Famous Depart Poems by Famous Poets

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

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This Chasm Sweet upon my life

by Emily Dickinson
 This Chasm, Sweet, upon my life
I mention it to you,
When Sunrise through a fissure drop
The Day must follow too.

If we demur, its gaping sides
Disclose as 'twere a Tomb
Ourself am lying straight wherein
The Favorite of Doom.

When it has just contained a Life
Then, Darling, it will close
And yet so bolder every Day
So turbulent it grows

I'm tempted half to stitch it up
With...Read more of this...

The Other

by Sylvia Plath
 You come in late, wiping your lips.
What did I leave untouched on the doorstep---

White Nike,
Streaming between my walls?

Smilingly, blue lightning
Assumes, like a meathook, the burden of his parts.

The police love you, you confess everything.
Bright hair, shoe-black, old plastic,

Is my life so intriguing?
Is it for this you widen your eye-rings?

Is it for this the air motes depart?
They rae not air...Read more of this...

Hymn 78

by Isaac Watts
 The strength of Christ's love.

SS 8:5-7,13,14. 

[Who is this fair one in distress,
That travels from the wilderness?
And pressed with sorrows and with sins,
On her beloved Lord she leans.

This is the spouse of Christ our God,
Bought with the treasure of his blood;
And her request and her complaint
Is but the voice of every saint.]

"O let my name engraven stand
Both on thy...Read more of this...

Longings for Home

by Walt Whitman
 O MAGNET-SOUTH! O glistening, perfumed South! My South! 
O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse, and love! Good and evil! O all dear to me! 
O dear to me my birth-things—All moving things, and the trees where I was
 born—the
 grains,
 plants, rivers; 
Dear to me my own slow sluggish rivers where they flow, distant, over flats of silvery
 sands,
...Read more of this...

The Water Nymphs

by Ellis Parker Butler
 They hide in the brook when I seek to draw nearer,
 Laughing amain when I feign to depart;
Often I hear them, now faint and now clearer—
 Innocent bold or so sweetly discreet.
Are they Nymphs of the Stream at their playing
 Or but the brook I mistook for a voice?
Little care I; for, despite harsh Time’s flaying,
 Brook voice or...Read more of this...

Note how the zephyrs have made the roses bloom!

by Omar Khayyam
Note how the zephyrs have made the roses bloom!
Note how their fragrant beauty glads the nightingale!
Go, then, repose in the shadow of these flowers, for
very speedily they depart from the earth and very often
ne'er return again....Read more of this...

The Dove's Visit

by Anonymous
I knew a little, sickly child,The long, long summer’s day,When all the world was green and bright,Alone in bed to lay;There used to come a little doveBefore his window small,[Pg 011]And sing to him with her sweet voice,Out of the fir-tree tall.And when the sick child better grew,And he could creep along,Close to that window he would come,And listen to...Read more of this...

To Wordsworth

by Percy Bysshe Shelley
 Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know 
That things depart which never may return: 
Childhood and youth, friendship and love's first glow, 
Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn. 
These common woes I feel. One loss is mine 
Which thou too feel'st, yet I alone deplore. 
Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine...Read more of this...

The Commination

by Alec Derwent (A D) Hope
 He that is filthy let him be filthy still. 
Rev. 22.11 

Like John on Patmos, brooding on the Four 
Last Things, I meditate the ruin of friends 
Whose loss, Lord, brings this grand new curse to mind 
Now send me foes worth cursing, or send more 
- Since means should be proportionate to ends - 
For mine are few...Read more of this...

The Sad Shepherd

by William Butler Yeats
 There was a man whom Sorrow named his Friend,
And he, of his high comrade Sorrow dreaming,
Went walking with slow steps along the gleaming
And humming Sands, where windy surges wend:
And he called loudly to the stars to bend
From their pale thrones and comfort him, but they
Among themselves laugh on and sing alway:
And then the man whom Sorrow named his friend
Cried...Read more of this...

456. Epitaph on Captain Lascelles

by Robert Burns
 WHEN Lascelles thought fit from this world to depart,
Some friends warmly thought of embalming his heart;
A bystander whispers—“Pray don’t make so much o’t,
The subject is poison, no reptile will touch it.”...Read more of this...

To My Friends

by Friedrich von Schiller
 Yes, my friends!--that happier times have been
Than the present, none can contravene;
That a race once lived of nobler worth;
And if ancient chronicles were dumb,
Countless stones in witness forth would come
From the deepest entrails of the earth.
But this highly-favored race has gone,
Gone forever to the realms of night.
We, we live! The moments are our own,
And the living judge the right.

Brighter...Read more of this...

Sonnet 6: Then let not winters ragged hand deface

by William Shakespeare
 Then let not winter's ragged hand deface
In thee thy summer ere thou be distilled.
Make sweet some vial; treasure thou some place
With beauty's treasure ere it be self-killed.
That use is not forbidden usury
Which happies those that pay the willing loan;
That's for thyself to breed another thee,
Or ten times happier, be it ten for one,
Ten times thy self were happier than...Read more of this...

