Famous Contingent Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Absalom And Achitophel

...bait, and circumvented still!
Did ever men forsake their present ease,
In midst of health imagine a disease;
Take pains contingent mischiefs to foresee,
Make heirs for monarchs, and for God decree?
What shall we think! Can people give away
Both for themselves and sons, their native sway?
Then they are left defenceless to the sword
Of each unbounded arbitrary lord:
And laws are vain, by which we right enjoy,
If kings unquestion'd can those laws destroy.
Yet, if the crowd be ju...Read more of this...
by Dryden, John


Bees are Black with Gilt Surcingles --

...with Gilt Surcingles --
Buccaneers of Buzz.
Ride abroad in ostentation
And subsist on Fuzz.

Fuzz ordained -- not Fuzz contingent --
Marrows of the Hill.
Jugs -- a Universe's fracture
Could not jar or spill....Read more of this...
by Dickinson, Emily

Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford

...not be buying beer for this Terpander's
Approved and estimated friend Ben Jonson;
He'd never foist it as a part of his
Contingent entertainment of a townsman
While he goes off rehearsing, as he must,
If he shall ever be the Duke of Stratford.
And my words are no shadow on your town -- 
Far from it; for one town's as like another
As all are unlike London. Oh, he knows it, -- 
And there's the Stratford in him; he denies it,
And there's the Shakespeare in him. So, God help him!...Read more of this...
by Robinson, Edwin Arlington

Impossible To Tell

...renga coursing from moment to moment
Is meaning, Bob says in his Haiku book.
Oh swirling petals, all living things are contingent,

Falling leaves, and transient, and they suffer.
But the Universal is the goal of jokes,
Especially certain ethnic jokes, which taper

Down through the swirling funnel of tongues and gestures
Toward their preposterous Ithaca. There's one
A journalist told me. He heard it while a hero

Of the South African freedom movement was speaking
To elderly ...Read more of this...
by Pinsky, Robert

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