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Famous Dumbness Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Lanier, Sidney
...re I learn while, Friend! I sit by thee:
Who sees all time, sees all eternity.


III.

If I do ask, How God can dumbness keep
While Sin creeps grinning through His house of Time,
Stabbing His saintliest children in their sleep,
And staining holy walls with clots of crime? --
Or, How may He whose wish but names a fact
Refuse what miser's-scanting of supply
Would richly glut each void where man hath lacked
Of grace or bread? -- or, How may Power deny
Wholeness to th' al...Read more of this...



by Lindsay, Vachel
...e remember kisses,
Remember the dear heart-leap when they came:
Not always, but sometimes we remember
The kindness, the dumbness, the good flame
Of laughter and farewell.
Beside the road
Afar from those who said "Good-by" I write,
Far from my city task, my lawful load.

Sun in my face, wind beside my shoulder,
Streaming clouds, banners of new-born night
Enchant me now. The splendors growing bolder
Make bold my soul for some new wise delight.

I write the day's...Read more of this...

by Blake, William
...ing thick
Settled, a lake, bright, & shining clear:
White as the snow on the mountains cold.

4. Forgetfulness, dumbness, necessity!
In chains of the mind locked up, 
Like fetters of ice shrinking together
Disorganiz'd, rent from Eternity,
Los beat on his fetters of iron;
And heated his furnaces & pour'd
Iron sodor and sodor of brass 

5. Restless turnd the immortal inchain'd
Heaving dolorous! anguish'd! unbearable
Till a roof shaggy wild inclos'd
In an orb, his f...Read more of this...

by Russell, George William
...ed, but their worship was only
The wonder at nights and at days,
As still as the lips of the lonely
Though burning with dumbness of praise.


No sadness of earth ever captured
Their spirits who bowed at the shrine:
They fled to the Lonely enraptured
And hid in the darkness divine.


As children at twilight may gather,
They met at the doorway of death
The smile of the dark hidden Father,
The Mother with magical breath.


Untold of in song or in story,
In days long ...Read more of this...

by Crowley, Aleister
...I returned into myself, and took
All in my arms, God's universe:
Crushed its black juice out, while His anger shook
His dumbness pregnant with a curse.
I made me ink, and in a little book
I wrote one word
That God himself, the adder of Thought, had never heard.

XV

It detonated. Nature, God, mankind
Like sulphur, nitre, charcoal, once 
Blended, in one annihilation blind
Were rent into a myriad of suns.
Yea! all the mighty fabric of a Mind
Stood in the abyss,
...Read more of this...



by Masefield, John
...e hedge stood out 
Like revelations but the tongue unknown; 
Even in the brooks a joy was quick: the trout 
Rushed in a dumbness dumb to me alone. 

All of the valley was loud with brooks; 
I walked the morning, breasting up the fells, 
Taking again lost childhood from the rooks, 
Whose cawing came above the Christmas bells. 

I had not walked that glittering world before, 
But up the hill a prompting came to me, 
"This line of upland runs along the shore: 
Beyond the...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...beams
 enough, 
Or man matured, or young or old, as now to thee I launch my invocation. 

(Thou canst not with thy dumbness me deceive,
I know before the fitting man all Nature yields, 
Though answering not in words, the skies, trees, hear his voice—and thou O sun, 
As for thy throes, thy perturbations, sudden breaks and shafts of flame gigantic, 
I understand them, I know those flames, those perturbations well.) 

Thou that with fructifying heat and light,
O’er myri...Read more of this...

by Schwartz, Delmore
...The trumpet is a brilliant instrument." - Dietrich Buxtehude


Come and come forth and come up from the cup of
Your dumbness, stunned and numb, come with
The statues and believed in,
Thinking this is nothing, deceived. 

 Come to the summer and sun,
 Come see upon that height, and that sum
 In the seedtime of the winter's absolute,
 How yearly the phoenix inhabits the fruit.
 Behold, above all, how the tall ball
 Called the body is but a drum, but a bell
 Summonin...Read more of this...

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Book: Shattered Sighs