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Famous Eager Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...would have his fee 
Were he to tell the truth. Your fee for this 
Is in my gratitude and my affection; 
And I’m not eager to be calling in 
Another to take yours away from you,
Whatever it’s worth. I like to think I know. 
Well then, again. The carriage rolled away 
With him inside; and so it might have gone 
For ten years rolling on, with him still in it, 
For all it was I saw of him. Sometimes
I heard of him, but only as one hears 
Of leprosy in Boston o...Read more of this...



by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...they glided away o'er the meadow.
Oft in the barns they climbed to the populous nests on the rafters,
Seeking with eager eyes that wondrous stone, which the swallow
Brings from the shore of the sea to restore the sight of its fledglings;
Lucky was he who found that stone in the nest of the swallow!
Thus passed a few swift years, and they no longer were children.
He was a valiant youth, and his face, like the face of the morning,
Gladdened the earth with its light, an...Read more of this...

by Wilde, Oscar
...ange and subtle witchery
She drew the moon from heaven: the Muse Time
Unrolls her gorgeous-coloured tapestry
To no less eager eyes; often indeed
In the great epic of Polymnia's scroll I love to read

How Asia sent her myriad hosts to war
Against a little town, and panoplied
In gilded mail with jewelled scimitar,
White-shielded, purple-crested, rode the Mede
Between the waving poplars and the sea
Which men call Artemisium, till he saw Thermopylae

Its steep ravine spanned by a...Read more of this...

by Keats, John
...ore the operations of the dawn
Stay'd in their birth, even as here 'tis told.
Those silver wings expanded sisterly,
Eager to sail their orb; the porches wide
Open'd upon the dusk demesnes of night
And the bright Titan, phrenzied with new woes,
Unus'd to bend, by hard compulsion bent
His spirit to the sorrow of the time;
And all along a dismal rack of clouds,
Upon the boundaries of day and night,
He stretch'd himself in grief and radiance faint.
There as he lay, the He...Read more of this...

by Pinsky, Robert
...ay through,
I would pretend that I forgot the punchline,

Or make believe that I was interrupted--
As though he'd be so eager to hear the end
He'd have to call me back. The joke was Elliot's,

More often than not. The doctors made the blunder
That killed him some time later that same year.
One day when I got home I found a message

On my machine from Bob. He had a story
About two rabbis, one of them tall, one short,
One day while walking along the street toget...Read more of this...



by Alighieri, Dante
...rowling: and the flood descends 
 Straight downward. 
 When he saw us, the loathly worm 
 Showed all his fangs, and eager trembling frame 
 Nerved for the leap. But undeterred my guide. 
 Stooped down, and gathered in full hands the soil, 
 And cast it in the gaping gullets, to foil 
 Gluttonous blind greed, and those fierce mouths and wide 
 Closed on the filth, and as the craving cur 
 Quietens, that strained and howled to reach his food, 
 Biting the bone, thos...Read more of this...

by Dyke, Henry Van
...To guide the merry crew.

Along the garden ways
We chase the light-foot tune,
And in and out the flowery maze,
With eager haste and fond delays,
In pleasant paths of June.

For us the fields are new,
For us the woods are rife
With fairy secrets, deep and true,
And heaven is but a tent of blue
Above the game of life.

The world is far away:
The fever and the fret,
And all that makes the heart grow gray,
Is out of sight and far away,
Dear Music, while I hear thee pl...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...

For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths- for you the shores 
a-crowding, 
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning; 
Here Captain! dear father! 
This arm beneath your head! 
It is some dream that on the deck, 
You've fallen cold and dead. 

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still, 
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will, 
The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and done, 
From fearful trip ...Read more of this...

by St Vincent Millay, Edna
...ioning me, importuning me to tell
Some slightest tidings of the light of day they know no more,
Plucking my sleeve, the eager shades were with me where I went.
I paused at every grievous door,
And harked a moment, holding up my hand,—and for a space
A hush was on them, while they watched my face;
And then they fell a-whispering as before;
So that I smiled at them and left them, seeing she was not there.
I sought her, too,
Among the upper gods, although I knew
She was ...Read more of this...

by Milton, John
...sive words, impregned 
With reason, to her seeming, and with truth: 
Mean while the hour of noon drew on, and waked 
An eager appetite, raised by the smell 
So savoury of that fruit, which with desire, 
Inclinable now grown to touch or taste, 
Solicited her longing eye; yet first 
Pausing a while, thus to herself she mused. 
Great are thy virtues, doubtless, best of fruits, 
Though kept from man, and worthy to be admired; 
Whose taste, too long forborn, at first assay 
Ga...Read more of this...

by Wilde, Oscar
...ct name,
Or mar the lordly scutcheon of his fame.

