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Famous Drear Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...l joints
Swayed with the undulations of the tide.
A restless impulse urged him to embark
And meet lone Death on the drear ocean's waste;
For well he knew that mighty Shadow loves
The slimy caverns of the populous deep.

The day was fair and sunny; sea and sky
Drank its inspiring radiance, and the wind
Swept strongly from the shore, blackening the waves. 
Following his eager soul, the wanderer
Leaped in the boat; he spread his cloak aloft
On the bare mast, and took...Read more of this...



by Milton, John
...g to attend their father's state,
And new-intrusted sceptre. But their way
Lies through the perplexed paths of this drear wood,
The nodding horror of whose shady brows
Threats the forlorn and wandering passenger;
And here their tender age might suffer peril,
But that, by quick command from sovran Jove,
I was despatched for their defence and guard:
And listen why; for I will tell you now
What never yet was heard in tale or song,
From old or modern bard, in hall or bower.Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...arless fare.

"And I shall hear what none shall hear -
The hardy robin piping clear,
The Storm King gallop dark and drear
Across the sky;
And I shall know what none shall know -
The silent kisses of the snow,
The Christmas candles' silver glow,
Before I die.

"Then from your frost-gemmed window pane
One morning you will look in vain,
My smile of delicate disdain
No more to see;
But though I pass before my time,
And perish in the grale and grime,
Maybe you'll have a li...Read more of this...

by Arnold, Matthew
...I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of stru...Read more of this...

by Keats, John
...adryads dress
Their ruffled locks where meeting hazels darken;
And through whole solemn hours dost sit, and hearken
The dreary melody of bedded reeds--
In desolate places, where dank moisture breeds
The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth;
Bethinking thee, how melancholy loth
Thou wast to lose fair Syrinx--do thou now,
By thy love's milky brow!
By all the trembling mazes that she ran,
Hear us, great Pan!

 "O thou, for whose soul-soothing quiet, turtles
Passion their voices co...Read more of this...



by Keats, John
....--
Into these regions came I following him,
Sick hearted, weary--so I took a whim
To stray away into these forests drear
 Alone, without a peer:
And I have told thee all thou mayest hear.

 "Young stranger!
 I've been a ranger
In search of pleasure throughout every clime:
 Alas! 'tis not for me!
 Bewitch'd I sure must be,
To lose in grieving all my maiden prime.

 "Come then, Sorrow!
 Sweetest Sorrow!
Like an own babe I nurse thee on my breast:
 I thought to leav...Read more of this...

by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...tenantless house of her father.
Smouldered the fire on the hearth, on the board was the supper untasted,
Empty and drear was each room, and haunted with phantoms of terror.
Sadly echoed her step on the stair and the floor of her chamber.
In the dead of the night she heard the disconsolate rain fall
Loud on the withered leaves of the sycamore-tree by the window.
Keenly the lightning flashed; and the voice of the echoing thunder
Told her that God was in heaven,...Read more of this...

by Hugo, Victor
...by hour. 
 
 As to the sword rust is, so lichens are 
 To towering citadel with which they war. 
 Alas! for Corbus—dreary, desolate, 
 And yet its woes the winters mitigate. 
 It rears itself among convulsive throes 
 That shake its ruins when the tempest blows. 
 Winter, the savage warrior, pleases well, 
 With its storm clouds, the mighty citadel,— 
 Restoring it to life. The lightning flash 
 Strikes like a thief and flies; the winds that crash 
 Sound like a ...Read more of this...

by Ginsberg, Allen
...children brought 
 them down shuddering mouth-wracked and 
 battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance 
 in the drear light of Zoo, 
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's 
 floated out and sat through the stale beer after 
 noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack 
 of doom on the hydrogen jukebox, 
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to 
 pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook- 
 lyn Bridge, 
lost battalion of platonic conve...Read more of this...

by Wilde, Oscar
...life free and inviolate,
From our sad lips another song is rung,
By our own hands our heads are desecrate,
Wanderers in drear exile, and dispossessed
Of what should be our own, we can but feed on wild unrest.

