Famous Consciousness Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Consciousness poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous consciousness poems. These examples illustrate what a famous consciousness poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Emily Dickinson
Of Consciousness, her awful Mate
The Soul cannot be rid --
As easy the secreting her
Behind the Eyes of God.
The deepest hid is sighted first
And scant to Him the Crowd --
What triple Lenses burn upon
The Escapade from God --...Read more of this...
by
Fernando Pessoa
I am older than Nature and her Time
By all the timeless age of Consciousness,
And my adult oblivion of the clime
Where I was born makes me not countryless.
Ay, and dim through my daylight thoughts escape
Yearnings for that land where my childhood dreamed,
Which I cannot recall in colour or shape
But haunts my hours like something that hath gleamed
And yet is not as...Read more of this...
by
Philip Levine
Numb, stiff, broken by no sleep,
I keep night watch. Looking for
signs to quiet fear, I creep
closer to his bed and hear
his breath come and go, holding
my own as if my own were
all I paid. Nothing I bring,
say, or do has meaning here.
Outside, ice crusts on river
and pond; wild hare come...Read more of this...
by
George (Lord) Byron
To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell,
To slowly trace the forest's shady scene,
Where things that own not man's dominion dwell,
And mortal foot hath ne'er or rarely been;
To climb the trackless mountain all unseen,
With the wild flock that never needs a fold;
Alone o'er steeps and foaming falls to lean;
This is not solitude, 'tis but to hold
Converse with...Read more of this...
by
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Why fades a dream?
An iridescent ray
Flecked in between the tryst
Of night and day.
Why fades a dream?—
Of consciousness the shade
Wrought out by lack of light and made
Upon life's stream.
Why fades a dream?
That thought may thrive,
[Pg 78]So fades the fleshless dream;
Lest men should learn to trust
The things that seem.
So fades a dream,
That living thought may grow
And like a waxing star-beam...Read more of this...
by
Victor Hugo
("Dans les vieilles forêts.")
{X., April 20, 1837.}
Through ancient forests—where like flowing tide
The rising sap shoots vigor far and wide,
Mounting the column of the alder dark
And silv'ring o'er the birch's shining bark—
Hast thou not often, Albert Dürer, strayed
Pond'ring, awe-stricken—through the half-lit glade,
Pallid and...Read more of this...
by
Alan Seeger
There is a power whose inspiration fills
Nature's fair fabric, sun- and star-inwrought,
Like airy dew ere any drop distils,
Like perfume in the laden flower, like aught
Unseen which interfused throughout the whole
Becomes its quickening pulse and principle and soul.
Now when, the drift of old desire renewing,
Warm tides flow northward over valley and field,
When...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
Me from Myself -- to banish --
Had I Art --
Impregnable my Fortress
Unto All Heart --
But since Myself -- assault Me --
How have I peace
Except by subjugating
Consciousness?
And since We're mutual Monarch
How this be
Except by Abdication --
Me -- of Me?...Read more of this...
by
D. H. Lawrence
If you are a man, and believe in the destiny of mankind
then say to yourself: we will cease to care
about property and money and mechanical devices,
and open our consciousness to the deep, mysterious life
that we are now cut off from.
The machine shall be abolished from the earth again;
it is a mistake that mankind has made;
money shall cease to be,...Read more of this...
by
Edna St. Vincent Millay
I could not bring this splendid world nor any trading beast
In charge of it, to defer, no, not to give ear, not in the least
Appearance, to my handsome prophecies,
which here I ponder and put by.
I am left simpler, less encumbered, by the consciousness
that I shall by no pebble in my dirty sling
avail To slay one purple giant four...Read more of this...
by
David Lehman
for Aaron Fogel
Politically-correct
personal computers
point and click.
President Clinton
(codename Peacock)
can't protect
crack pushing
Communist Party
cops pursuing
a care package
of peasant consciousness
in a car park.
Poverty's a crime,
and capital punishment
par for the course,
in this penal code.
A plausible cliffhanger
can't cure the paralyzed,
prevent cancer,
or prepare California
for Perry Como,
that peerless crooner.
Pitcher...Read more of this...
by
Philip Larkin
"Of course I was drugged, and so heavily I did not regain
consciousness until the next morning. I was horrified to
discover that I had been ruined, and for some days I was inconsolable,
and cried like a child to be killed or sent back to my aunt."
--Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor
Even so distant, I can taste the grief,
Bitter...Read more of this...
by
Fernando Pessoa
As a bad orator, badly o'er-book-skilled,
Doth overflow his purpose with made heat,
And, like a clock, winds with withoutness willed
What should have been an inner instinct's feat;
Or as a prose-wit, harshly poet turned,
Lacking the subtler music in his measure,
With useless care labours but to be spurned,
Courting in alien speech the Muse's pleasure;
I study how to love or how to hate,
Estranged by...Read more of this...
by
D. H. Lawrence
Close your eyes, my love, let me make you blind;
They have taught you to see
Only a mean arithmetic on the face of things,
A cunning algebra in the faces of men,
And God like geometry
Completing his circles, and working cleverly.
I'll kiss you over the eyes till I kiss you blind;
If I...Read more of this...
by
Robert Burns
OF all the numerous ills that hurt our peace,
That press the soul, or wring the mind with anguish
Beyond comparison the worst are those
By our own folly, or our guilt brought on:
In ev’ry other circumstance, the mind
Has this to say, “It was no deed of mine:”
But, when to all the evil of misfortune
This sting is added, “Blame thy foolish self!”
Or...Read more of this...
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...
by
Emily Dickinson
Ended, ere it begun --
The Title was scarcely told
When the Preface perished from Consciousness
The Story, unrevealed --
Had it been mine, to print!
Had it been yours, to read!
That it was not Our privilege
The interdict of God --...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
I never hear that one is dead
Without the chance of Life
Afresh annihilating me
That mightiest Belief,
Too mighty for the Daily mind
That tilling its abyss,
Had Madness, had it once or twice
The yawning Consciousness,
Beliefs are Bandaged, like the Tongue
When Terror were it told
In any Tone commensurate
Would strike us instant Dead
I do not know the man so bold
He dare in lonely Place
That awful...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
There is a Zone whose even Years
No Solstice interrupt --
Whose Sun constructs perpetual Noon
Whose perfect Seasons wait --
Whose Summer set in Summer, till
The Centuries of June
And Centuries of August cease
And Consciousness -- is Noon....Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
BEGINNING my studies, the first step pleas’d me so much,
The mere fact, consciousness—these forms—the power of motion,
The least insect or animal—the senses—eyesight—love;
The first step, I say, aw’d me and pleas’d me so much,
I have hardly gone, and hardly wish’d to go, any farther,
But stop and loiter all the time, to sing it in extatic songs....Read more of this...
by
Adela Florence Cory Nicolson
Second Song: The Girl from Baltistan
Throb, throb, throb,
Far away in the blue transparent Night,
On the outer horizon of a dreaming consciousness,
...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
This Consciousness that is aware
Of Neighbors and the Sun
Will be the one aware of Death
And that itself alone
Is traversing the interval
Experience between
And most profound experiment
Appointed unto Men --
How adequate unto itself
Its properties shall be
Itself unto itself and none
Shall make discovery.
Adventure most unto itself
The Soul condemned to be --
Attended by a single Hound
Its own identity....Read more of this...
by
D. H. Lawrence
My world is a painted fresco, where coloured shapes
Of old, ineffectual lives linger blurred and warm;
An endless tapestry the past has women drapes
The halls of my life, compelling my soul to conform.
The surface of dreams is broken,
The picture of the past is shaken and scattered.
Fluent, active figures of men pass along the railway, and...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Lee Masters
Have any of you, passers-by,
Had an old tooth that was an unceasing discomfort?
Or a pain in the side that never quite left you?
Or a malignant growth that grew with time?
So that even in profoundest slumber
There was shadowy consciousness or the phantom of thought
Of the tooth, the side, the growth?
Even so thwarted love, or defeated ambition,
Or a blunder in life...Read more of this...
by
Delmore Schwartz
Poem Faithful to your commands, o consciousness, o
Beating wings, I studied
the roses and the muses of reality,
the deceptions and the deceptive elation of the redness of the growing morning,
and all the greened and thomed variety of the vines of error, which begin by promising
Everything and more than everything, and then suddenly,
At the height of noon seem to rise...Read more of this...
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