Famous Emperors Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Emperors poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous emperors poems. These examples illustrate what a famous emperors poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Whitman, Walt
...rin, farmer, merchant, mechanic, and fisherman;
The singing-girl and the dancing-girl—the ecstatic person—the secluded Emperors,
Confucius himself—the great poets and heroes—the warriors, the castes, all,
Trooping up, crowding from all directions—from the Altay mountains,
From Thibet—from the four winding and far-flowing rivers of China,
From the Southern peninsulas, and the demi-continental islands—from Malaysia;
These, and whatever belongs to them, palpable, show forth...Read more of this...
by
Kipling, Rudyard
...er fire?
Lest some envious Pharaoh stir,
Make our lives our sepulcher?
Nay! Though Time with petty Fate
Prison us and Emperors,
By our Arts do we create
That which Time himself devours--
Such machines as well may run
'Gainst the Horses of the Sun.
When we would a new abode,
Space, our tyrant King no more,
Lays the long lance of the road
At our feet and flees before,
Breathless, ere we overwhelm,
To submit a further realm!...Read more of this...
by
Bradley, George
...gures
at that end are nearly indistinguishable,
generals at the heads of minute armies
differing little from fishwives,
emperors the same as eskimos
huddled under improvisations of snow--
eskimos, though, now have the advantage,
for it seems to be freezing there, a climate
which might explain the population's
outr? dress, their period costumes
of felt and silk and eiderdown,
their fur concoctions stuffed with straw
held in place with flexible strips of bark,
and all to no av...Read more of this...
by
Fu, Du
...white gulls. I turn my head, sad now for the place of song and dance, Qin has been since olden days the land of emperors....Read more of this...
by
Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...? And that's Nature, also.
It's Nature, and it's Nothing. It's all Nothing.
It's all a world where bugs and emperors
Go singularly back to the same dust,
Each in his time; and the old, ordered stars
That sang together, Ben, will sing the same
Old stave to-morrow."
When he talks like that,
There's nothing for a human man to do
But lead him to some grateful nook like this
Where we be now, and there to make him drink.
He'll drink, for love of me, and then be...Read more of this...
by
Wilde, Oscar
..., antique-limbed, and stern?
And yet - methinks I'd rather see thee play
That serpent of old Nile, whose witchery
Made Emperors drunken, - come, great Egypt, shake
Our stage with all thy mimic pageants! Nay,
I am grown sick of unreal passions, make
The world thine Actium, me thine Anthony!...Read more of this...
by
Lindsay, Vachel
...I. GOD SEND THE REGICIDE
Would that the lying rulers of the world
Were brought to block for tyrannies abhorred.
Would that the sword of Cromwell and the Lord,
The sword of Joshua and Gideon,
Hewed hip and thigh the hosts of Midian.
God send that ironside ere tomorrow's sun;
Let Gabriel and Michael with him ride.
God send the Regicide.
...Read more of this...
by
Manrique, Jorge
...heir thrones to grime and tears
And sorrow's keeping!
Naught else proves any more enduring;
Nor are the popes, nor emperors,
Nor prelatries
A longer stay or truce securing
Than the poor herdsman of the moors
From Death's decrees.
Recount no more of Troy, or foeman
The echo of whose wars is now
But far tradition;
Recount no more how fared the Roman
(His scroll of glories we allow)
Nor his perdition;
Nor here rehearse the homely fable
Of such as yielded up ...Read more of this...
by
Matthew, John
...rning to you, mother city, after twenty years,
I look at your broad, bereft blood-stained streets, mater,
Through which emperors, prime ministers cavalcaded,
In victory and defeat, through gates and triumphal arches,
That murmur of the pains of your rape and impregnation.
The sudden shock of your poverty upsets me,
It is evident in the desperation of the cycle-rickshaw puller,
His eyes intent on the ground, standing on his pedals,
He pulls his woes, as if there is no hal...Read more of this...
by
Henley, William Ernest
....
What come of every claim?
O Vanity of Vanities!
Alike are clods and earls.
For sot, and seer, and swain,
For emperors and for churls,
For antidote and bane,
There is but one refrain:
But one for king and thrall,
For David and for Saul,
For fleet of foot and lame,
For pieties and profanities,
The picture and the frame:--
"O Vanity of Vanities!"
Life is a smoke that curls--
Curls in a flickering skein,
That winds and whisks and whirls,
A figment thin and vain,
Into ...Read more of this...
by
Hikmet, Nazim
...:
"Those who crush our rice fields
with the caterpillar treads of their tanks
and who swagger through our cities
like emperors of hell,
are they of YOUR race,
the race of him who CREATED you?"
