Famous Extravagance Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Emblems of Love

...She

ONLY to be twin elements of joy
In this extravagance of Being, Love,
Were our divided natures shaped in twain;
And to this hour the whole world must consent.
Is it not very marvellous, our lives
Can only come to this out of a long
Strange sundering, with the years of the world between us?

He

Shall life do more than God? for hath not God
Striven with himself, when into known delight
Hi...Read more of this...
by Abercrombie, Lascelles


Favrile

...o,
for Faberge

For everything
which begins in limit
(where else might our work

begin?) and ends in grace,
or at least extravagance.
For the silk sleeves

of the puppet queen,
held at a ravishing angle
over her puppet lover slain,

for her lush vowels
mouthed by the plain man
hunched behind the stage....Read more of this...
by Doty, Mark

Gone Down

...To secure the country vote for Mister Hay. 
So he told 'em what he'd borrowed, and he told 'em what he'd spent, 
Though extravagance had blown it all away. 
Said he, "Vote for Hay, my hearties, and wherever we may roam 
We will borrow, undismayed by Fortune's frown!" 
When he got his little banjo, and he sang them "Home, Sweet Home!" 
Why, it made a blessed horse fall down. 
Then he summoned his supporters, and went spouting through the bush, 
To assure them that he'd build t...Read more of this...
by Paterson, Andrew Barton

Gregory Corso

...
 Not up to man whether you boom or not Death has long since distributed its
 categorical blue I sing thee Bomb Death's extravagance Death's jubilee
 Gem of Death's supremest blue The flyer will crash his death will differ
 with the climbor who'll fall to die by cobra is not to die by bad pork
Some die by swamp some by sea and some by the bushy-haired man in the night
 O there are deaths like witches of Arc Scarey deaths like Boris Karloff
 No-feeling deaths like birth-death ...Read more of this...
by Corso, Gregory

Must be a Woe --

...fficult
As Stalactite

A Common Bliss
Were had for less --
The price -- is
Even as the Grace --

Our lord -- thought no
Extravagance
To pay -- a Cross --...Read more of this...
by Dickinson, Emily


On A Flemish Window-pane

...
 By a frail crystal stair, whose viewless marge 
 Bears her slight footfall, tim'rous half, yet free, 
 In innocent extravagance of glee 
 The graceful elf alights from out the spheres, 
 While the quick spirit—thing of eyes and ears— 
 As now she goes, now comes, mounts, and anon 
 Descends, those delicate degrees upon, 
 Hears her melodious spirit from step to step run on. 
 
 Fraser's Magazine 


 




...Read more of this...
by Hugo, Victor

Prosody 101

...oked out and saw what a cold front had done
to the garden, sweeping in like common language,
unexpected in the sensuous
extravagance of a Maryland spring.
There was a dark edge around each flower
as if it had been outlined in ink
instead of frost, and the tension I felt
between the expected and actual
was like that time I came to you, ready
to say goodbye for good, for you had been
a cold front yourself lately, and as I walked in
you laughed and lifted me up in your arms
as i...Read more of this...
by Pastan, Linda

The Cremona Violin

...ged against him all her lack
Of other trinkets. Should she dare to use
A ring or brooch her husband might accuse
Her of extravagance, and ask to see
A strict accounting, or still worse might be.
But Heinrich would not be persuaded. Why
Should he not give her what he liked? And in
He went, determined certainly to buy
A thing so beautiful that it would win
Her wavering fancy. Altgelt's violin
He would outscore by such a handsome jewel
That Lotta could no longer be so cruel!
Pit...Read more of this...
by Lowell, Amy

The Investment

...lf an ear to the piano's vigor.

All that piano and new paint back there,
Was it some money suddenly come into?
Or some extravagance young love had been to?
Or old love on an impulse not to care--

Not to sink under being man and wife,
But get some color and music out of life?...Read more of this...
by Frost, Robert

The Raft

...ehold a Republic
Where a river speaks to men
And cries to those that love its ways,
Answering again
When in the heart's extravagance
The rascals bend to say
"O singing Mississippi
Shine, sing for us today."

But who is this in sweeping Oxford gown
Who steers the raft, or ambles up and down,
Or throws his gown aside, and there in white
Stands gleaming like a pillar of the night?
The lion of high courts, with hoary mane,
Fierce jester that this boyish court will gain —
Mark Twa...Read more of this...
by Lindsay, Vachel

The Wife of Baths Tale

...Venus,31
Be in their working full contrarious.
Mercury loveth wisdom and science,
And Venus loveth riot and dispence.* *extravagance
And for their diverse disposition,
Each falls in other's exaltation.
As thus, God wot, Mercury is desolate
In Pisces, where Venus is exaltate,
And Venus falls where Mercury is raised. 32
Therefore no woman by no clerk is praised.
The clerk, when he is old, and may not do
Of Venus' works not worth his olde shoe,
Then sits he down, and writes in h...Read more of this...
by Chaucer, Geoffrey

Three Odes To My Friend

...at the age of eighteen, 
and most of the remainder were composed while he was still quite 
young. Despite, however, the extravagance of some of them, such 
as the Winter Journey over the Hartz Mountains, and the Wanderer's 
Storm-Song, nothing can be finer than the noble one entitled Mahomet's 
Song, and others, such as the Spirit Song' over the Waters, The 
God-like, and, above all, the magnificent sketch of Prometheus, 
which forms part of an unfinished piece bearing the sa...Read more of this...
by von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang

Vacillation

...hat thought
Test every work of intellect or faith,
And everything that your own hands have wrought
And call those works extravagance of breath
That are not suited for such men as come
proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.

 IV

My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so...Read more of this...
by Yeats, William Butler

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