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Famous Discovery Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Stojanovic, Dejan
...dden place 
Longing freely to explore 
Break obstacles and recognize 
Invisible sparks emanating 
From the deserved discovery 
Of nothing between us 
Shining longing only 
Wakening stars in the Garden 
Witnessing the birth of new landscapes, 
Future cities and temples 
Hearing new stories, falling 
From the fountains of the secret art 
All old sounds and colors reviving 
And you, blindingly bright, 
Into new senses are melting me 
And into the core I grow 
Wit...Read more of this...



by Dickinson, Emily
...However first it be,
This instant be suspended
Above Mortality --

Significance that each has lived
The other to detect
Discovery not God himself
Could now annihilate

Eternity, Presumption
The instant I perceive
That you, who were Existence
Yourself forgot to live --

The "Life that is" will then have been
A thing I never knew --
As Paradise fictitious
Until the Realm of you --

The "Life that is to be," to me,
A Residence too plain
Unless in my Redeemer's Face
I recognize y...Read more of this...

by Bidart, Frank
..., or
 need for a past.



The need for the past

is so much at the center of my life
I write this poem to record my discovery of it,
my reconciliation.

 It was in Bishop, the room was done
in California plush: we had gone into the coffee shop, were told
you could only get a steak in the bar:
 I hesitated,
not wanting to be an occasion of temptation for my father

but he wanted to, so we entered

a dark room, with amber water glasses, walnut
tables, captain's chairs,
...Read more of this...

by Brautigan, Richard
...The petals of the vagina unfold
like Christofer Columbus
taking off his shoes.

Is there anything more beautiful
than the bow of a ship
touching a new world?...Read more of this...

by Dickinson, Emily
...Finding is the first Act
The second, loss,
Third, Expedition for
The "Golden Fleece"

Fourth, no Discovery --
Fifth, no Crew --
Finally, no Golden Fleece --
Jason -- sham -- too....Read more of this...



by Dickinson, Emily
...How far is it to Heaven?
As far as Death this way --
Of River or of Ridge beyond
Was no discovery.

How far is it to Hell?
As far as Death this way --
How far left hand the Sepulchre
Defies Topography....Read more of this...

by Stevens, Wallace
...tumult of integrations out of the sky, 

And what we think, a breathing like the wind, 
A moving part of a motion, a discovery 
Part of a discovery, a change part of a change, 

A sharing of color and being part of it. 
The afternoon is visibly a source, 
Too wide, too irised, to be more than calm, 

Too much like thinking to be less than thought, 
Obscurest parent, obscurest patriarch, 
A daily majesty of meditation, 

That comes and goes in silences of its...Read more of this...

by Frost, Robert
...und him with our questing,
And holds us off unnecessarily,
As if he didn't know what little thing
Might lead us on to a discovery.
It was as personal as be could be
About the way he saw it was with you
To say your mother, bad she lived, would be
As far again as from being born to bearing."

 "Just one look more with what you say in mind,
And I give up"; which last look came to nothing.
But though they now gave up the search forever,
They clung to what one had seen...Read more of this...

by Jarrell, Randall
...br>
It looks at me
From the rear-view mirror, with the eyes I hate,
The smile I hate. Its plain, lined look
Of gray discovery
Repeats to me: "You're old." That's all, I'm old.

And yet I'm afraid, as I was at the funeral
I went to yesterday.
My friend's cold made-up face, granite among its flowers,
Her undressed, operated-on, dressed body
Were my face and body.
As I think of her and I hear her telling me

How young I seem; I am exceptional;
I think of all ...Read more of this...

by Drinkwater, John
...pass
Minute by minute till the last is done.
But not the new birds singing in the brake,
And not the buds of our discovery,
The deeper blue, the wilder green, the ache
For beauty that we shadow as we see,
Made heaven, but we, as love's occasion brings,
Took these, and made them Paradisal things.
VIII 	The lilacs offer beauty to the sun,
Throbbing with wonder as eternally
For sad and happy lovers they have done
With the first bloom of summer in the sky;
Yet...Read more of this...

by Rich, Adrienne
...lves.
The knowledge breeds reserve. We walk on tiptoe,
Demanding more than we know how to render.
Two-edged discovery hunts us finally down;
The human act will make us real again,
And then perhaps we come to know each other.