To A Sick Child During The Siege Of Paris

by Victor Hugo
 ("Si vous continuez toute pâle.") 
 
 {November, 1870.} 


 If you continue thus so wan and white; 
 If I, one day, behold 
 You pass from out our dull air to the light, 
 You, infant—I, so old: 
 If I the thread of our two lives must see 
 Thus blent to human view, 
 I...Read more of this...

Psalm 89 part 5

by Isaac Watts
 v.30ff 
C. M.
The covenant of grace unchangeable.

"Yet," saith the Lord, "if David's race,
The children of my Son,
Should break my laws, abuse my grace,
And tempt mine anger down;

"Their sins I'll visit with the rod
And make their folly smart;
But I'll not cease to be their God,
Nor from my truth depart.

"My cov'nant I will ne'er revoke,
But keep my grace in mind
And what...Read more of this...

The Consolation

by Anne Bronte
 Though bleak these woods and damp the ground
With fallen leaves so thickly strewn,
And cold the wind that wanders round
With wild and melancholy moan, 
There is a friendly roof I know
Might shield me from the wintry blast;
There is a fire whose ruddy glow
Will cheer me for my wanderings past. 

And so, though still where'er I roam
Cold stranger glances meet my...Read more of this...

Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte

by George (Lord) Byron
 I 
'Tis done -- but yesterday a King! 
And arm'd with Kings to strive -- 
And now thou art a nameless thing: 
So abject -- yet alive! 
Is this the man of thousand thrones, 
Who strew'd our earth with hostile bones, 
And can he thus survive? 
Since he, miscall'd the Morning Star, 
Nor man nor fiend hath fallen so...Read more of this...

The Flower

by George Herbert
 How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean
Are thy returns! ev'n as the flowers in spring;
To which, besides their own demean,
The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.
Grief melts away
Like snows in May,
As if there were no such cold thing.

Who would have thought my shrivelled heart
Could have recovered greenness? It was gone
Quite under ground; as flowers depart
To see their mother-root,...Read more of this...

Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat

by T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
 There's a whisper down the line at 11.39
When the Night Mail's ready to depart,
Saying "Skimble where is Skimble has he gone to hunt the thimble?
We must find him or the train can't start."
All the guards and all the porters and the stationmaster's daughters
They are searching high and low,
Saying "Skimble where is Skimble for unless he's very nimble
Then the Night...Read more of this...

Spirit whose Work is Done

by Walt Whitman
 SPIRIT whose work is done! spirit of dreadful hours! 
Ere, departing, fade from my eyes your forests of bayonets; 
Spirit of gloomiest fears and doubts, (yet onward ever unfaltering pressing;) 
Spirit of many a solemn day, and many a savage scene! Electric spirit! 
That with muttering voice, through the war now closed, like a tireless phantom flitted,
Rousing the land...Read more of this...

Psalm 30 part 2

by Isaac Watts
 v.6 
L. M.
Health, sickness, and recovery.

Firm was my health, my day was bright,
And I presumed 'twould ne'er be night;
Fondly I said within my heart,
"Pleasure and peace shall ne'er depart."

But I forgot thine arm was strong
Which made my mountain stand so long:
Soon as thy face began to hide,
My health was gone, my comforts died.

I cried aloud to thee, my God,
"What...Read more of this...

The Latest School

by G K Chesterton
 See the flying French depart
Like the bees of Bonaparte,
Swarming up with a most venomous vitality.
Over Baden and Bavaria,
And Brighton and Bulgaria,
Thus violating Belgian neutrality.

And the injured Prussian may
Not unreasonably say
"Why, it cannot be so small a nationality
Since Brixton and Batavia,
Bolivia and Belgravia,
Are bursting with the Belgian neutrality."

By pure Alliteration
You may trace this curious nation,
And respect this somewhat scattered Principality;
When...Read more of this...

El Poeta Leva El Ancla (Weighing The Anchor)

by Delmira Agustini
SpanishEl ancla de oro canta…la vela azul asciendeComo el ala de un sueño abierta al nuevo día.                              Partamos, musa mía!Ante lo prora alegre un bello mar se extiende.En el oriente claro como un cristal, esplendeEl fanal sonrosado de Aurora. FantasíaEstrena un raro traje lleno de pedreríapara vagar brillante por las olas.                              Ya tiendeLa vela azul a Eolo su oriflama de raso…El momento...Read more of this...

The Wanderers

by Robert Browning
 OVER the sea our galleys went, 
With cleaving prows in order brave 
To a speeding wind and a bounding wave-- 
 A gallant armament: 
Each bark built out of a forest-tree 
 Left leafy and rough as first it grew, 
And nail'd all over the gaping sides, 
Within and without, with black bull-hides, 
Seethed in fat and suppled in...Read more of this...

Depart we must! what boots it then to be,

by Omar Khayyam
Depart we must! what boots it then to be,
To walk in vain desires continually?
Nay, but if heaven vouchsafe no place of rest,
What power to cease our wanderings have we?...Read more of this...

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