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Famous Eloquent Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry
...w the regular course of--throats.]
Some die pinned by the broken decks,
 Some die sobbing between the boats.


Some die eloquent, pressed to death
 By the sliding trench as their friends can hear
Some die wholly in half a breath.
 Some--give trouble for half a year.


"There is neither Evil nor Good in life
 Except as the needs of the State ordain."
[Since it is rather too late for the knife,
 All we can do is to mask the pain.]


Some die saintly in faith and hope--
 One die...Read more of this...
by Kipling, Rudyard



...
Well; imagine you've printed your volume of verses:
Your forehead is wreathed with the garland of fame,
Your poems the eloquent school-boy rehearses,
Her album the school-girl presents for your name;

Each morning the post brings you autograph letters;
You'll answer them promptly,-- an hour isn't much
For the honor of sharing a page with your betters,
With magistrates, members of Congress, and such.

Of course you're delighted to serve the committees
That come with requests ...Read more of this...
by Holmes, Oliver Wendell
...rely comprehend the plot.
Enwritten upon the leaf where now are peering
Eyes scintillating soul, there lie perdus
Three eloquent words oft uttered in the hearing
Of poets, by poets- as the name is a poet's, too,
Its letters, although naturally lying
Like the knight Pinto- Mendez Ferdinando-
Still form a synonym for Truth- Cease trying!
You will not read the riddle, though you do the best you can do....Read more of this...
by Poe, Edgar Allan
...hos; her fair hands
Were bare alone, sweeping from some strange harp
Strange symphony, and in their branching veins
The eloquent blood told an ineffable tale.
The beating of her heart was heard to fill
The pauses of her music, and her breath 
Tumultuously accorded with those fits
Of intermitted song. Sudden she rose,
As if her heart impatiently endured
Its bursting burden; at the sound he turned,
And saw by the warm light of their own life
Her glowing limbs beneath the sinuou...Read more of this...
by Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...hey course on for ever unexpress'd.
And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well--but 't#is not true!
And then we will no more be rack'd
With inward striving, and demand
Of all the thousand nothings of the hour
Their stupefying power;
Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call!
Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn,
From the soul's subterranean depth upborne
As from an infinitely distant land,
Come airs, and float...Read more of this...
by Arnold, Matthew



...e, accents of
 bargainers, 
Underneath these, possessing the words that never fail. 

To her children, the words of the eloquent dumb great mother never fail; 
The true words do not fail, for motion does not fail, and reflection does not fail; 
Also the day and night do not fail, and the voyage we pursue does not fail.

6
Of the interminable sisters, 
Of the ceaseless cotillions of sisters, 
Of the centripetal and centrifugal sisters, the elder and younger sisters, 
The beaut...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt
...y future grave,
Serene and brave,
With unremitting breath
Inhaling life from death,
Thine epitaph writ fair in fruitage eloquent,
Thyself thy monument.

As poets should,
Thou hast built up thy hardihood
With universal food,
Drawn in select proportion fair
From honest mould and vagabond air;
From darkness of the dreadful night,
And joyful light;
From antique ashes, whose departed flame
In thee has finer life and longer fame;
From wounds and balms,
From storms and calms,
From p...Read more of this...
by Lanier, Sidney
...ntred, and self-comforted,
To watch the world's vain phantasies go by with unbowed head.

Alas! that serene brow, those eloquent lips,
Those eyes that mirrored all eternity,
Rest in their own Colonos, an eclipse
Hath come on Wisdom, and Mnemosyne
Is childless; in the night which she had made
For lofty secure flight Athena's owl itself hath strayed.

Nor much with Science do I care to climb,
Although by strange and subtle witchery
She drew the moon from heaven: the Muse Time
U...Read more of this...
by Wilde, Oscar
...oney-bags see east and west?--
Yet so they did--and every dealer fair
Must see behind, as doth the hunted hare.

XIX.
O eloquent and famed Boccaccio!
Of thee we now should ask forgiving boon,
And of thy spicy myrtles as they blow,
And of thy roses amorous of the moon,
And of thy lilies, that do paler grow
Now they can no more hear thy ghittern's tune,
For venturing syllables that ill beseem
The quiet glooms of such a piteous theme.

XX.
Grant thou a pardon here, and then the ...Read more of this...
by Keats, John
...raved and they put it

down on film.

 Later on, probably, a different voice will be dubbed in.

It will be a noble and eloquent voice denouncing man's in-

humanity to man in no uncertain terms.

 "Trout Fishing in America Shorty, Mon Amour. "

 His soliloquy beginning with, "I was once a famous skip-

tracer known throughout America as 'Grasshopper Nijinsky.'