Let us return to imperfection's school.
No longer wandering after Plato's ghost,
Seeking the garden where all fruit is flawless,
We must at last renounce that ultimate blue
And take a walk in other kinds of weather.
The sourest ap...Read more of this...

by Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...left out 
Of Tasker Norcross, who, for lack of it, 
Saw the same sun go down year after year;
All which at last was my discovery. 
And only mine, so far as evidence 
Enlightens one more darkness. You have known 
All round you, all your days, men who are nothing— 
Nothing, I mean, so far as time tells yet
Of any other need it has of them 
Than to make sextons hardy—but no less 
Are to themselves incalculably something, 
And therefore to be cherished. God, you see,...Read more of this...

by Jeffers, Robinson
...the depths; let the long pale tendrils
Spend all to discover the sky, now nothing is good
But only the steel mirrors of discovery . . .
And the beautiful enormous dawns of time, after we perish.

V

Mourning the broken balance, the hopeless prostration of the earth
Under men's hands and their minds,
The beautiful places killed like rabbits to make a city,
The spreading fungus, the slime-threads
And spores; my own coast's obscene future: I remember the farther
...Read more of this...

by Stevens, Wallace
...ore closely the essential prose 
275 As being, in a world so falsified, 
276 The one integrity for him, the one 
277 Discovery still possible to make, 
278 To which all poems were incident, unless 
279 That prose should wear a poem's guise at last. 

IV 

The Idea of a Colony 

280 Nota: his soil is man's intelligence. 
281 That's better. That's worth crossing seas to find. 
282 Crispin in one laconic phrase laid bare 
283 His cloudy drift and pl...Read more of this...

by Jeffers, Robinson
...y my own thirty-year-old decision:
 who drinks the wine
Should take the dregs; even in the bitter lees and sediment
New discovery may lie. The deer in that beautiful place lay down their
 bones: I must wear mine....Read more of this...

by Blake, William
...The Morning blush?d fiery red: 
Mary was found in adulterous bed; 
Earth groan’d beneath, and Heaven above 
Trembled at discovery of Love. 
Jesus was sitting in Moses’ chair. 
They brought the trembling woman there. 
Moses commands she be ston’d to death. 
What was the sound of Jesus’ breath? 
He laid His hand on Moses’ law; 
The ancient Heavens, in silent awe, 
Writ with curses from pole to pole, 
All away began to roll. 
The Earth trembling and naked lay...Read more of this...

by Merwin, W S
...a heart,
The sea pulsing as a heart,
The sky vaulted as a heart,
Where I know the light will shatter like a cry
Above a discovery:
"Emptiness.
Emptiness! Look!"
Look. This is the morning....Read more of this...

by Jeffers, Robinson
...d, free and out-doors.
But the vast hungry spirit of the time
Cries to his chosen that there is nothing good
Except discovery, experiment and experience and discovery: To look
 truth in the eyes,
To strip truth naked, let our dogs do our living for us
But man discover.
 It is a fine ambition,
But the wrong tools. Science and mathematics
Run parallel to reality, they symbolize it, they squint at it,
They never touch it: consider what an explosion
Would rock the bon...Read more of this...

by McGonagall, William Topaz
...ses he discovered, one day,
What is now called the art of Lithography. 

So Alois plodded on making known his great discovery,
Until he obtained the notice of the Royal Academy,
Besides, he obtained a gold Medal, and what was more dear to his heart,
He lived to see the wide extension of his art. 

And when life's prospects may at times appear dreary to ye,
Remember Alois Senefelder, the discoverer of Lithography,
How God saved him from drowning himself in adversity,
A...Read more of this...

by Dickinson, Emily
...periment
Appointed unto Men --

How adequate unto itself
Its properties shall be
Itself unto itself and none
Shall make discovery.

Adventure most unto itself
The Soul condemned to be --
Attended by a single Hound
Its own identity....Read more of this...

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