words would be fixed ...Read more of this...
by Jeffers, Robinson
...six thousand dollars worth of bad debts, " he said.

 I was going to say that a sick person should never under

any conditions be abad debt, but I decided to forget it. Noth-

ing was going to be proved or changed on the shores of Little

Redfish Lake, and as that chub had discovered, it was not a

good place to have cosmetic surgery done.

 "I worked three years ago for a union in Southern Utah

that had a health plan, " the surgeon said. "I would not care

t...Read more of this...
by Brautigan, Richard
...he reason to be autonomous is to stand there,
a cleared instrument, ready to act, to search

the moral realm and actual conditions for what
needs to be done and to do it: fine, the

best, if it works out, but if, like a gun, it
comes in handy to the wrong choice, why then

you see the danger in the effective: better
then an autonomy that stands and looks about,

negotiating nothing, the supreme indifferences:
is anything to be gained where as much is lost:

and if for every a...Read more of this...
by Ammons, A R
...t advantag'd best;
Mean while the men of Judah to prevent
The harrass of thir Land, beset me round;
I willingly on some conditions came
Into thir hands, and they as gladly yield me
To the uncircumcis'd a welcom prey, 
Bound with two cords; but cords to me were threds
Toucht with the flame: on thir whole Host I flew
Unarm'd, and with a trivial weapon fell'd
Thir choicest youth; they only liv'd who fled.
Had Judah that day join'd, or one whole Tribe,
They had by this posses...Read more of this...
by Milton, John
...
We are striving to forge a union with purpose
To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and
conditions of man
And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us
but what stands before us
We close the divide because we know, to put our future first,
we must first put our differences aside
We lay down our arms
so we can reach out our arms
to one another
We seek harm to none and harmony for all
Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is ...Read more of this...
by Gorman, Amanda
...k, half-fallen off,
cracked and unpainted. It looks old."
--The strong sunlight, the wind from the sea,
all the conditions of its existence,
may have flaked off the paint, if ever it was painted,
and made it homelier than it was.
"Why did you bring me here to see it?
A temple of crates in cramped and crated scenery,
what can it prove?
I am tired of breathing this eroded air,
this dryness in which the monument is cracking."

It is an artifact 
of wood. Wood...Read more of this...
by Bishop, Elizabeth
...well for you. 
O hard, when love and duty clash! I fear 
My conscience will not count me fleckless; yet-- 
Hear my conditions: promise (otherwise 
You perish) as you came, to slip away 
Today, tomorrow, soon: it shall be said, 
These women were too barbarous, would not learn; 
They fled, who might have shamed us: promise, all.' 

What could we else, we promised each; and she, 
Like some wild creature newly-caged, commenced 
A to-and-fro, so pacing till she paused 
By...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...ides
laughing.

And I laughed also, perhaps in relief that Providence had delivered us
yet again, or perhaps--under conditions of extremity--
far from Connecticut--finding there creatures
acutely ridiculous, so avid
to swallow their own blood. First one, and then the other collapsed, dying,
bloodless in the snow black with their own blood,
and Kantiuk retrieved
his turnoks, and hacked lean meat
from the thigh of the larger wolf, which we ate
grateful, blessing the Cre...Read more of this...
by Hall, Donald

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Book: Reflection on the Important Things