Nothing was too good for me. Beautiful blondes followed me

wherever I went." Etc. . . . They'll milk it for all it...Read more of this...
by Brautigan, Richard
...en outvied,) 
In the Old World, the east, the Suez canal,
The New by its mighty railroad spann’d, 
The seas inlaid with eloquent, gentle wires, 
I sound, to commence, the cry, with thee, O soul, 
The Past! the Past! the Past! 

The Past! the dark, unfathom’d retrospect!
The teeming gulf! the sleepers and the shadows! 
The past! the infinite greatness of the past! 
For what is the present, after all, but a growth out of the past? 
(As a projectile, form’d, impell’d, passing a ...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt
...express, 
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place. 

And on that cheek, and o'er that brow, 
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent, 
The smiles that win, the tints that glow, 
But tell of days in goodness spent, 
A mind at peace with all below, 
A heart whose love is innocent!...Read more of this...
by Byron, George (Lord)
...d if he then does not comprehend fully what is feebly expressed in the above line, I shall be sorry for us both. For an eloquent passage in the latest work of the first female writer of this, perhaps of any age, on the analogy (and the immediate comparison excited by that analogy) between "painting and music," see vol. iii. cap. 10, "De L'Allemagne." And is not this connexion still stronger with the original than the copy? with the colouring of Nature than of Art? After all, ...Read more of this...
by Byron, George (Lord)
...hey course on for ever unexpress'd.
And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well--but 't#is not true!
And then we will no more be rack'd
With inward striving, and demand
Of all the thousand nothings of the hour
Their stupefying power;
Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call!
Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn,
From the soul's subterranean depth upborne
As from an infinitely distant land,
Come airs, and float...Read more of this...
by Arnold, Matthew
...t in attempting to say
 He considered the Beaver his friend.

While the Beaver confessed, with affectionate looks
 More eloquent even than tears,
It had learned in ten minutes far more than all books
 Would have taught it in seventy years.

They returned hand-in-hand, and the Bellman, unmanned
 (For a moment) with noble emotion,
Said "This amply repays all the wearisome days
 We have spent on the billowy ocean!"

Such friends, as the Beaver and Butcher became,
 Have seldom if...Read more of this...
by Carroll, Lewis
...ready as another
In his emergence to exonerate 
His father and his mother; 
He may have been a captain of a host, 
Self-eloquent and ripe for prodigies, 
Doomed here to swell by dangerous degrees,
And then give up the ghost. 
Nahum’s great grasshoppers were such as these, 
Sun-scattered and soon lost. 

Whatever the dark road he may have taken, 
This man who stood on high
And faced alone the sky, 
Whatever drove or lured or guided him,— 
A vision answering a faith unshaken, 
...Read more of this...
by Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...goat 
And, while a red fillet he carefully pins on him, 
Confesses the whole of the Israelites' sins on him. 
With this eloquent burst he exhorts the accurst -- 
"Go forth in the desert and perish in woe, 
The sins of the people are whiter than snow!" 
Then signs to his pal "for to let the brute go". 
(That "pal" as I've heard, is an elegant word, 
Derived from the Persian "Palaykhur" or "Pallaghur"), 
As the scapegoat strains and tugs at the reins 
The Rabbi yells rapidly, "...Read more of this...
by Paterson, Andrew Barton
...upon her threadbare theme. 

Still an attentive ear he lent
But could not fathom what she meant:
She was not deep, nor eloquent. 

He marked the ripple on the sand:
The even swaying of her hand
Was all that he could understand. 

He saw in dreams a drawing-room,
Where thirteen wretches sat in gloom,
Waiting - he thought he knew for whom: 

He saw them drooping here and there,
Each feebly huddled on a chair,
In attitudes of blank despair: 

Oysters were not more mute than the...Read more of this...
by Carroll, Lewis
...enomena's flight.
Bodies and voices are lent by writing to thought ever silent,
Over the centuries' stream bears it the eloquent page.
Then to the wondering gaze dissolves the cloud of the fancy,
And the vain phantoms of night yield to the dawning of day.
Man now breaks through his fetters, the happy one! Oh, let him never
Break from the bridle of shame, when from fear's fetters he breaks
Freedom! is reason's cry,--ay, freedom! The wild raging passions
Eagerly cast off the bo...Read more of this...
by Schiller, Friedrich von
...e that conquered care; 
And loyalty, whose courage was sublime; 

The great deep heart that was a home for all-- 
Just, eloquent, and strong 
In protest against wrong; 
Wide charity, that knew no sin, no fall; 

The spartan spirit that made life so grand, 
Mating poor daily needs 
With high, heroic deeds, 
That wrested happiness from Fate's hard hand. 

We thought to weep, but sing for joy instead, 
Full of the grateful peace 
That follows her release; 
For nothing but the we...Read more of this...
by Alcott, Louisa May

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry