Famous Exultation Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Farewell to Agassiz

...d,
Till their glorious raid is o'er,
And they touch our ransomed shore!
Then the welcome of a nation,
With its shout of exultation,
Shall awake the dumb creation,
And the shapes of buried aeons
Join the living creature's paeans,
Till the fossil echoes roar;
While the mighty megalosaurus
Leads the palaeozoic chorus,
God bless the great Professor,
And the land his proud possessor,--
Bless them now and evermore!...Read more of this...
by Holmes, Oliver Wendell


A Hill

...heap landscapes and ugly religious prints
Were all on sale. The colors and noise
Like the flying hands were gestures of exultation,
So that even the bargaining
Rose to the ear like a voluble godliness.
And then, where it happened, the noises suddenly stopped,
And it got darker; pushcarts and people dissolved
And even the great Farnese Palace itself
Was gone, for all its marble; in its place
Was a hill, mole-colored and bare. It was very cold,
Close to freezing, with a promise...Read more of this...
by Hecht, Anthony

A Hymn

...a living tether 
The prince and priest and thrall, 
Bind all our lives together, 
Smite us and save us all; 
In ire and exultation 
Aflame with faith, and free, 
Lift up a living nation, 
A single sword to thee....Read more of this...
by Chesterton, G K

A poem on divine revelation

...tain side, 
Where far from converse and the social band, 
My days shall pass inglorious away: [3] 
But this shall be my exultation still 
My chiefest merit and my only joy, 
That when the hunter on some western hill, 
Or furzy glade shall see my grassy tomb, 
And know the stream which mourns unheeded by, 
He for a moment shall repress his step, 
And say, There lies a Son of Nassau-Hall....Read more of this...
by Brackenridge, Hugh Henry

Alastor: or the Spirit of Solitude

...the wild Carmanian waste,
And o'er the aërial mountains which pour down
Indus and Oxus from their icy caves,
In joy and exultation held his way;
Till in the vale of Cashmire, far within
Its loneliest dell, where odorous plants entwine
Beneath the hollow rocks a natural bower,
Beside a sparkling rivulet he stretched
His languid limbs. A vision on his sleep
There came, a dream of hopes that never yet 
Had flushed his cheek. He dreamed a veilèd maid
Sate near him, talking in low...Read more of this...
by Shelley, Percy Bysshe


Artilleryman's Vision The

...plause,
 (some
 special success;) 
And ever the sound of the cannon, far or near, (rousing, even in dreams, a devilish
 exultation,
 and
 all the old mad joy, in the depths of my soul;)
And ever the hastening of infantry shifting positions—batteries, cavalry, moving
 hither
 and
 thither; 
(The falling, dying, I heed not—the wounded, dripping and red, I heed not—some
 to the
 rear
 are hobbling;) 
Grime, heat, rush—aid-de-camps galloping by, or on a full run; 
With the patter...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt

From Pent-up Aching Rivers

...makes me or any man drunk, fainting with excess; 
From what the divine husband knows—from the work of fatherhood;
From exultation, victory, and relief—from the bedfellow’s embrace in the night; 
From the act-poems of eyes, hands, hips, and bosoms, 
From the cling of the trembling arm, 
From the bending curve and the clinch, 
From side by side, the pliant coverlid off-throwing,
From the one so unwilling to have me leave—and me just as unwilling to leave, 
(Yet a moment, O ten...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt

Hiawathas Departure

...sorrow,
As the fog from off the water,
As the mist from off the meadow.
With a smile of joy and triumph,
With a look of exultation,
As of one who in a vision
Sees what is to be, but is not,
Stood and waited Hiawatha.
Toward the sun his hands were lifted,
Both the palms spread out against it,
And between the parted fingers
Fell the sunshine on his features,
Flecked with light his naked shoulders,
As it falls and flecks an oak-tree
Through the rifted leaves and branches.
O'er t...Read more of this...
by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

Hymn to Love

...use us for a sound of song,
And Love’s meaning our life wields,
Making our souls like syllables to throng
His tunes of exultation. 

Down the blind speed of a fatal world we fly,
As rain blown along earth’s fields;
Yet are we god-desiring liturgy,
Sung joys of adoration; 

Yea, made of chance and all a labouring strife,
We go charged with a strong flame;
For as a language Love hath seized on life
His burning heart to story. 

Yea, Love, we are thine, the liturgy of thee,
Thy...Read more of this...
by Abercrombie, Lascelles

Individuality

...t; ‘tis mine own.

Thank God, I say, for while I love you so, 
With that vast love, as passionate as tender, 
I feel an exultation as I know
I have not made you a complete surrender.
Here is my body; bruise it, if you will, 
And break my heart; I have that something still.

