Famous Contemplating Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Contemplating poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous contemplating poems. These examples illustrate what a famous contemplating poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Plath, Sylvia
...e a cat.
Seeming to see
A funny pink world he might eat on the other side of it,
He bites,
Then sits
Back, fat jug
Contemplating a world clear as water.
A red
Shred in his little fist....Read more of this...
by
Brecht, Bertolt
...Contemplating Hell, as I once heard it,
My brother Shelley found it to be a place
Much like the city of London. I,
Who do not live in London, but in Los Angeles,
Find, contemplating Hell, that is
Must be even more like Los Angeles.
Also in Hell,
I do not doubt it, there exist these opulent gardens
With flowers as large as trees, wilting, of course,
...Read more of this...
by
Keats, John
...awful shine
From the exaltation of Apollo's bow;
A heavenly beacon in their dreary woe.
Who thus were ripe for high contemplating,
Might turn their steps towards the sober ring
Where sat Endymion and the aged priest
'Mong shepherds gone in eld, whose looks increas'd
The silvery setting of their mortal star.
There they discours'd upon the fragile bar
That keeps us from our homes ethereal;
And what our duties there: to nightly call
Vesper, the beauty-crest of summer wea...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...g her Klein.
I sat through many a summer watching the children play,
Feeling a hermit’s contentment in his cave,
Contemplating Plato and envisioning that cave
Of his where shadows move against the wall;
And turn to see or fail to see
The need to turn at all....Read more of this...
by
Estep, Maggie
...n relationships,
I love that kind of pointless intellectualism
so do it again and
**** ME.
Stop being logical
stop contemplating
the origins of evil
and the beauty of death
this is not a TV movie about Plato sex life,
this is **** ME
so **** ME
It's the pause that refreshes
just add water and
**** ME.
I wrote this
so I'd have a good excuse to say "**** ME"
over and over
and over
so I could get a lot of attention
and look, it worked!
So thank you
thank you
and **** ...Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
...-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
ment roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the wi...Read more of this...
by
McKay, Claude
...comprehend but not control,
I need not gloom my days with futile dread,
Because I see a part and not the whole.
Contemplating the strange, I'm comforted
By this narcotic thought: I know my soul....Read more of this...
by
Rich, Susan
...distilled to an angle of wind, camel droppings,
salted food. How long has this man been here, how long
can I stay contemplating a route home?
It's so easy to get lost and disappear, die of thirst and longing
as the Sultan's three wives did last year. Found in their Mercedes,
the chauffeur at the wheel, how did they fail to return home
to Ágadez, retrace a landscape they'd always believed?
No cross-streets, no broken yellow lines; I feel relief at the abandonmen...Read more of this...
by
Rilke, Rainer Maria
...endures
the outrage of his too pure image...
Wistfully following their example,
nature re-enters herself;
contemplating its own sap, the flower
becomes too soft, and the boulder hardens...
It's the return of all desire that enters
toward all life embracing itself from afar...
Where does it fall? Under the dwindling
surface, does it hope to renew a center?...Read more of this...
by
Gibran, Kahlil
...o hearts restored the singleness which had been taken from them.
At dawn the two stood in the middle of the field contemplating the beauty of Nature injured by the tempest. After a deep and comforting silence, the soldier said to his sweetheart, "Look at the Darkness, giving birth to the Sun."...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...wn master, total and absolute,
Listening to others, and considering well what they say,
Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,
Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.
I inhale great draughts of space;
The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine.
I am larger, better than I thought;
I did not know I held so much goodness.
All seems beautiful to me;
I can repeat over to men and wome...Read more of this...
by
Dickinson, Emily
...m?
Waits any indurated mate
His wrinkled coming Home?
Oh Life, begun in fluent Blood
And consummated dull!
Achievement contemplating thee --
Feels transitive and cool....Read more of this...
by
Blake, William
...CHAPTER 4
Dark, revolving in silent activity:
Unseen in tormenting passions:
An activity unknown and horrible,
A self-contemplating shadow,
In enormous labours occupied.
CHAPTER 5
But Eternals beheld his vast forests;
Age on ages he lay, clos'd, unknown,
Brooding shut in the deep; all avoid
The petrific, abominable chaos.
6
His cold horrors silent, dark Urizen
Prepar'd; his ten thousands of thunders,
Rang'd in gloom'd array, stretch out across
The dread worl...Read more of this...
by
Nash, Ogden
...and the terror
of smell—and sight—is overtaking him;
I know he has that terrified faraway look
that death brings—he is contemplating. I want him
to touch my forehead once again and rub my muzzle
before he lifts me up and throws me into
that little valley. I hope he doesn't use
his shoe for fear of touching me; I know,
or used to know, the grasses down there; I think
I knew a hundred smells. I hope the dog's way
doesn't overtake him, one quick push,
barely that, ...Read more of this...
by
Turner Smith, Charlotte
...nce with step,
Mournful and slow, along the wave-worn cliff,
Pensive I took my solitary way,
Lost in despondence, while contemplating
Not my own wayward destiny alone,
(Hard as it is, and difficult to bear!)
But in beholding the unhappy lot
Of the lorn Exiles; who, amid the storms
Of wild disastrous Anarchy, are thrown,
Like shipwreck'd sufferers, on England's coast,
To see, perhaps, no more their native land,
Where Desolation riots: They, like me,
From fairer hopes and happi...Read more of this...
by
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...moving without answer to her rest
She found no rest, and ever failed to draw
The quiet night into her blood, but lay
Contemplating her own unworthiness;
And when the pale and bloodless east began
To quicken to the sun, arose, and raised
Her mother too, and hand in hand they moved
Down to the meadow where the jousts were held,
And waited there for Yniol and Geraint.
And thither came the twain, and when Geraint
Beheld her first in field, awaiting him,
He felt, w...Read more of this...
by
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...session of man's mind and deed.
I care not what the sects may brawl.
I sit as God holding no form of creed,
But contemplating all."* * * * *
Full oft the riddle of the painful earth
Flash'd thro' her as she sat alone,
Yet not the less held she her solemn mirth,
And intellectual throne.
And so she throve and prosper'd; so three years
She prosper'd: on the fourth she fell,
Like Herod, when the shout was in his ears,
Struck thro' with pangs of hell.
Les...Read more of this...
by
Petrarch, Francesco
...ath remorseful were.This gentle company thus throng'd around,In her contemplating the awful endAll once must make, by law of nature bound;Each was a neighbour, each a sorrowing friend.Then Death stretch'd forth his hand, in that dread hour,From her bright head a golden hair to rend,Thus culling of...Read more of this...
by
Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...s upon shoulders that had never felt the wheel;
And their last of empty trophies was a gilded cup of nothing,
Which a contemplating vagabond would not have come to steal.
Long and often had they figured for a larger valuation,
But the size of their addition was the balance of a doubt:
There were gentlemen of leisure in the Valley of the Shadow,
Not allured by retrospection, disenchanted, and played out.
And among the dark endurances of unavowed reprisals
There...Read more of this...
by
Gibran, Kahlil
...ring the water which poured from the mouths of the statues like thoughts flowing freely from a lover's imagination, and contemplating heavily his palace which stood upon a knoll like a birth-mark upon the cheek of a maiden. His fancy revealed to him the pages of his life's drama which he read with falling tears that veiled his eyes and prevented him from viewing man's feeble additions to Nature.
He looked back with piercing regret to the images of his early life, wo...Read more of this...
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