Get Your Premium Membership

Famous Dives Poems by Famous Poets

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

See also:

by Moore, Thomas
...

But vain her wish, her weeping vain -- 
As Time too well hath taught her -- 
Each year the Fiend returns again, 
And dives into that water; 
And brings, triumphant, from beneath 
His shafts of desolation, 
And sends them, wing'd with worse than death, 
Through all her maddening nation. 

Alas for her who sits and mourns, 
Even now, beside that river -- 
Unwearied still the Fiend returns, 
And stored is still his quiver. 
"When will this end, ye Powers of Good?" 
Sh...Read more of this...



by Thomas, Dylan
...nd, land, land, nothing remains
Of the pacing, famous sea but its speech,
And into its talkative seven tombs
The anchor dives through the floors of a church.

Good-bye, good luck, struck the sun and the moon,
To the fisherman lost on the land.
He stands alone in the door of his home,
With his long-legged heart in his hand....Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...The mule-skinner was Bill Jerome, the passengers were three;
Two tinhorns from the dives of Nome, and Father Tim McGee.
And as for sunny Southland bound, through weary woods they sped,
The solitude that ringed them round was silent as the dead.

Then when the trail crooked crazily, the frost-rimed horses reared,
And from behind a fallen tree a grim galoot appeared;
He wore a parki white as snow, a mask as black as soot,
And careles...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Robert
...n's choir
I hear him, Stupor Mundi, and the mud
Flies from his hunching wings and beak--my heart,
he blue kingfisher dives on you in fire.
...Read more of this...

by Hope, Alec Derwent (A D)
...ertiser, him I mean 
And his smooth hatchet-man, the Technocrat. 
Them let my malediction single out, 
These modern Dives with their talking screen 
Who lick the sores of Lazarus and grow fat, 

Licensed to pimp, solicit and procure 
Here in my house, to foul my feast, to bawl 
Their wares while I am talking with my friend, 
To pour into my ears a public sewer 
Of all the Strumpet Muses sell and all 
That prostituted science has to vend. 

In this great Sodom of a wor...Read more of this...



by Keats, John
...me by the hand: Ah! 'twas too much;
Methought I fainted at the charmed touch,
Yet held my recollection, even as one
Who dives three fathoms where the waters run
Gurgling in beds of coral: for anon,
I felt upmounted in that region
Where falling stars dart their artillery forth,
And eagles struggle with the buffeting north
That balances the heavy meteor-stone;--
Felt too, I was not fearful, nor alone,
But lapp'd and lull'd along the dangerous sky.
Soon, as it seem'd, we lef...Read more of this...

by Keats, John
...tinctness; storm,
And calm, and whispering, and hideous roar
Were emblem'd in the woof; with every shape
That skims, or dives, or sleeps, 'twixt cape and cape.
The gulphing whale was like a dot in the spell,
Yet look upon it, and 'twould size and swell
To its huge self; and the minutest fish
Would pass the very hardest gazer's wish,
And show his little eye's anatomy.
Then there was pictur'd the regality
Of Neptune; and the sea nymphs round his state,
In beauteous vass...Read more of this...

by Emerson, Ralph Waldo
...br> 

'Tis a brave master; 
Let it have scope: 
Follow it utterly  
Hope beyond hope: 10 
High and more high 
It dives into noon  
With wing unspent  
Untold intent; 
But it is a god 15 
Knows its own path  
And the outlets of the sky. 

It was never for the mean; 
It requireth courage stout  
Souls above doubt 20 
Valour unbending: 
Such 'twill reward;¡ª 
They shall return 
More than they were  
And ever ascending. 25 

Leave all for love; 
Ye...Read more of this...

by Mueller, Lisel
...e trapped, enduring whimper,
and the fly, arrested mid-plunge
above the strawberry pie
fulfills its abiding mission
and dives into the sweet, red glaze.

As a child I had a book
with a picture of that scene.
I was too young to notice
how fear persists, and how
the anger that causes fear persists,
that its trajectory can't be changed
or broken, only interrupted.
My attention was on the fly:
that this slight body
with its transparent wings
and life-span of one human...Read more of this...

by Wilbur, Richard
...purest ray, 
Bright thoughts uncut by men: 
Strange that you need but speak them, Thomas Gray, 
And the mind skips and dives beyond its ken, 

Finding at once the wild supposed bloom, 
Or in the imagined cave 
Some pulse of crystal staving off the gloom
As covertly as phosphorus in a grave.

