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Famous Emotion Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Schwartz, Delmore
...the sweating sick-excited passage 
 in steerage, strange and estranged
Hence I must descry and describe the kingdom of emotion.

For I am a poet of the kindergarten (in the city)
 and the cemetery (in the city)
And rapture and ragtime and also the secret city in the
 heart and mind
This is the song of the natural city self in the 20th century.

It is true but only partly true that a city is a "tyranny of
 numbers"
(This is the chant of the urban metropolitan and
 met...Read more of this...



by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...r>
All was silent within; and in vain at the door and the windows
Stood she, and listened and looked, till, overcome by emotion,
"Gabriel!" cried she aloud with tremulous voice; but no answer
Came from the graves of the dead, nor the gloomier grave of the living.
Slowly at length she returned to the 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...Read more of this...

by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...ulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neith...Read more of this...

by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...the calamitous annunciation?

There is no end, but addition: the trailing
Consequence of further days and hours,
While emotion takes to itself the emotionless
Years of living among the breakage
Of what was believed in as the most reliable—
And therefore the fittest for renunciation.

There is the final addition, the failing
Pride or resentment at failing powers,
The unattached devotion which might pass for devotionless,
In a drifting boat with a slow leakage,
The silent ...Read more of this...

by Arnold, Matthew
...
And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel:
Deep in our hidden heart
Festers the dull remembrance of a change,
But no emotion—none.

It is—last stage of all— 
When we are frozen up within, and quite
The phantom of ourselves,
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
Which blamed the living man....Read more of this...



by Byron, George (Lord)
...zed on him unseen; 
At length encountering meets the mutual gaze 
Of keen inquiry, and of mute amaze; 
On Lara's glance emotion gathering grew, 
As if distrusting that the stranger threw; 
Along the stranger's aspect fix'd and stern 
Flash'd more than thence the vulgar eye could learn. 

XXII. 

"'Tis he!" the stranger cried, and those that heard 
Re-echo'd fast and far the whisper'd word. 
"'Tis he!" — "'Tis who?" they question far and near, 
Till louder accents ...Read more of this...

by Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...THE fountains mingle with the river 
And the rivers with the ocean  
The winds of heaven mix for ever 
With a sweet emotion; 
Nothing in the world is single 5 
All things by a law divine 
In one another's being mingle¡ª 
Why not I with thine? 

See the mountains kiss high heaven  
And the waves clasp one another; 10 
No sister-flower would be forgiven 
If it disdain'd its brother; 
And the sunlight clasps the earth  
And the moonbeams kiss the sea¡ª 
What are ...Read more of this...

by Arnold, Matthew
...And she, whose censure thou dost dread,
Whose eye thou wast afraid to seek,
See, on her face a glow is spread,
A strong emotion on her cheek!
'Ah, child!' she cries, 'that strife divine,
Whence was it, for it is not mine?

'There is no effort on my brow--
I do not strive, I do not weep;
I rush with the swift spheres and glow
In joy, and when I will, I sleep.
Yet that severe, that earnest air,
I saw, I felt it once--but where?

'I knew not yet the gauge of time,
Nor wore t...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...ievous elf."
Said Mother, who's rather a huffer:
"That's right - he takes after yourself."
Controlling parental emotion
They turned to me, seeking a cue,
And sudden conceived the bright notion
To ask what I wanted to do.

Said I: "my ambition is modest:
A clown in a circus I'd be,
And turn somersaults in the sawdust
With audience laughing at me."
. . . Poor parents! they're dead and decaying,
But I am a clown as you see;
And though in no circus I'm...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Amy
...s.
Eunice starts up in terrible distress.
"My God! What's that?" Her 
staring eyes are big.

XXXIV
Revulsed emotion set her body shaking As though 
she had an ague. Gervase swore,
Jumped to his feet in such a dreadful taking His face was ghastly 
with the look it wore.
Crouching and slipping through the trees, a man In worn, blue 
livery, a humpbacked thing,
Made off. But turned every few steps 
to gaze At Eunice, and to fling
Vile looks and gestures b...Read more of this...

by Nash, Ogden
...hing at all to be done!

How pleasant to look at the ocean,
Democratic and damp; indiscriminate;
It fills me with noble emotion
To think I am able to swim in it.
 To lave in the wave,
 Majestic and chilly,
 Tomorrow I crave;
 But today it is silly.
It is pleasant to look at the ocean;
Tomorrow, perhaps, I shall swim in it.

