Famous Decades Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Decades poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous decades poems. These examples illustrate what a famous decades poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Dickinson, Emily
...hopman importunes it --
While cool -- concernless No --
Nods from the Gilded pointers --
Nods from the Seconds slim --
Decades of Arrogance between
The Dial life --
And Him --...Read more of this...
by
Hall, Donald
...r> The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything....Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...One implores
Thy clemency, whose wilfulness innate
Has gone uncurbed and roughshod while the years
Have lengthened into decades; now distressed
He knows no rule by which to move or stay,
And teased with restlessness and desperate fears
He dares not watch in silence thy wise way
Bringing about results none could have guessed....Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
...ut Saigon to Marshal Ky
Air America followed through
Transporting confiture for President Thieu
All these Dealers were decades and yesterday
The Indochinese mob of the U.S. CIA
Operation Haylift Offisir Wm. Colby
Saw Marshal Ky fly opium Mr. Mustard told me
Indochina desk he was Chief of Dirty Tricks
"Hitchhiking" with dope pushers was how he got his fix
Subsidizing traffickers to drive the Reds away
Till Colby was the head of the CIA
January 1972...Read more of this...
by
Finch, Annie
...he long edge of the last human shore,
there are deep windows the waves haven't opened,
where night is reflected through decades of glass.
There is the nursery, there is the nanny,
there are my father’s unreachable eyes
turned towards the window. Is the child uneasy?
His is the death that is circling the stars.
In the deep room where candles burn soundlessly
and peace pours at last through the cells of our bodies,
three of us are watching, one of us is staring
wit...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...a copy of my poems
And Horovitz putting me in ‘Children of Albion’ and ‘The
Statesman’ giving me good reviews.
Decades later, in Byram Arcade, I am staring at the facade of
‘The Poetry Business’ and its proprietors sitting on the steps
Outside, trying to look civilised and their letter, "Your poetry
Is good but its not our kind" and I wondered what their kind was
And besides they’re not my kind of editor and I’m back in Leeds
With a letter from Seamus Heaney - t...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...r>
I write these verses sitting in the marble hall
Of City Station’s restored art deco glory,
The rats and debris of decades swept away,
How much I need the kindness of strangers,
The welcome from my son’s nurses on the
Ward with the highest security rating Leeds possesses,
A magnificent rotunda among lawns and wooded glades,
Air conditioned with more staff than patients-
When visiting times are readily extended to encompass
My moorland walks and journeys to the ca...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...ere of today
Begging in stations
Sleeping in boxes.
It is time to find
Our lost, those children
I taught three decades ago
To paint on ceilings
With sticks of incense
Rainbows of silence
For John Cage
To write on walls
In luminous paint
Pink haiku
For Allen Ginsberg.
It is time to awaken and emblazon the sky
With symphonies of sorrow,
To draft the articles of war.
Poets of the Underground
The doors have opened
The ghost of Walt Whitman
Grey-bea...Read more of this...
by
Gluck, Louise
...volving.
Substitution of the image
for relentless earth. What
do I know of this place,
the role of the tree for decades
taken by a bonsai, voices
rising from the tennis courts --
Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut.
As one expects of a lyric poet.
We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory....Read more of this...
by
Clampitt, Amy
...the farm, a sock-shod
stove-warmed flatiron slid under
the covers, mornings a damascene-
sealed bizarrerie of fernwork
decades ago now
waking in northwest London, tea
brought up steaming, a Peak Frean
biscuit alongside to be nibbled
as blue gas leaps up singing
decades ago now
damp sheets in Dorset, fog-hung
habitat of bronchitis, of long
hot soaks in the bathtub, of nothing
quite drying out till next summer:
delicious to think of
hassocks pulled in close, toasting-
for...Read more of this...
by
von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang
...mmortality, and whose
fame already extends over the earth, although as yet only in its
infancy. Scarcely have two decades passed away since he ceased to
dwell among men, yet he now stands before us, not as a mere individual,
like those whom the world is wont to call great, but as a type,
as an emblem--the recognised emblem and representative of the human
mind in its present stage of culture and advancement.
