Famous Discovering Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Upon Her Eyes

by Robert Herrick
 Clear are her eyes,
Like purest skies;
Discovering from thence
A baby there
That turns each sphere,
Like an Intelligence....Read more of this...

The Country Of Marriage

by Wendell Berry
 I.

I dream of you walking at night along the streams
of the country of my birth, warm blooms and the nightsongs
of birds opening around you as you walk.
You are holding in your body the dark seed of my sleep.

II.

This comes after silence. Was it something I said
that bound me to you, some mere promise
or, worse, the fear of loneliness and...Read more of this...

All is Truth

by Walt Whitman
 O ME, man of slack faith so long! 
Standing aloof—denying portions so long; 
Only aware to-day of compact, all-diffused truth; 
Discovering to-day there is no lie, or form of lie, and can be none, but grows as
 inevitably
 upon
 itself as the truth does upon itself, 
Or as any law of the earth, or any natural production of the...Read more of this...

The Absence

by Paul Eluard
 I speak to you across cities
I speak to you across plains 

My mouth is upon your pillow 

Both faces of the walls come meeting
My voice discovering you 

I speak to you of eternity 

O cities memories of cities
Cities wrapped in our desires
Cities come early cities come lately
Cities strong and cities secret
Plundered of their master's builders
All their thinkers all their...Read more of this...

To Be Blind

by A S J Tessimond
 Is it sounds
 converging,
Sounds
 nearing,
Infringement,
 impingement,
Impact,
 contact
With surfaces of the sounds
Or surfaces without the sounds:
Diagrams,
 skeletal,
 strange?

Is it winds
 curling round invisible corners?
Polyphony of perfumes?
Antennae discovering an axis,
 erecting the architecture of a world?

Is it
 orchestration of the finger-tips,
 graph of a fugue:
Scaffold for colours:
 colour itself being god?...Read more of this...

the shakes

by Rg Gregory
 now pay attention
(said the teacher)
and look up here

the children looked up

this is william shakespeare

four centuries up
on a pedestal
was shakespeare's head

he was what we call
a great man

the children got sore necks
looking up
and some began to look down

no no
you mustn't look down
(said the teacher)
apart from winston churchill
shakespeare was the greatest
englishman who ever lived

the children's eyes
drained to their feet
and their minds
played around...Read more of this...

Elegy XVI: On His Mistress

by John Donne
 By our first strange and fatal interview,
By all desires which thereof did ensue,
By our long starving hopes, by that remorse
Which my words' masculine persuasive force
Begot in thee, and by the memory
Of hurts, which spies and rivals threatened me,
I calmly beg: but by thy father's wrath,
By all pains, which want and divorcement hath,
I conjure thee, and all the oaths which...Read more of this...

To A Sad Daughter

by Michael Ondaatje
 All night long the hockey pictures
gaze down at you
sleeping in your tracksuit.
Belligerent goalies are your ideal.
Threats of being traded
cuts and wounds
--all this pleases you.
O my god! you say at breakfast
reading the sports page over the Alpen
as another player breaks his ankle
or assaults the coach.

When I thought of daughters
I wasn't expecting this
but I like this more.
I like all your faults
even...Read more of this...

Thy words are torture to me, that scarce grieve thee--

by Fernando Pessoa
Thy words are torture to me, that scarce grieve thee--

That entire death shall null my entire thought;

And I feel torture, not that I believe thee,

But that I cannot disbelieve thee not.

Shall that of me that now contains the stars

Be by the very contained stars survived?

Thus were Fate all unjust. Yet what truth bars

An all unjust Fate's truth from being believed?

Conjecture...Read more of this...

To Leonide Massine in ‘Cleopatra'

by Siegfried Sassoon
 O beauty doomed and perfect for an hour, 
Leaping along the verge of death and night, 
You show me dauntless Youth that went to fight 
Four long years past, discovering pride and power. 

You die but in our dreams, who watch you fall
Knowing that to-morrow you will dance again. 
But not to ebbing music were they slain 
Who sleep...Read more of this...

The Summing Up

by Robert William Service
 When you have sailed the seven seas
And looped the ends of earth,
You'll long at last for slippered ease
Beside a bonny hearth;
A cosy cottage in the sun,
A pleasant page to read -
You'll find when all is said and done,
That's nearly all you need. 

You may have pow-wowed with the Great
And played a potent part
In serious affairs of state,
But now with...Read more of this...

California Plush

by Frank Bidart
 The only thing I miss about Los Angeles

is the Hollywood Freeway at midnight, windows down and
radio blaring
bearing right into the center of the city, the Capitol Tower
on the right, and beyond it, Hollywood Boulevard
blazing

--pimps, surplus stores, footprints of the stars

--descending through the city
 fast as the law would allow

through the lights, then rising to the stack
out of the city
to...Read more of this...

Animals Are Passing From Our Lives

by Philip Levine
 It's wonderful how I jog
on four honed-down ivory toes
my massive buttocks slipping
like oiled parts with each light step.

I'm to market. I can smell
the sour, grooved block, I can smell
the blade that opens the hole
and the pudgy white fingers

that shake out the intestines
like a hankie. In my dreams 
the snouts drool on the marble,
suffering children, suffering flies,

suffering the consumers
who won't...Read more of this...

30 Cents Two Transfers Love

by Richard Brautigan
 Thinking hard about you 
I got on the bus 
and paid 30 cents car fare 
and asked the driver for two transfers 
before discovering 
that I was 
alone....Read more of this...

On the Portrait of Two Beautiful Young People

by Gerard Manley Hopkins
 A Brother and Sister


O I admire and sorrow! The heart’s eye grieves 
Discovering you, dark tramplers, tyrant years. 
A juice rides rich through bluebells, in vine leaves, 
And beauty’s dearest veriest vein is tears. 

Happy the father, mother of these! Too fast:
Not that, but thus far, all with frailty, blest 
In one fair fall; but, for time’s aftercast, 
Creatures...Read more of this...

Atavism

by Elinor Wylie
 1
Sometimes in the open you look up
where birds go by, or just nothing,
and wait. A dim feeling comes 
you were like this once, there was air,
and quiet; it was by a lake, or
maybe a river you were alert
as an otter and were suddenly born
like the evening star into wide
still worlds like this one you have found
again, for a moment,...Read more of this...

Aubade

by Barry Tebb
 Dawn’s my Mr Right, already

Cocks have crowed, birds flown from nests,

The neon lights of Leeds last night still

Sovereign in my sights, limousines and

Pink baloons, tee shirts with green stencilled

Dates of wedding days to come, the worn dance floor,

Jingling arcades where chrome fendered fruit machines

Rest on plush carpets like the ghosts of fifties Chevies,

Dreams for sale on boulevards where forget-me-nots

Are...Read more of this...

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