Famous Encounter Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Encounter poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous encounter poems. These examples illustrate what a famous encounter poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Francesco Petrarch
SONNET V. Quand' io movo i sospiri a chiamar voi. HE PLAYS UPON THE NAME LAURETA OR LAURA. In sighs when I outbreathe your cherish'd name,That name which love has writ upon my heart,LAUd instantly upon my doting tongue,At the first thought of its sweet sound, is heard;Your REgal state, which...Read more of this...
by
Joseph Brodsky
...and when "the future" is uttered, swarms of mice
rush out of the Russian language and gnaw a piece
of ripened memory which is twice
as hole-ridden as real cheese.
After all these years it hardly matters who
or what stands in the corner, hidden by heavy drapes,
and your mind resounds not with a seraphic "doh",
only their rustle. Life, that no one dares
to...Read more of this...
by
Maya Angelou
Beloved,
In what other lives or lands
Have I known your lips
Your Hands
Your Laughter brave
Irreverent.
Those sweet excesses that
I do adore.
What surety is there
That we will meet again,
On other worlds some
Future time undated.
I defy my body's haste.
Without the promise
Of one more sweet encounter
I will not deign to die....Read more of this...
by
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Towery city and branchy between towers;
Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd, rook-racked, river-rounded;
The dapple-eared lily below thee; that country and town did
Once encounter in, here coped and poisèd powers;
Thou hast a base and brickish skirt there, sours
That neighbour-nature thy grey beauty is grounded
Best in; graceless growth, thou hast confounded
Rural rural keeping—folk, flocks, and flowers.
Yet ah! this air I gather and...Read more of this...
by
John Davidson
In anguish we uplift
A new unhallowed song:
The race is to the swift;
The battle to the strong.
Of old it was ordained
That we, in packs like curs,
Some thirty million trained
And licensed murderers,
In crime should live and act,
If cunning folk say sooth
Who flay the naked fact
And carve the heart of truth....Read more of this...
by
T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or...Read more of this...
by
Robert Francis
Those who have touched it or been touched by it
Or brushed by something that the vine has brushed,
Or burning it, have stood where the sly smoke
Has touched them-Know the meaning of its name.
The leaf is smooth. Its green is innocence.
A clean, unblemished leaf, glossy when young.
A leaf the unobserving might overlook
And the observing find too prosperous.
I've seen a vine...Read more of this...
by
Horace
Not I, but Varius:—he, of Homer's brood
A tuneful swan, shall bear you on his wing,
Your tale of trophies, won by field or flood,
Mighty alike to sing.
Not mine such themes,...Read more of this...
by
Rainer Maria Rilke
He felt the entrance's green darkness
wrapped cooly round him like a silken cloak
that he was still accepting and arranging;
when at the opposite transparent end, far off,
through green sunlight, as through green window panes,
whitely a solitary shape
flared up, long remaining distant
and then finally, the downdriving light
boiling over it at every step,
bearing on itself a bright pulsation,
which in the blond ran...Read more of this...
by
Sylvia Plath
Axes
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes traveling
Off from the center like horses.
The sap
Wells like tears, like the
Water striving
To re-establish its mirror
Over the rock
That drops and turns,
A white skull,
Eaten by weedy greens.
Years later I
Encounter them on the road---
Words dry and riderless,
The indefatigable hoof-taps....Read more of this...
by
William Stafford
It is time for all the heroes to go home
if they have any, time for all of us common ones
to locate ourselves by the real things
we live by.
Far to the north, or indeed in any direction,
strange mountains and creatures have always lurked-
elves, goblins, trolls, and spiders:-we
encounter them in dread and wonder,
But once we have tasted far streams, touched the...Read more of this...
by
Robert Frost
ONCE on the kind of day called “weather breeder,”
When the heat slowly hazes and the sun
By its own power seems to be undone,
I was half boring through, half climbing through
A swamp of cedar. Choked with oil of cedar
And scurf of plants, and weary and over-heated,
And sorry I ever left the road I knew,
I paused and rested on a sort...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Carew
SO grieves th' adventurous merchant, when he throws
All the long toil'd-for treasure his ship stows
Into the angry main, to save from wrack
Himself and men, as I grieve to give back
These letters : yet so powerful is your sway
As if you bid me die, I must obey.
Go then, blest papers, you shall kiss those...Read more of this...
by
A S J Tessimond
Dogs take new friends abruptly and by smell,
Cats' meetings are neat, tactual, caressive.