For as the olive-garland of the race,
Which lights with joy each eager runner's face,
As the red cross which saveth men in war,
As a flame-bearded beacon seen from far
By mariners upon a storm-tossed sea, -
Such was his love for Greece and Liberty!

Byron, thy crowns are ever fresh and green:
Red leaves of rose from Sapphic Mitylene
Shall bind thy brows; the myrtle blooms for thee,
In hidden glades by lonely Castaly;
The ...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...still, examining with a candle: 
Voyaging to every port, to dicker and adventure;
Hurrying with the modern crowd, as eager and fickle as any; 
Hot toward one I hate, ready in my madness to knife him; 
Solitary at midnight in my back yard, my thoughts gone from me a long while; 
Walking the old hills of Judea, with the beautiful gentle God by my side; 
Speeding through space—speeding through heaven and the stars;
Speeding amid the seven satellites, and the broad ring, ...Read more of this...

by Bridges, Robert Seymour
...ort tarrieth,
For all my wakeful prayer sent without rest
To thee, O shew and shadow of my death. 

49
The spirit's eager sense for sad or gay
Filleth with what he will our vessel full:
Be joy his bent, he waiteth not joy's day
But like a child at any toy will pull:
If sorrow, he will weep for fancy's sake,
And spoil heaven's plenty with forbidden care.
What fortune most denies we slave to take;
Nor can fate load us more than we can bear. 
Since pleasure with the ...Read more of this...

by Carroll, Lewis
...r Child:
in memory of golden summer hours
and whispers of a summer sea.


Girt with a boyish garb for boyish task,
 Eager she wields her spade; yet loves as well
Rest on a friendly knee, intent to ask
 The tale he loves to tell.

Rude spirits of the seething outer strife,
 Unmeet to read her pure and simple spright,
Deem, if you list, such hours a waste of life,
 Empty of all delight!

Chat on, sweet Maid, and rescue from annoy
 Hearts that by wiser talk are unbeguile...Read more of this...

by Scott, Sir Walter
...rom the mountain-side.'
     Then, like a sunbeam, swift and bright,
     She darted to her shallop light,
     And, eagerly while Roderick scanned,
     For her dear form, his mother's band,
     The islet far behind her lay,
     And she had landed in the bay.
     XXII.

     Some feelings are to mortals given
     With less of earth in them than heaven;
     And if there be a human tear
     From passion's dross refined and clear,
     A tear so limpid and so...Read more of this...

by Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...other height aspires
Than one at which he neither quails nor tires? 
He may do more by seeing what he sees 
Than others eager for iniquities; 
He may, by seeing all things for the best, 
Incite futurity to do the rest.

Or with an even likelihood, 
He may have met with atrabilious eyes 
The fires of time on equal terms and passed 
Indifferently down, until at last 
His only kind of grandeur would have been,
Apparently, in being seen. 
He may have had for evil or for g...Read more of this...

by Carroll, Lewis
...ver thus, in dismal round,
Shall Pain and Mystery profound
Pursue me like a sleepless hound, 

"With crimson-dashed and eager jaws,
Me, still in ignorance of the cause,
Unknowing what I broke of laws?" 

The whisper to his ear did seem
Like echoed flow of silent stream,
Or shadow of forgotten dream, 

The whisper trembling in the wind:
"Her fate with thine was intertwined,"
So spake it in his inner mind: 

"Each orbed on each a baleful star:
Each proved the other's blight and...Read more of this...

by Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...remains alone.

And there lay Visions swift and sweet and quaint,
Each in its thin sheath like a chrysalis;--
Some eager to burst forth; some weak and faint
With the soft burden of intensest bliss
It is their work to bear to many a saint 
Whose heart adores the shrine which holiest is,
Even Love's; and others, white, green, grey, and black,
And of all shapes:--and each was at her beck.

And odours in a kind of aviary
Of ever-blooming Eden-trees she kept,
Clipped in a...Read more of this...

by Bronte, Charlotte
...s doubting if my powers are made 
To ford the floods of woe. 

Know, then it is my spirit swells, 
And drinks, with eager joy, the air 
Of freedom­where at last it dwells,
Chartered, a common task to share 
With thee, and then it stirs alert,
And pants to learn what menaced hurt
Demands for thee its care. 

Remember, I have crossed the deep, 
And stood with thee on deck, to gaze 
On waves that rose in threatening heap, 
While stagnant lay a heavy haze, 
Dimly confusin...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...onders of city and country, and others taking great interest in
 them—and we taking no interest in them! 

To think how eager we are in building our houses! 
To think others shall be just as eager, and we quite indifferent! 

(I see one building the house that serves him a few years, or seventy or eighty years at
 most,
I see one building the house that serves him longer than that.) 

Slow-moving and black lines creep over the whole earth—they never cease—they are
 the
 b...Read more of this...

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Book: Reflection on the Important Things