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Famous Deathly Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Rossetti, Christina
...e stands there like a beacon thro' the night,
 A pale clear beacon where the storm-drift is;
She stands alone, a wonder deathly white;
She stands there patient, nerved with inner might,
 Indomitable in her feebleness,
Her face and will athirst against the light....Read more of this...



by Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
...ody from thy brow,--by all of those
Permitted desolations, comfort mine !
No earthly friend being near me, interpose
No deathly angel 'twixt my face aud thine,
But stoop Thyself to gather my life's rose,
And smile away my mortal to Divine !...Read more of this...

by Robinson, Mary Darby
...rphan, known,
Ere Fate had left thee--all alone!


IV. 

Thy russet coat is scant, and torn,
Thy cheek is now grown deathly pale!
Thy eyes are dim, thy looks forlorn,
And bare thy bosom meets the gale;
And oft I hear thee deeply groan,
That thou, poor boy, art left alone.


V. 

Thy naked feet are wounded sore
With thorns, that cross thy daily road;
The winter winds around thee roar,
The church-yard is thy bleak abode;
Thy pillow now, a cold grave stone--
And ther...Read more of this...

by de la Mare, Walter
...en gather 
Posies once mine. 

Look thy last on all things lovely, 
Every hour. Let no night 
Seal thy sense in deathly slumber 
Till to delight 
Thou have paid thy utmost blessing; 
Since that all things thou wouldst praise 
Beauty took from those who loved them 
In other days....Read more of this...

by Slessor, Kenneth
...hen blank and bone-white, like a maniac's thought, 
The naphtha-flash of lightning slit the sky, 
Knifing the dark with deathly photographs. 
There's not so many with so poor a purse 
Or fierce a need, must fare by night like that, 
Five miles in darkness on a country track, 
But when you do, that's what you think. 
Five bells. 

In Melbourne, your appetite had gone, 
Your angers too; they had been leeched away 
By the soft archery of summer rains 
And the sponge-...Read more of this...



by Belloc, Hilaire
...Human Race in Scorn,
And lived with all his Sisters where
His father lived, in Berkeley Square.
And oh! The Lad was Deathly Proud!
He never shook your Hand or Bowed,
But merely smirked and nodded thus:
How perfectly ridiculous!
Alas! That such Affected Tricks
Should flourish in a Child of Six!
(For such was Young Godolphin's age).
Just then, the Court required a Page,
Whereat the Lord High Chamberlain
(The Kindest and the Best of Men),
He went good-naturedly and took
...Read more of this...

by Robinson, Mary Darby
...eav'n will save thee," GOLFRE said,
"Save thee, to be MY bride!"
But while he spoke a beam of light
Shone on her bosom, deathly white,
Then onward seem'd to glide.

And now the GOATHERD, on his knees,
With frantic accent cried,
"O! GOD forbid! that I should see
"The beauteous ZORIETTO, be
"The BARON GOLFRE'S bride!

"Poor Lady! she did shrink and fall,
"As leaves fall in September!
"Then be not BARON GOLFRE'S bride--
"Alack! in yon black tow'r SHE died--
"Full well, I do ...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...nd baffled long!
Bear up, O smitten orb! O ship, continue on! 

Sure, as the ship of all, the Earth itself, 
Product of deathly fire and turbulent chaos, 
Forth from its spasms of fury and its poisons, 
Issuing at last in perfect power and beauty,
Onward, beneath the sun, following its course, 
So thee, O ship of France! 

Finish’d the days, the clouds dispell’d, 
The travail o’er, the long-sought extrication, 
When lo! reborn, high o’er the European world,
(In gladness, answ...Read more of this...

by Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
...s hand,
Whence harmonies, we cannot understand,
Of God; will in his worlds, the strain unfolds
In sad-perplexed minors: deathly colds
Fall on us while we hear, and countermand
Our sanguine heart back from the fancyland
With nightingales in visionary wolds.
We murmur ' Where is any certain tune
Or measured music in such notes as these ? '
But angels, leaning from the golden seat,
Are not so minded their fine ear hath won
The issue of completed cadences,
And, smiling down t...Read more of this...

by Robinson, Mary Darby
...quiv'ring stream of light--
It danc'd upon the murm'ring wave
It danc'd upon--her HENRY'S Grave!
It mark'd his visage, deathly pale,--
His white shroud floating in the gale;
His speaking eyes--his smile so sweet
That won the love--of MARGUERITE!

And now he beckon'd her along
The curling moonlight waves among;
No footsteps mark'd the slanting sand
Where she had seen her HENRY stand!
She saw him o'er the billows go--
She heard the rising breezes blow;
She shriek'd aloud ! The...Read more of this...

by Lawson, Henry
...d on the field, of friend and foe, 
Ten thousand men lay dead. 