Monkeys exchange their fleas before they speak.
Snakes, no doubt, coil by coil reach mutual knowledge.
We then, at first encounter, should be silent;
Not court the cortex but the epidermis;
Not work from inside out but outside in;
Discover each other's flesh, its scent and texture;
Familiarize the sinews and the nerve-ends,
The...Read more of this...
by
William Strode
Now the declining sun 'gan downwards bend
From higher heavens, and from his locks did send
A milder flame, when near to Tiber's flow
A lutinist allay'd his careful woe
With sounding charms, and in a greeny seat
Of shady oake took shelter from the heat.
A Nightingale oreheard him, that did use
To sojourn in the neighbour groves, the muse
That fill'd the place, the Syren...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
The end of the affair is always death.
She's my workshop. Slippery eye,
out of the tribe of myself my breath
finds you gone. I horrify
those who stand by. I am fed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
Finger to finger, now she's mine.
She's not too far. She's my encounter.
I beat her like a bell....Read more of this...
by
Robert Burns
THERE was once a day, but old Time wasythen young,
That brave Caledonia, the chief of her line,
From some of your northern deities sprung,
(Who knows not that brave Caledonia’s divine?)
From Tweed to the Orcades was her domain,
To hunt, or to pasture, or do what she would:
Her heav’nly relations there fixed her reign,
And pledg’d her their godheads...Read more of this...
by
Dylan Thomas
I
I, in my intricate image, stride on two levels,
Forged in man's minerals, the brassy orator
Laying my ghost in metal,
The scales of this twin world tread on the double,
My half ghost in armour hold hard in death's corridor,
To my man-iron sidle.
Beginning with doom in the bulb, the spring unravels,
Bright as her spinning-wheels, the colic season
Worked on a world of petals;
She...Read more of this...
by
Edna St. Vincent Millay
"Wolf!" cried my cunning heart
At every sheep it spied,
And roused the countryside.
"Wolf! Wolf!"—and up would start
Good neighbours, bringing spade
And pitchfork to my aid.
At length my cry was known:
Therein lay my release.
I met the wolf alone
And was devoured in peace....Read more of this...
by
Isaac Watts
The privileges of the living above the dead.
Isa. 38:18,19.
Awake, my zeal; awake, my love,
To serve my Savior here below,
In works which perfect saints above
And holy angels cannot do.
Awake, my charity, to feed
The hungry soul, and clothe the poor;
In heav'n are found no sons of need,
There all these duties are no more.
Subdue thy passions, O my soul!
Maintain the fight,...Read more of this...
by
Francesco Petrarch
SONNET LXVII. Poi che mia speme è lunga a venir troppo. HE COUNSELS LOVERS TO FLEE, RATHER THAN BE CONSUMED BY THE FLAMES OF LOVE. Since my hope's fruit yet faileth to arrive,And short the space vouchsafed me to survive,Betimes of this aware I fain would be,Swifter than light or wind from...Read more of this...
by
Ezra Pound
All the while they were talking the new morality
Her eyes explored me.
And when I rose to go
Her fingers were like the tissue
Of a Japanese paper napkin....Read more of this...
by
Wystan Hugh (W H) Auden
Among pelagian travelers,Lost on their lewd conceited wayTo Massachusetts, Michigan,Miami or L.A., An airborne instrument I sit,Predestined nightly to fulfillColumbia-Giesen-Management'sUnfathomable will, By whose election justified,I bring my gospel of the MuseTo fundamentalists, to nuns,to Gentiles and to Jews, And daily, seven days a week,Before a local sense has jelled,From talking-site to talking-siteAm jet-or-prop-propelled. Though warm my welcome everywhere,I shift so...Read more of this...
by
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
You shall hear how Pau-Puk-Keewis,
He, the handsome Yenadizze,
Whom the people called the Storm-Fool,
Vexed the village with disturbance;
You shall hear of all his mischief,
And his flight from Hiawatha,
And his wondrous transmigrations,
And the end of his adventures.
On the shores of Gitche Gumee,
On the dunes of Nagow Wudjoo,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water
Stood the lodge of Pau-Puk-Keewis.
It was he who in his frenzy
Whirled these...Read more of this...
by
Czeslaw Milosz
We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.
And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.
That was long ago.Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.
O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash...Read more of this...
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