Famous Disused Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Coldness in Love

by D. H. Lawrence
And you remember, in the afternoon
The sea and the sky went grey, as if there had sunk
A flocculent dust on the floor of the world: the festoon
Of the sky sagged dusty as spider cloth,
And coldness clogged the sea, till it ceased to croon.

A dank, sickening scent came up from the grime
Of weed that blackened the shore, so that I recoiled
Feeling...Read more of this...

Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse

by Matthew Arnold
 Through Alpine meadows soft-suffused
With rain, where thick the crocus blows,
Past the dark forges long disused,
The mule-track from Saint Laurent goes.
The bridge is cross'd, and slow we ride,
Through forest, up the mountain-side. 

The autumnal evening darkens round,
The wind is up, and drives the rain;
While, hark! far down, with strangled sound
Doth the Dead Guier's stream complain,
Where that wet smoke, among the...Read more of this...

Cape Breton

by Elizabeth Bishop
 Out on the high "bird islands," Ciboux and Hertford, 
the razorbill auks and the silly-looking puffins all stand 
with their backs to the mainland 
in solemn, uneven lines along the cliff's brown grass-frayed edge, 
while the few sheep pastured there go "Baaa, baaa." 
(Sometimes, frightened by aeroplanes, they stampede 
and fall over into the sea or onto the rocks.)...Read more of this...

In a Disused Graveyard

by Robert Frost
 The living come with grassy tread
To read the gravestones on the hill;
The graveyard draws the living still,
But never anymore the dead.
The verses in it say and say:
"The ones who living come today
To read the stones and go away
Tomorrow dead will come to stay."
So sure of death the marbles rhyme,
Yet can't help marking all the time
How no one dead will...Read more of this...

I Now O Friend Whom Noiselessly The Snows

by Robert Louis Stevenson
 I NOW, O friend, whom noiselessly the snows
Settle around, and whose small chamber grows
Dusk as the sloping window takes its load:

* * * * *

The kindly hill, as to complete our hap,
Has ta'en us in the shelter of her lap;
Well sheltered in our slender grove of trees
And ring of walls, we sit between her knees;
A disused quarry, paved with...Read more of this...

Ghost House

by Robert Frost
 I DWELL in a lonely house I know 
That vanished many a summer ago, 
And left no trace but the cellar walls, 
And a cellar in which the daylight falls, 
And the purple-stemmed wild raspberries grow. 

O'er ruined fences the grape-vines shield 
The woods come back to the mowing field; 
The orchard tree has grown one copse 
Of new...Read more of this...

To Mary

by William Cowper
 The twentieth year is well nigh past
Since first our sky was overcast;— 
Ah would that this might be the last!
My Mary!

Thy spirits have a fainter flow,
I see thee daily weaker grow;— 
'Twas my distress that brought thee low,
My Mary!

Thy needles, once a shining store,
For my sake restless heretofore,
Now rust disused, and shine no more,
My Mary!

For though thou gladly wouldst...Read more of this...

Socrates Ghost Must Haunt Me Now

by Delmore Schwartz
 Socrates ghost must haunt me now,
Notorious death has let him go,
He comes to me with a clumsy bow,
Saying in his disused voice,
That I do not know I do not know,
The mechanical whims of appetite
Are all that I have of conscious choice,
The butterfly caged in eclectic light
Is my only day in the world's great night,
Love is not love, it is...Read more of this...

The Iron Bridge

by Billy Collins
 I am standing on a disused iron bridge
that was erected in 1902,
according to the iron plaque bolted into a beam,
the year my mother turned one.
Imagine--a mother in her infancy,
and she was a Canadian infant at that,
one of the great infants of the province of Ontario.

But here I am leaning on the rusted railing
looking at the water below,
which is flat...Read more of this...

Elegy V: His Picture

by John Donne
 Here take my picture; though I bid farewell,
Thine, in my heart, where my soul dwells, shall dwell.
'Tis like me now, but I dead, 'twill be more
When we are shadows both than 'twas before.
When weather-beaten I come back, my hand
Perhaps with rude oars torn, or sunbeams tanned,
My face and breast of haircloth, and my head
With cares rash sudden storms being...Read more of this...

Maiden Name

by Philip Larkin
 Marrying left yor maiden name disused. 
Its five light sounds no longer mean your face, 
Your voice, and all your variants of grace; 
For since you were so thankfully confused 
By law with someone else, you cannot be 
Semantically the same as that young beauty: 
It was of her that these two words were used. 

Now it's a phrase...Read more of this...

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