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Famous Emotions Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Brooke, Rupert
...nd the young trochee, having done enough?
Ah! turn again! Sing so to us, who are sick
Of seeming-simple rhymes, bizarre emotions,
Decked in the simple verses of the day,
Infinite meaning in a little gloom,
Irregular thoughts in stanzas regular,
Modern despair in antique metres, myths
Incomprehensible at evening,
And symbols that mean nothing in the dawn.
The slow lines swell. The new style sighs. The Celt
Moans round with many voices.
God! to see
Gaunt anap?st...Read more of this...



by Wilcox, Ella Wheeler
...you, and kiss you, 
Though the whole world stands in the way.

And like Communists, as mad, as disloyal, 
My fierce emotions roam out of their lair; 
They hate King Reason for being royal –
They would fire his castle, and burn him there.
O Love! They would clasp you, and crush you and kill you, 
In the insurrection of uncontrol.
Across the miles, does this wild war thrill you
That is raging in my soul?...Read more of this...

by Wilcox, Ella Wheeler
...ld sleep, 
Throws from her breast the coverlet of snow, 
Revealing Spring's soft charms which lie below.
Suppressed emotions in each heart arise, 
The wooer wakens and the warrior dies.
The bird of prey is vanquished by the dove, 
And thoughts of bloody strife give place to thoughts of love.



XLIX.
The mighty plains, devoid of whispering trees, 
Guard well the secrets of departed seas.
Where once great tides swept by with ebb and flow
The scorching sun l...Read more of this...

by Chatterton, Thomas
...es furious drive along, 
Full of the majesty of city dames, 
Whose jewels sparkling in the gaudy throng, 
Raise strange emotions and invidious flames. 

Now Merit, happy in the calm of place, 
To mortals as a highlander appears, 
And conscious of the excellence of lace, 
With spreading frogs and gleaming spangles glares. 

Whilst Envy, on a tripod seated nigh, 
In form a shoe-boy, daubs the valu'd fruit, 
And darting lightnings from his vengeful eye, 
Raves about Wilk...Read more of this...

by Gregory, Rg
...acher in the shadow of a dead headmaster
  a tree using somebody else's old sap

  i want to build my future out of new emotions
  to seek more than my own in a spring surround
  to move amongst people keen to move outwards
  putting love and ideas into fresh ground

  who will come with me across this border
  not anywhere but in the bonds we make
  taking the old apart to find new order
  living ourselves boldly for each other's sake

then love is

  if you ask me today wha...Read more of this...



by Campbell, Thomas
...hey deem him first:
To speak he tries; but quivering, pale, and parch'd,
From lips, as by some powerless dream accursed
Emotions unintelligible burst;
And long his filmed eye is red and dim;
At length the pity-proffer'd cup his thirst
Had half assuaged, and nerved his shuddering limb
When Albert's hand he grasp'd;--but Albert knew not him--

"And hast thou then forgot," (he cried forlorn,
And eyed the group with half indignant air,)
"Oh! hast thou, Christian chief, forgot the...Read more of this...

by Wilcox, Ella Wheeler
...ow does Love speak? 
By the uneven heart-throbs, and the freak
Of bounding pulses that stand still and ache, 
While new emotions, like strange barques, make
Along vein-channels their disturbing course; 
Still as the dawn, and with the dawn’s swift force –
Thus doth Love speak.

How does Love speak? 
In the avoidance of that which we seek –
The sudden silence and reserve when near –
The eye that glistens with an unshed tear –
The joy that seems the counterpart of fear, 
As...Read more of this...

by Stevens, Wallace
..., an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one. The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging 
An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly
Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,
Beyond which it has no will to rise.
It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman da...Read more of this...

by Kaufman, Bob
...e.
Musical tears from lost
Eyes.
Broken drumsticks, why?
Pitter patter, boom dropping
Bombs in the middle
Of my emotions
My father's sound
My mother's sound,
Is love,
Is life....Read more of this...

by Gluck, Louise
...or its song's sake.

