Famous Disembodied Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Primeval my Love for the Woman I Love

by Walt Whitman
 PRIMEVAL my love for the woman I love, 
O bride! O wife! more resistless, more enduring than I can tell, the thought of you! 
Then separate, as disembodied, the purest born, 
The ethereal, the last athletic reality, my consolation, 
I ascend—I float in the regions of your love, O man,
O sharer of my roving life....Read more of this...

To Walt Whitman In America

by Algernon Charles Swinburne
 Send but a song oversea for us,
Heart of their hearts who are free,
Heart of their singer, to be for us
More than our singing can be;
Ours, in the tempest at error,
With no light but the twilight of terror;
Send us a song oversea!

Sweet-smelling of pine-leaves and grasses,
And blown as a tree through and through
With the winds of the keen mountain-passes,
And tender...Read more of this...

To a Canadian Aviator Who Died for his Country in France

by Duncan Campbell Scott
 Tossed like a falcon from the hunter's wrist,
A sweeping plunge, a sudden shattering noise,
And thou hast dared, with a long spiral twist,
The elastic stairway to the rising sun.
Peril below thee and above, peril
Within thy car; but peril cannot daunt
Thy peerless heart: gathering wing and poise,
Thy plane transfigured, and thy motor-chant
Subduéd to a whisper -- then a silence, --
And thou...Read more of this...

Years End

by Marilyn Hacker
 for Audre Lorde and Sonny Wainwright

Twice in my quickly disappearing forties
someone called while someone I loved and I were
making love to tell me another woman had died of cancer.

Seven years apart, and two different lovers:
underneath the numbers, how lives are braided,
how those women's death and lives, lived and died, were
interleaved also.

Does lip touch on lip a memento mori?
Does the...Read more of this...

Fast Anchor'd Eternal O Love

by Walt Whitman
 FAST-ANCHOR’D, eternal, O love! O woman I love! 
O bride! O wife! more resistless than I can tell, the thought of you! 
—Then separate, as disembodied, or another born, 
Ethereal, the last athletic reality, my consolation; 
I ascend—I float in the regions of your love, O man,
O sharer of my roving life....Read more of this...

Gustav Richter

by Edgar Lee Masters
 After a long day of work in my hot-houses
Sleep was sweet, but if you sleep on your left side
Your dreams may be abruptly ended.
I was among my flowers where some one
Seemed to be raising them on trial,
As if after-while to be transplanted
To a larger garden of freer air.
And I was disembodied vision
Amid a light, as it were the sun
Had...Read more of this...

Armand Barbes

by Algernon Charles Swinburne
 Fire out of heaven, a flower of perfect fire,
That where the roots of life are had its root
And where the fruits of time are brought forth fruit;
A faith made flesh, a visible desire,
That heard the yet unbreathing years respire
And speech break forth of centuries that sit mute
Beyond all feebler footprint of pursuit;
That touched the highest of hope, and went...Read more of this...

The Eagle and the Mole

by Elinor Wylie
 Avoid the reeking herd, 
Shun the polluted flock, 
Live like that stoic bird, 
The eagle of the rock.

The huddled warmth of crowds 
Begets and fosters hate; 
He keeps above the clouds 
His cliff inviolate.

When flocks are folded warm, 
And herds to shelter run, 
He sails above the storm, 
He stares into the sun. 

If in the eagle's track 
Your...Read more of this...

Symphonic Studies (After Schumann)

by Emma Lazarus
 Prelude 

Blue storm-clouds in hot heavens of mid-July 
Hung heavy, brooding over land and sea: 
Our hearts, a-tremble, throbbed in harmony 
With the wild, restless tone of air and sky. 
Shall we not call im Prospero who held 
In his enchanted hands the fateful key 
Of that tempestuous hour's mystery, 
And with controlling wand our spirits spelled, 
With him...Read more of this...

In Sark

by Algernon Charles Swinburne
 Abreast and ahead of the sea is a crag's front cloven asunder
With strong sea-breach and with wasting of winds whence terror is
shed
As a shadow of death from the wings of the darkness on waters that
thunder
Abreast and ahead.

At its edge is a sepulchre hollowed and hewn for a lone man's bed,
Propped open with rock and agape on the sky and...Read more of this...

Europe the 72d and 73d years of These States

by Walt Whitman
 1
SUDDENLY, out of its stale and drowsy lair, the lair of slaves, 
Like lightning it le’pt forth, half startled at itself, 
Its feet upon the ashes and the rags—its hands tight to the throats of kings. 

O hope and faith! 
O aching close of exiled patriots’ lives!
O many a sicken’d heart! 
Turn back unto this day, and make yourselves...Read more of this...

So Long

by Walt Whitman
 1
TO conclude—I announce what comes after me; 
I announce mightier offspring, orators, days, and then, for the present, depart. 

I remember I said, before my leaves sprang at all, 
I would raise my voice jocund and strong, with reference to consummations. 

When America does what was promis’d,
When there are plentiful athletic bards, inland and seaboard, 
When through These States...Read more of this...

The Future Life

by William Cullen Bryant
HOW shall I know thee in the sphere which keeps 
The disembodied spirits of the dead  
When all of thee that time could wither sleeps 
And perishes among the dust we tread? 

For I shall feel the sting of ceaseless pain 5 
If there I meet thy gentle presence not; 
Nor hear the voice I love nor read again...Read more of this...

Think not I dread from out the world to hie,

by Omar Khayyam
Think not I dread from out the world to hie,
And see my disembodied spirit fly;
I tremble not at death, for death is true,
'Tis my ill life that makes me fear to die!...Read more of this...

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