Void notions proper to a buried head! 
Beneath these tombstones here 
Unseenness fills the sockets of the dead, 
Whatever to their souls may now appear; 

And who but those unfathoma...Read more of this...

by Matthews, William
...frail bow
pokes blindly out over the falls' lip
a little and a little more and then
too much, and then the boat's nose dives and butt

flips up so that the boat points doomily
down and the screams of the soon-to-be-dead
last longer by echo than the screamers do.
Let's go to the videotape, the news-
caster intones, and the control room does,
and the boat explodes again and again....Read more of this...

by Auden, Wystan Hugh (W H)
...I sit in one of the divesOn Fifty-second StreetUncertain and afraidAs the clever hopes expireOf a low dishonest decade:Waves of anger and fearCirculate over the brightAnd darkened lands of the earth,Obsessing our private lives;The unmentionable odour of deathOffends the September night. Accurate scholarship canUnearth the whole of...Read more of this...

by Sitwell, Dame Edith
...feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross.
Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us---
On Dives and on Lazarus:
Under the Rain the sore and the gold are as one.

Still falls the Rain---
Still falls the Blood from the Starved Man's wounded Side:
He bears in His Heart all wounds,---those of the light that died,
The last faint spark
In the self-murdered heart, the wounds of the sad uncomprehending dark,
The wounds of the baited bear---
The blind...Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...never they mold their days and nights
as when for twenty-five days and nights you molded mine
and planted the seed that dives into my God
and will do so forever
no matter how often I sweep the floor....Read more of this...

by Hope, Alec Derwent (A D)
...ertiser, him I mean 
And his smooth hatchet-man, the Technocrat. 
Them let my malediction single out, 
These modern Dives with their talking screen 
Who lick the sores of Lazarus and grow fat, 

Licensed to pimp, solicit and procure 
Here in my house, to foul my feast, to bawl 
Their wares while I am talking with my friend, 
To pour into my ears a public sewer 
Of all the Strumpet Muses sell and all 
That prostituted science has to vend. 

In this great Sodom of a wor...Read more of this...

by Browning, Robert
...ick clap of the stork's bill,
``For the air is still, and the water still,
``When the blue breast of the dipping coot
``Dives under, and all is mute.
``So, at the last shall come old age,
``Decrepit as befits that stage;
``How else wouldst thou retire apart
``With the hoarded memories of thy heart,
``And gather all to the very least
``Of the fragments of life's earlier feast,
``Let fall through eagerness to find
``The crowning dainties yet behind?
``Ponder on the entire p...Read more of this...

by Collins, Billy
...head,
slipping out to where the sun rakes the water
and filters through the trees that crowd the shore.

And now he dives,
disappears below the surface,
and while I wait for him to pop up,
I picture him flying underwater with his strange wings,

as I picture you, my tiny mother,
who disappeared last year,
flying somewhere with your strange wings,
your wide eyes, and your heavy wet dress,
kicking deeper down into a lake
with no end or name, some boundless province of water...Read more of this...

by Kipling, Rudyard
...The Word came down to Dives in Torment where he lay:
"Our World is full of wickedness, My Children maim and slay,
 "And the Saint and Seer and Prophet
 "Can make no better of it
"Than to sanctify and prophesy and pray.

"Rise up, rise up, thou Dives, and take again thy gold,
"And thy women and thy housen as they were to thee of old.
 "It may be grace hath found thee
 "In ...Read more of this...

by Kipling, Rudyard
...nd ship
And lie for a rotting contraband on Vladivostock slip.)
She turned and dived in the sea-smother as a rabbit dives in the whins,
And the Northern Light sent up her boats to steal the stolen skins.
They had not brought a load to side or slid their hatches clear,
When they were aware of a sloop-of-war, ghost-white and very near.
Her flag she showed, and her guns she showed -- three of them, black, abeam,
And a funnel white with the crusted salt, but never a s...Read more of this...

by Chaucer, Geoffrey
...and drink, and in their foul delight.
We have this worlde's lust* all in despight** * pleasure **contempt
Lazar and Dives lived diversely,
And diverse guerdon* hadde they thereby. *reward
Whoso will pray, he must fast and be clean,
And fat his soul, and keep his body lean
We fare as saith th' apostle; cloth* and food *clothing
Suffice us, although they be not full good.
The cleanness and the fasting of us freres
Maketh that Christ accepteth our prayeres.
Lo, M...Read more of this...

Dont forget to view our wonderful member Dives poems.


Book: Shattered Sighs