Somehow the grace, the bloom of things has flown,
And of all men we are most wretched who
Must live each other's lives and not our own
For very pity's sake and then undo
All that we lived for - it was otherwise
When soul and body seemed to blend in mystic symphonies...Read more of this...

by Keats, John
...Still sat, still snuff'd the incense, teeming up
From man to the sun's God: yet unsecure:
For as among us mortals omens drear
Fright and perplex, so also shuddered he---
Not at dog's howl, or gloom-bird's hated screech,
Or the familiar visiting of one
Upon the first toll of his passing-bell,
Or prophesyings of the midnight lamp;
But horrors, portion'd to a giant nerve,
Oft made Hyperion ache. His palace bright,
Bastion'd with pyramids of glowing gold,
And touch'd with sha...Read more of this...

by Alighieri, Dante
...nswered, "These be they 
 That praiseless lived and blameless. Now the scorn 
 Of Height and Depth alike, abortions drear; 
 Cast with those abject angels whose delay 
 To join rebellion, or their Lord defend, 
 Waiting their proved advantage, flung them here. - 
 Chased forth from Heaven, lest else its beauties end 
 The pure perfection of their stainless claim, 
 Out-herded from the shining gate they came, 
 Where the deep hells refused them, lest the lost 
 Boast s...Read more of this...

by Milton, John
...
With complicated monsters head and tail, 
Scorpion, and Asp, and Amphisbaena dire, 
Cerastes horned, Hydrus, and Elops drear, 
And Dipsas; (not so thick swarmed once the soil 
Bedropt with blood of Gorgon, or the isle 
Ophiusa,) but still greatest he the midst, 
Now Dragon grown, larger than whom the sun 
Ingendered in the Pythian vale or slime, 
Huge Python, and his power no less he seemed 
Above the rest still to retain; they all 
Him followed, issuing forth to the open fi...Read more of this...

by Wilde, Oscar
...ve wandered far
From the wave-circled islands of my home;
Have seen the gloomy mystery of the Dome
Rise slowly from the drear Campagna's way,
Clothed in the royal purple of the day:
I from the city of the violet crown
Have watched the sun by Corinth's hill go down,
And marked the 'myriad laughter' of the sea
From starlit hills of flower-starred Arcady;
Yet back to thee returns my perfect love,
As to its forest-nest the evening dove.

O poet's city! one who scarce has seen...Read more of this...

by Schiller, Friedrich von
...ished one.
With drooping wing she hovers here
Around her darling, near the senses' land,
And on his prison-walls so drear
Elysium paints with fond deceptive hand.

While soft humanity still lay at rest,
Within her tender arms extended,
No flame was stirred by bigots' murderous zest,
No guiltless blood on high ascended.
The heart that she in gentle fetters binds,
Views duty's slavish escort scornfully;
Her path of light, though fairer far it winds,
Sinks in the sun...Read more of this...

by Seeger, Alan
...at grove and field
And sunshine and green Earth and tender arms could yield---

A nympholept, through pleasant days and drear
Seeking his faultless adolescent dream,
A pilgrim down the paths that disappear
In mist and rainbows on the world's extreme,
A helpless voyager who all too near
The mouth of Life's fair flower-bordered stream,
Clutched at Love's single respite in his need
More than the drowning swimmer clutches at a reed---

That coming one whose feet in other days
Sha...Read more of this...

by Browning, Robert
...go,
So, like black priests up, and so
Down the other side again
To another greater, wilder country,
That's one vast red drear burnt-up plain,
Branched through and through with many a vein
Whence iron's dug, and copper's dealt;
Look right, look left, look straight before,---
Beneath they mine, above they smelt,
Copper-ore and iron-ore,
And forge and furnace mould and melt,
And so on, more and ever more,
Till at the last, for a bounding belt,
Comes the salt sand hoar of the gre...Read more of this...

by Warton, Thomas
...nfinish'd furrow furrow rests the plough:
Rings not the high wood with enliven'd shouts
Of early hunter: all is silence drear;
And deeptest saness wraps the face of things.
Thro' Pope's soft song tho' all the Graces breathe,
And happiest art adorn his Attic page;
Yet does my mind with sweeter transport glow,
As at the root of mossy trunk reclin'd,
In magic Spenser's wildly-warbled song
I see deserted Una wander wide
Thro' wasteful solitudes, and lurid heaths,
Weary, forlo...Read more of this...

by Pound, Ezra
...æsars
Nor gold-giving lords like those gone.
Howe'er in mirth most magnified,
Whoe'er lived in life most lordliest,
Drear all this excellence, delights undurable!
Waneth the watch, but the world holdeth.
Tomb hideth trouble. The blade is layed low.
Earthly glory ageth and seareth.
No man at all going the earth's gait,
But age fares against him, his face paleth,
Grey-haired he groaneth, knows gone companions,
Lordly men are to earth o'ergiven,
Nor may he th...Read more of this...

by Burns, Robert
...u art blest, compared wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But och! I backward cast my e'e
          On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho I canna see,
          I guess an' fear!
...Read more of this...

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