I almost raised my hand
and cried "No!"
27 April
Tonight at the blare of an American trumpet
--the horn of a 12-horsepower Ford--
I awoke from a dream,
and what I glimpsed for an instant
instantly vanished.
What I'd seen was a still blue lake.
In this lake the slant-ey...Read more of this...
by
Dickinson, Emily
...-- must pass
Through this low Arch of Flesh --
No Casque so brave
It spurn the Grave --
I told him Worlds I knew
Where Emperors grew --
Who recollected us
If we were true --
And so with Thews of Hymn --
And Sinew from within --
And ways I knew not that I knew -- till then --
I lifted Him --...Read more of this...
by
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...,
Memories haunt thy pointed gables, like the rooks that round them throng:
Memories of the Middle Ages, when the emperors, rough and bold, 5
Had their dwelling in thy castle, time-defying, centuries old;
And thy brave and thrifty burghers boasted, in their uncouth rhyme,
That their great imperial city stretched its hand through every clime.
In the court-yard of the castle, bound with many an iron band,
Stands the mighty linden planted by Queen Cunigun...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Robert
...Among these latter busts we count by scores,
Half-emperors and quarter-emperors,
Each with his bay-leaf fillet, loose-thonged vest,
Loricand low-browed Gorgon on the breast,---
One loves a baby face, with violets there,
Violets instead of laurel in the hair,
As those were all the little locks could bear.
Now read here. ``Protus ends a period
``Of empery beginning with a god;
``Born in the porphyry ...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...One Wednesday in November
you watched a balloon, painted like a silver abll,
float up over the Forum, up over the lost emperors,
to shiver its little modern cage in an occasional
breeze. You worked your New England conscience out
beside artisans, chestnut vendors and the devout.
Tonight I will learn to love you twice;
learn your first days, your mid-Victorian face.
Tonight I will speak up and interrupt
your letters, warning you that wars are coming,
that the Coun...Read more of this...
by
Kipling, Rudyard
...1904(C. F. Rhodes, buried in the Matoppos, April 10, 1902)
When that great Kings return to clay,
Or Emperors in their pride,
Grief of a day shall fill a day,
Because its creature died.
But we -- we reck on not with those
Whom the mere Fates ordain,
This Power that wrought on us and goes
Back to the Power again.
Dreamer devout, by vision led
Beyond our guess or reach,
The travail of his spirit bred
Cities in place of speech.
So huge the al...Read more of this...
by
Lindsay, Vachel
...ODWILL WITH THE JAPANESE PEOPLE
Glossary for the uninstructed and the hasty: Jimmu Tenno, ancestor of all the Japanese Emperors; Nikko, Japan's loveliest shrine; Iyeyasu, her greatest statesman; Bushido, her code of knighthood; The Forty-seven Ronins, her classic heroes; Nogi, her latest hero; Fuji, her most beautiful mountain.
"Now do you know of Avalon
That sailors call Japan?
She holds as rare a chivalry
As ever bled for man.
King Arthur sleeps at Nikko hill
W...Read more of this...
by
Delville, Jean
...uros, Rameses and Sesostris,
But in the time of the Latins and when ruddy Rome
Upraised in bronze and gold her wasted emperors,
This is the hour when the infinite penetrates the heart of man.
Like the elected orb of the great sacred haloes
With which the head of future saints should be encircled,
The moon in blossom smiles her ethereal dreams
In sidereal incense brushing against the holy land.
Far in the blue sands of the biblical desert,
Reclining in her secrecy...Read more of this...
by
Petrarch, Francesco
...they gather'd were;Who had most happy lived, attended there:Popes, Emperors, nor Kings, no ensigns woreOf their past height, but naked show'd and poor.Where be their riches, where their precious gems,Their mitres, sceptres, robes, and diadems?O miserable men, whose hopes ariseFrom worldly joys, y...Read more of this...
by
Kipling, Rudyard
...r bones!)
Hands off o' the sons o' the Widow,
Hands off o' the goods in 'er shop,
For the Kings must come down an' the Emperors frown
When the Widow at Windsor says "Stop"!
(Poor beggars! -- we're sent to say "Stop"!)
Then 'ere's to the Lodge o' the Widow,
From the Pole to the Tropics it runs --
To the Lodge that we tile with the rank an' the file,
An' open in form with the guns.
(Poor beggars! -- it's always they guns!)
We 'ave 'eard o' the Widow at Windsor,
It...Read more of this...
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