You cannot grasp it. Seize the breath of morn, 
Or bind the perfume of the rose as well.
God put it in my soul when I was born; 
It is not mine to give away, or sell, 
Or offer up on any alter shrine.
It w...Read more of this...
by Wilcox, Ella Wheeler

Insomnia

...m young and free and strong.

Maybe it is the springtide. I am so happy I am afraid. 
The sense of living fills me with exultation. I want to sing, 
to dance; I am dithyrambic with delight.

I think the moon must be to blame:
It fills the room with fairy flame;
It paints the wall, it seems to pour
A dappled flood upon the floor.
I rise and through the window stare . . .
Ye gods! how marvelously fair!
From Montrouge to the Martyr's Hill,
A silver city rapt and still;
Dim, drow...Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William

May Magnificat

...and clinches all—

This ecstasy all through mothering earth 
Tells Mary her mirth till Christ's birth 
To remember and exultation 
In God who was her salvation....Read more of this...
by Hopkins, Gerard Manley

Our New Horse

...the game. 

* * * * * 

The winter rolled by, and the station 
Was green with the garland of Spring; 
A spirit of glad exultation 
Awoke in each animate thing; 
And all the old love, the old longing, 
Broke out in the breasts of the boys -- 
The visions of racing came thronging 
With all its delirious joys. 

The rushing of floods in their courses, 
The rattle of rain on the roofs, 
Recalled the fierce rush of the horses, 
The thunder of galloping hoofs. 
And soon one broke ...Read more of this...
by Paterson, Andrew Barton

Prometheus Unbound: Act I (excerpt)

...through wide Heaven!
How will thy soul, cloven to its depth with terror,
Gape like a hell within! I speak in grief,
Not exultation, for I hate no more,
As then ere misery made me wise. The curse
Once breathed on thee I would recall. Ye Mountains,
Whose many-voicèd Echoes, through the mist
Of cataracts, flung the thunder of that spell!
Ye icy Springs, stagnant with wrinkling frost,
Which vibrated to hear me, and then crept
Shuddering through India! Thou serenest Air,
Through w...Read more of this...
by Shelley, Percy Bysshe

Shepherd And Goatherd

...eyond the sea.

Goatherd. He had often played his pipes among my hills,
And when he played it was their loneliness,
The exultation of their stone, that died
Under his fingers.

Shepherd. I had it from his mother,
And his own flock was browsing at the door.

Goatherd. How does she bear her grief? There is not a
 shepherd
But grows more gentle when he speaks her name,
Remembering kindness done, and how can I,
That found when I had neither goat nor grazing
New welcome and old wi...Read more of this...
by Yeats, William Butler

The House Of Dust: Part 04: 03: Palimpsest: A Deceitful Portrait

...room, grow silent,
The eaves make liquid music. . . .Hours have passed,
And nothing changes, and everything is changed.
Exultation is dead, Beauty is harlot,—
And walks the streets. The thing I strongly seized
Has turned to darkness, and darkness rides my heart.

If you could solve this darkness you would have me.
This causeless melancholy that comes with rain,
Or on such days as this when large wet snowflakes
Drop heavily, with rain . . . whence rises this?
Well, so-and-so, ...Read more of this...
by Aiken, Conrad

The Hunting Of The Snark

...y pound."
The Jury all cheered, though the Judge said he feared
 That the phrase was not legally sound.

But their wild exultation was suddenly checked
 When the jailer informed them, with tears,
Such a sentence would have not the slightest effect,
 As the pig had been dead for some years.

The Judge left the Court, looking deeply disgusted:
 But the Snark, though a little aghast,
As the lawyer to whom the defence was intrusted,
 Went bellowing on to the last.

Thus the Barri...Read more of this...
by Carroll, Lewis

The May Magnificat

..., and clinches all—

This ecstasy all through mothering earth
Tells Mary her mirth till Christ's birth
 To remember and exultation
 In God who was her salvation....Read more of this...
by Hopkins, Gerard Manley

The Wish

...consolation;
And I am silent; my murmur is dead,
My soul, sunk in a depression’s shade,
Hides in its depths the bitter exultation.
I don’t deplore my passing dream of life --
Vanish in dark, the empty apparition!
I care only for my love’s infliction,
And let me die, but only die in love!...Read more of this...
by Pushkin, Alexander

To Walt Whitman In America

...ime.

Till it rise and remain and take station
With the stars of the worlds that rejoice;
Till the voice of its heart's exultation
Be as theirs an invariable voice;
By no discord of evil estranged,
By no pause, by no breach in it changed,
By no clash in the chord of its choice.

It is one with the world's generations,
With the spirit, the star, and the sod;
With the kingless and king-stricken nations,
With the cross, and the chain, and the rod;
The most high, the most secret,...Read more of this...
by Swinburne, Algernon Charles

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