Boy Clarence lay in slush and blood 
With his face deathly white; 
Old Withen lay by his left side 
And I knelt at his right. 
And Clarence ever whispered, 
Though with dying eyes serene: 
"I loved her for her girlhood,. 
Will someone tell the Queen?" 

And this old Withen's message, 
When his time shortly came: 
"I loved her for her father's sake 
But I fought for Virland's fame: 
Go, take you this,...Read more of this...

by Spenser, Edmund
...ome comparèd be, 
And only Rome could make great Rome to tremble: 
So did the Gods by heavenly doom decree, 
That other deathly power should not resemble 
Her that did match the whole earth's puissaunce, 
And did her courage to the heavens advance. 


7 

Ye sacred ruins, and ye tragic sights, 
Which only do the name of Rome retain, 
Old monuments, which of so famous sprites 
The honour yet in ashes do maintain: 
Triumphant arcs, spires neighbors to the sky, 
That you to ...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...curved and streamed, and the bottle of "hooch" was dry.

A man once aimed that my life be shamed, and wrought me a deathly wrong;
I vowed one day I would well repay, but the heft of his hate was strong.
He thonged me East and he thonged me West; he harried me back and forth,
Till I fled in fright from his peerless spite to the bleak, bald-headed North.

And there I lay, and for many a day I hatched plan after plan,
For a golden haul of the wherewithal to crush an...Read more of this...

by Lawson, Henry
...br> 

There was silence in the city, there was silence as of night – 
Women in the ghostly daylight, kneeling, praying, deathly white, 
As their mothers knelt before them, as their daughters knelt since then, 
And as ours shall, in the future, kneel and pray for fighting men. 

For their men had gone to battle, as our sons and grandsons too 
Must go out, for Life and Freedom, as all nations have to do. 
And the Charlestown women waited for the sounds that came too soo...Read more of this...

by Bukowski, Charles
...ere comes a newspaper stuffed with small red birds
with flat brown beaks
here comes a **** carrying a torch
a grenade
a deathly love
here comes a victory carrying
one bucket of blood
and stumbling over the berry bush
and the sheets hang out the windows
and the bombers head east west north south
get lost
get tossed like salad
as all the fish in the sea line up and form
one line
one long line
one very long thin line
the longest line you could ever imagine
and we get lost
walkin...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...falls;
The holes you digged are water to the brim;
Your little sod-roofed cabins with the snugly moss-chinked walls
Are deathly now and mouldering and dim.
The battle-field is silent where of old you fought it out;
The claims you fiercely won are lost and sold;
But there's a little army that they'll never put to rout--
The men who simply live to seek the gold.

The men who can't remember when they learned to swing a pack,
Or in what lawless land the quest began;
The s...Read more of this...

by Lawrence, D. H.
...s the dawn 
the cruel dawn of coming back to life 
out of oblivion 

Wait, wait, the little ship 
drifting, beneath the deathly ashy grey 
of a flood-dawn. 

Wait, wait! even so, a flush of yellow 
and strangely, O chilled wan soul, a flush of rose. 

A flush of rose, and the whole thing starts again. 

X 

The flood subsides, and the body, like a worn sea-shell 
emerges strange and lovely. 
And the little ship wings home, faltering and lapsing 
on the pink fl...Read more of this...

by Sherrick, Fannie Isabelle
...ear some awful doom.
That dreary silence by foretold the storm
That soon would rage within the night's dark gloom;
A deathly hush o'er waiting land and sea,
And then with one loud clap the storm cloud burst.
Behold! the elements again set free,
As if with fearful spell they'd long been curst,
Now vented all the power of stifled birth
Upon the luckless unoffending earth.
The waves around the cliff's low base sprang high
And madly dashed their spray in furious rage;
...Read more of this...

by Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
...and cloud are pined
And drop together,
And at a blast, which is not wind,
The forests wither,
Thou, from the darkening deathly curse
To glory breakest,— 
The Strongest of the universe
Guarding the weakest!...Read more of this...

by Mandelstam, Osip
...famous gather to applaud their seeming
greatness
you
wonder where 
the real ones are
what 
giant cave
hides them
as
the deathly talentless
bow to
accolades
as
the fools are
fooled
again
you 
wonder where 
the real ones are
if there are
real ones.
this self-congratulatory nonsense
has lasted 
decades
and
with some exceptions
centuries.
this
is so dreary
is so absolutely pitiless
it
churns the gut to 
powder
shackles hope
it 
makes little things
like
pulling up a shade
...Read more of this...

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