So it became human.
It found passion, it found violence,
first conflated, then
as separate emotions
and these were not
contained by music. Thus
its song changed,
the sweet notes of its longing to become human
soured and flattened. Then

the world drew back; the mutant
fell from love
as from the cherry branch,
it fell stained with the bloody
fruit of the tree.

So it is true after all, not merely
a rule of art:
change your form and you ...Read more of this...

by Murray, Les
...Religions are poems. They concert
our daylight and dreaming mind, our
emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture

into the only whole thinking: poetry.
Nothing's said till it's dreamed out in words
and nothing's true that figures in words only.

A poem, compared with an arrayed religion,
may be like a soldier's one short marriage night
to die and live by. But that is a small religion. 

Full religion is the ...Read more of this...

by Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...upon each other's face;
And the blood in our fingers intertwined 
Ran like the thoughts of a single mind,
As the swift emotions went and came
Through the veins of each united frame.
So through the long, long streets we passed
Of the million-peopled City vast;
Which is that desert, where each one
Seeks his mate yet is alone,
Beloved and sought and mourned of none;
Until the clear blue sky was seen,
And the grassy meadows bright and green. 
And then I sunk in his embra...Read more of this...

by Hugo, Victor
...ow; 
 From eyes so gayly beaming, 
 Whence rays of beauty flow, 
 Salt tears most oft are streaming. 
 
 Free from emotions past, 
 All joy and hope possessing, 
 With mind in pureness cast, 
 Sweet ignorance confessing. 
 
 Plant, safe from winds and showers, 
 Heart with soft visions glowing, 
 In childhood's happy hours 
 A mother's rapture showing. 
 
 Loved by each anxious friend, 
 No carking care within— 
 When summer gambols end, 
 My winter sports b...Read more of this...

by Stevens, Wallace
...ions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.

3
Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...'Twas in the bleary middle of the hard-boiled Arctic night,
I was lonesome as a loon, so if you can,
Imagine my emotions of amazement and delight
When I bumped into that Missionary Man.
He was lying lost and dying in the moon's unholy leer,
And frozen from his toes to finger-tips'
The famished wolf-pack ringed him; but he didn't seem to fear,
As he pressed his ice-bond Bible to his lips.

'Twas the limit of my trap-line, with the cabin miles away,
And every st...Read more of this...

by Piercy, Marge
...ur body? 
Can you run up and down trees? Jump between roofs?

Let us rub our bodies together and talk of touch. 
My emotions are pure as salt crystals and as hard. 
My lusts glow like my eyes. I sing to you in the mornings
walking round and round your bed and into your face. 

Come I will teach you to dance as naturally 
as falling asleep and waking and stretching long, long. 
I speak greed with my paws and fear with my whiskers. 
Envy lashes my tail.<...Read more of this...

by Murray, Les
...de an animal, instinct. Rice in bowl with chopsticks
denotes food. Figure 1 lying prone equals other.

Most emotions are mini-faces, and the speech 
balloon is ubiquitous. A bull inside one is dialect
for placards inside one. Sun and moon together

inside one is poetry. Sun and moon over palette,
over shoes etc are all art forms — but above
a cracked heart and champagne glass? Riddle that

and you're starting to think in World, whose grammar 
is Chines...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...

by Mansell, Chris
...phone
the page also wearies
us we have taken the meaning
out of things by laying them face to
face in our dictionary of emotions
we are so entirely alone that we
are unaware of it
and we enjoy the religion of solitude
because religions are at base
meaningless and we can turn
from them to a new hobby
to clean ashtrays or emptier
whiskey glasses we the women
of our building Margaret Gladys
Cecily Ida Eileen and I have
the cleanest washing on our block
we are proud and air our s...Read more of this...

by Austen, Jane
...The day returns again, my natal day;
What mix'd emotions with the Thought arise!
Beloved friend, four years have pass'd away
Since thou wert snatch'd forever from our eyes.-- 
The day, commemorative of my birth
Bestowing Life and Light and Hope on me,
Brings back the hour which was thy last on Earth.
Oh! bitter pang of torturing Memory!-- 

Angelic Woman! past my power to praise
In Language meet, ...Read more of this...

Dont forget to view our wonderful member Emotions poems.


Book: Shattered Sighs