Among the infinitely varied effusions of Goethe's pen,...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...
box full of flies and lures and hooks.
Some of the hooks still had worms on them. The worms
were years and decades old and petrified to the hooks. The
worms were now as much a part of the hooks as the metal it-
self.
There was some old Trout Fishing in America armor in
the trunk and beside a weather-beaten fishing helmet, I saw
an old diary. I opened the diary to the first page and it said:
The Trout Fishing Diary of Alonso Hagen
It seemed to...Read more of this...
by
Doty, Mark
...s of the World to the Reading Room
where Art and Industry met in the mural
on the dome. The room smelled like two decades
before I was born, when the name
carved over the door meant something.
I never read the second section,
"Wonders of the Modern World";
I loved the promise of my father's blueprints,
the unfulfilled turquoise schemes,
but in the real structures
you could hardly imagine a future.
I wanted the density of history,
which I confused with...Read more of this...
by
Collins, Billy
...e your eyes
while you drown, as if panic, or the act of submergence,
could startle time into such compression, crushing
decades in the vice of your desperate, final seconds.
After falling off a steamship or being swept away
in a rush of floodwaters, wouldn't you hope
for a more leisurely review, an invisible hand
turning the pages of an album of photographs-
you up on a pony or blowing out candles in a conic hat.
How about a short animated film, a slide presentation...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...h.
In the silence, shining bright,
She stands naked and unsubdued.
Her marble coldness will endure the march
Of decades.
Rend her bronzes, hammers;
Cast down her inscriptions.
She is unconquerable, austere,
Cold as the moon that swims above her
When the nights are clear.
IV
Croissy, Ile-de-France, June, 1815
"Whoa! Victorine.
Devil take the mare! I've never seen so vicious a beast.
She kicked Jules the last time she was here,
He's been lame ever s...Read more of this...
by
Bukowski, Charles
...e once had a tail, somebody
cut it off..."
I took the cat back, it was a hot summer, one of the
hottest in decades, I put him on the bathroom
floor, gave him water and pills, he wouldn't eat, he
wouldn't touch the water, I dipped my finger into it
and wet his mouth and I talked to him, I didn't go any-
where, I put in a lot of bathroom time and talked to
him and gently touched him and he looked back at
me with those pale blue crossed eyes and as the days went
b...Read more of this...
by
Field, Eugene
...er the meadows that call is aye and forever repeated.
Such were the voices that whooped wildly and vainly for Peter
Decades and decades ago down in the State of Kentucky--
Such are the voices that cry now from the woodland and meadow,
"Peter--O Peter!" all day, calling, reminding, and chiding--
Taking us back to the time when Peter he done gone and done it!
These are the voices of those left by the boy in the farmhouse
When, with his laughter and scorn, hatless and bootle...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...dows
Darker than death itself upon the bedroom wall
At Rawdon in the bungalow by the cross-roads where we met?
Three decades on and yet I cannot say for sure the destiny
That made us meet was dark or light, some sound or sight
‘Beyond our mortal vision’, some immaterial infinity,
A double helix on the heels of both that made my south
Your north and jerked the compass till we knew
Not day from night nor wrong from right.
Only a week ago you took me to the house ...Read more of this...
by
Mandelstam, Osip
...ed
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
or
putting on your shoes
or
walking out on the street
more difficult
near
damnable
as
the famous gather to
applaud their
seeming
greatness
as
the fools are
fooled
again
huma...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...s too immature to understand or care.
When I saw you again you had Sarah and I had Brenda, my wife-to-be;
Three decades of nightmare ahead with neither of our ‘adult children’
Quite right, both drink to excess and have been on wards.
Nor has your life been a total success, full-time teaching till you retired
Then Victim Support: where’s that sharp mind, that laughter and that passion?
And what have I to show?
A few pamphlets, a small ‘Selected’, a single go...Read more of this...
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