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Famous Emptying Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Aiken, Conrad
...r worse,
sifted by leaves, sifted by snow; on mulberry silk
a slant of witch-light; on the pure text
a slant of genius; emptying mind and heart
for winecups and more winecups and more words.
What was his time? Say that it was a change,
but constant as a changing thing may be,
from chicory's moon-dark blue down the taut scale
to chicory's tenderest pink, in a pink field
such as imagination dreams of thought.
But of the heart beneath the winecup moon
the tears that fell...Read more of this...



by McGonagall, William Topaz
...they can enjoy themselves during the live-long summmer day,
Near to the little purling burn, meandering on its way,
And emptying itself into the pond of Monikie,
Which supplies the people with water belonging to Dundee....Read more of this...

by Swinburne, Algernon Charles
...lus,
For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces,
The tongueless vigil, and all the pain.

Come with bows bent and emptying of quivers,
Maiden most perfect, lady of light,
With a noise of winds and many rivers,
With a clamour of waters, and with might;
Bind on thy sandals, O thou most fleet,
Over the splendour and speed of thy feet;
For the faint east quickens, the wan west shivers,
Round the feet of the day and the feet of the night.

Where shall we find her, how sh...Read more of this...

by Creeley, Robert
...>

In mind discover I,
in body find the sky.

Sleep in the dream as one,
wake to the others there found.


22)

Emptying out
each complicating part,

each little twist of mind inside,
each clenched fist,

each locked, particularizing thought,
forgotten, emptying out.


23)

What did it feel like
to be one at a time --

to be caught in a mind
in the body you'd found

in yourself alone --
in each other one?


24)

Broken hearts, a curious round of echoes --
and ther...Read more of this...

by Berryman, John
...d, baby, there was of
schist but small there (some).

Why should I tell a truth? when in the crack
of the dooming & emptying news I did hold back—
in the taxi too, sick—
silent—it's so I broke down here, in his mind
whose sire as mine one same way—I refuse,
hoping the guy go home....Read more of this...



by Merwin, W S
...ed through wars
and echoes of wars around your silence
through days of parting and seasons of absence
with the house emptying as the years went their way
until it was home to bats and swallows
and still when spring climbed toward summer
you opened once more the curled sleeping fingers
of newborn leaves as though nothing had happened
you and the seasons spoke the same language
and all these years I have looked through your limbs
to the river below and the roofs and t...Read more of this...

by Flynn, Nick
...I want to erase your footprints
from my walls. Each pillow
is thick with your reasons. Omens 

fill the sidewalk below my window: a woman
in a party hat, clinging
to a tin-foil balloon. Shadows 

creep slowly across the tar, someone yells, "Stop!"
and I close my eyes. I can't watch 

as this town slowly empties, leaving me
strung between bo...Read more of this...

by Russell, George William
...s of life or death:
So softly ebbed away, away,
The life that had been light to him,
So fled her beauty leaving dim
The emptying chambers of his heart
Thrilled only by the pang and smart,
The dull and throbbing agony
That suffers still, yet knows not why.
Love’s immortality so blind
Dreams that all things with it conjoined
Must share with it immortal day:
But not of this—but not of this—
The touch, the eyes, the laugh, the kiss,
Fall from it and it goes its way.
So bl...Read more of this...

by Kinnell, Galway
...He climbed to the top
of one of those million white pines
set out across the emptying pastures
of the fifties - some program to enrich the rich
and rebuke the forefathers
who cleared it all at once with ox and axe - 
climbed to the top, probably to get out
of the shadow
not of those forefathers but of this father
and saw for the first time
down in its valley, Bruce Pond, giving off
its little steam in the afternoon,

pond ...Read more of this...

by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and afte...Read more of this...

by Boland, Eavan
....

She looked down the Boulevard des Capucines.
She ordered more coffee. She stood up.
The streets were emptying. The heat was killing.
She thought the distance smelled of rain and lightning.

These are wild roses, appliqued on silk by hand,
darkly picked, stitched boldly, quickly.
The rest is tortoiseshell and has the reticent clear patience 
 of its element. It is
a worn-out, underwater bullion and it keeps,
even now, an inference of its ...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Amy
...dy flaw
She glided imperceptibly away,
Drew farther off and in the bright sky seemed to fade.

26
Home, through the emptying streets, Max took Christine,
Who would have hid her sorrow from his gaze.
Before the iron gateway, clasped between
Each garden wall, he stopped. She, in amaze,
Asked, "Do you enter not then, Mynheer Breuck?
My father told me of your courtesy.
Since I am now your charge, 'tis meet for me
To show such hospitality as maiden may,
Without dis...Read more of this...

by Cavafy, Constantine P
...this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people's faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly, 
everyone going home so lost in thought?

 Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
 And some who have just returned from the border say
 there are no barbarians any longer.

And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution....Read more of this...

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