How pleasant to gaze at the sailors
As their sailboats they manfully sail
With the vigor of vikings and whalers
In the days of the vikings and...Read more of this...

by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...e; 
And beautiful with all the soul's expansion 
Shall we behold her face. 

And though at times impetuous with emotion 45 
And anguish long suppressed  
The swelling heart heaves moaning like the ocean  
That cannot be at rest ¡ª 

We will be patient and assuage the feeling 
We may not wholly stay; 50 
By silence sanctifying not concealing  
The grief that must have way....Read more of this...

by Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...fitful wind is heard to stir
One solitary leaf on high;
The chirping of the grasshopper
Fills every pause. There is emotion
In all that dwells at noontide here;
Then through the intricate wild wood
A maze of life and light and motion
Is woven. But there is stillness now-- 
Gloom, and the trance of Nature now.
The snake is in his cave asleep;
The birds are on the branches dreaming;
Only the shadows creep;
Only the glow-worm is gleaming;
Only the owls and the nighti...Read more of this...

by Browning, Robert
...r news---
Life or death. The whole earth was awakened, hell loosed with her crews;
And the stars of night beat with emotion, and tingled and shot
Out in fire the strong pain of pent knowledge: but I fainted not,
For the Hand still impelled me at once and supported, suppressed
All the tumult, and quenched it with quiet, and holy behest,
Till the rapture was shut in itself, and the earth sank to rest.
Anon at the dawn, all that trouble had withered from earth---
Not so ...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...and dumb devotion,
And everywhere that Casey went that goat would want to go;
And though I cannot analyze a quadruped's emotion,
They said the baste was jealous, and I reckon it was so.
For every time that Casey went to call on Missis Rooney,
Beside the gate the goat would wait with woefulness intense;
Until one day it chanced that they were fast becoming spooney,
When Shamus spied that ould red shawl a-flutter on the fence.

Now Missis Rooney loved that shawl beyond ...Read more of this...

by Carroll, Lewis
...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 ever been known;
In winter or summer, 'twas always the same--
 You could never meet either alone.

And when quarrels arose--as one frequently finds
 Quarrels will, spite of every endeavour--
The so...Read more of this...

by Schiller, Friedrich von
...
Where the calm art's pure dwellers are,
Lo, the Laocoon writhes, but does not groan.
Here, no sharp grief the high emotion knows--
Here, suffering's self is made divine, and shows
The brave resolve of the firm soul alone:
Here, lovely as the rainbow on the dew
Of the spent thunder-cloud, to art is given,
Gleaming through grief's dark veil, the peaceful blue
Of the sweet moral heaven.

So, in the glorious parable, behold
How, bowed to mortal bonds, of old
Life's drear...Read more of this...

by Scott, Sir Walter
..., the archers' stake;
     Fondly he watched, with watery eye,
     Some answering glance of sympathy,—
     No kind emotion made reply!
     Indifferent as to archer wight,
     The monarch gave the arrow bright.
     XXIII.

     Now, clear the ring! for, hand to hand,
     The manly wrestlers take their stand.
     Two o'er the rest superior rose,
     And proud demanded mightier foes,—
     Nor called in vain, for Douglas came.—
     For life is Hugh of Larbe...Read more of this...

by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...ever crowed for kisses.' 
'Out upon it!' 
She answered, 'peace! and why should I not play 
The Spartan Mother with emotion, be 
The Lucius Junius Brutus of my kind? 
Him you call great: he for the common weal, 
The fading politics of mortal Rome, 
As I might slay this child, if good need were, 
Slew both his sons: and I, shall I, on whom 
The secular emancipation turns 
Of half this world, be swerved from right to save 
A prince, a brother? a little will I yield. 
Be...Read more of this...

by Ondaatje, Michael
...t,
(a nymph out of Chagall)
I bring little to that scene.
We remember the time around scars,
they freeze irrelevant emotions
and divide us from present friends.
I remember this girl's face,
the widening rise of surprise.

And would she 
moving with lover or husband
conceal or flaunt it,
or keep it at her wrist
a mysterious watch.
And this scar I then remember
is a medallion of no emotion.

I would meet you now
and I would wish this scar
to have been given ...Read more of this...

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Book: Shattered Sighs