Famous Fading Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Birthday

...ow love twines
A wreath for every decanate, degree,
Minute and second, linked eternally
In chains of flowers that never fading are,
Each one as sempiternal as a star.

Let me go back to your last birthday. Then
I was already your one man of men
Appointed to complete you, and fulfil
From everlasting the eternal will.
We lay within the flood of crimson light
In my own balcony that August night,
And conjuring the aright and the averse
Created yet another universe.

We worked tog...Read more of this...
by Crowley, Aleister


A Childs Christmas In Wales

...where only a few children fumbled with bare red fingers in the wheel-
rutted snow and cat-called after us, their voices fading away, as we trudged uphill, into the cries of the dock
birds and the hooting of ships out in the whirling bay. And then, at tea the recovered Uncles would be jolly;
and the ice cake loomed in the center of the table like a marble grave. Auntie Hannah laced her tea with rum,
because it was only once a year.

Bring out the tall tales now that we told by...Read more of this...
by Thomas, Dylan

A Letter From Li Po

...n deep thought that thought itself be dead?
Already in our coil of rock and hand,
hidden in the cloud of mind, burning, fading,
under the waters, in the eyes of sand,
was that which in its time would understand.
Already in the Kingdom of the Dead
the scrolls were waiting for the names and dates
and what would there irrevocably be said.
The brush was in the hand, the poem was in the love,
the praise was in the word. The ‘Book of Lives'
listed the name, Li Po, as an Immortal;
a...Read more of this...
by Aiken, Conrad

Endymion: Book IV

...e Carian turn'd,
To mark if her dark eyes had yet discern'd
This beauty in its birth--Despair! despair!
He saw her body fading gaunt and spare
In the cold moonshine. Straight he seiz'd her wrist;
It melted from his grasp: her hand he kiss'd,
And, horror! kiss'd his own--he was alone.
Her steed a little higher soar'd, and then
Dropt hawkwise to the earth. There lies a den,
Beyond the seeming confines of the space
Made for the soul to wander in and trace
Its own existence, of r...Read more of this...
by Keats, John

Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie

...lete, imperfect, unfinished;
As if a morning of June, with all its music and sunshine,
Suddenly paused in the sky, and, fading, slowly descended
Into the east again, from whence it late had arisen.
Sometimes she lingered in towns, till, urged by the fever within her,
Urged by a restless longing, the hunger and thirst of the spirit,
She would commence again her endless search and endeavor;
Sometimes in churchyards strayed, and gazed on the crosses and tombstones,
Sat by some n...Read more of this...
by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth


Eviradnus

...Nimrod, and on ocean wide 
 With Neptune. Rivers too personified 
 Appear—the Rhine as by the Meuse betrayed, 
 And fading groups of Odin in the shade, 
 And the wolf Fenrir and the Asgard snake. 
 One might the place for dragons' stable take. 
 The only lights that in the shed appear 
 Spring from the table's giant chandelier 
 With seven iron branches—brought from hell 
 By Attila Archangel, people tell, 
 When he had conquered Mammon—and they say 
 That seven s...Read more of this...
by Hugo, Victor

Four Quartets 4: Little Gidding

...w
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?

 If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the jou...Read more of this...
by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)

Four Riddles

...er-much,
A flat and yet decided negative -
Photographers love such. 

There comes a welcome summons - hope revives,
And fading eyes grow bright, and pulses quicken:
Incessant pop the corks, and busy knives
Dispense the tongue and chicken. 

Flushed with new life, the crowd flows back again:
And all is tangled talk and mazy motion -
Much like a waving field of golden grain,
Or a tempestuous ocean. 

And thus they give the time, that Nature meant
For peaceful sleep and meditati...Read more of this...
by Carroll, Lewis

Haunted

...elds,¡¯ he thought, 
And half remembered starlight on the meadows, 
Scent of mown grass and voices of tired men, 20 
Fading along the field-paths; home and sleep 
And cool-swept upland spaces, whispering leaves, 
And far off the long churring night-jar¡¯s note. 

But something in the wood, trying to daunt him, 
Led him confused in circles through the thicket. 25 
He was forgetting his old wretched folly, 
And freedom was his need; his throat was choking. 
Barbed br...Read more of this...
by Sassoon, Siegfried

Hospital Window

...his spectacle after weeks of poisoned lassitude, my thighs 
belly chest & arms covered with poxied welts, 
head pains fading back of the neck, right eyebrow cheek 
mouth paralyzed--from taking the wrong medicine, sweated 
too much in the forehead helpless, covered my rage from 
gorge to prostate with grinding jaw and tightening anus 
not released the weeping scream of horror at robot Mayaguez 
World self ton billions metal grief unloaded 
Pnom Penh to Nakon Thanom, Sa...Read more of this...
by Ginsberg, Allen

Lara

...grew 
Cold in the many, anxious in the few. 
His hall scarce echoes with his wonted name, 
His portrait darkens in its fading frame, 
Another chief consoled his destined bride, 
The young forgot him, and the old had died; 
"Yet doth he live!" exclaims the impatient heir, 
And sighs for sables which he must not wear. 
A hundred scutcheons deck with gloomy grace 
The Laras' last and longest dwelling-place; 
But one is absent from the mouldering file, 
That now were welcome to ...Read more of this...
by Byron, George (Lord)

Maple

...made a pleasant sunny cellar.)
Her mother's bedroom was her father's still,
Where she could watch her mother's picture fading.
Once she found for a bookmark in the Bible
A maple leaf she thought must have been laid
In wait for her there. She read every word
Of the two pages it was pressed between,
As if it was her mother speaking to her.
But forgot to put the leaf back in closing
And lost the place never to read again.
She was sure, though, there had been nothing in it.

So ...Read more of this...
by Frost, Robert

Mountains

...gh gulfs of calm and glittering air; 
Stately mountains, high and hoary, piled with blocks of amber cloud, 
Where the fading twilight lingers, when the winds are wailing loud; 

Grand old mountains, overbeetling brawling brooks and deep ravines, 
Where the moonshine, pale and mournful, flows on rocks and evergreens. 

Underneath these regal ridges - underneath the gnarly trees, 
I am sitting, lonely-hearted, listening to a lonely breeze! 
Sitting by an ancient caseme...Read more of this...
by Kendall, Henry

Mrs Moon

...Mrs Moon
sitting up in the sky
little old lady
rock-a-bye
with a ball of fading light
and silvery needles
knitting the night...Read more of this...
by McGough, Roger

Ode to a Nightingale

...month endows 
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; 45 
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; 
Fast-fading violets cover'd up in leaves; 
And mid-May's eldest child, 
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, 
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. 50 

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time 
I have been half in love with easeful Death, 
Call'd him soft names in many a mus¨¨d rhyme, 
To take into the air my quiet breath; 
Now more than ever ...Read more of this...
by Keats, John

Requiem

...ks upon the cheeks.
I know how dark or ash-blond strands of hair
Can suddenly turn white. I've learned to recognise
The fading smiles upon submissive lips,
The trembling fear inside a hollow laugh.
That's why I pray not for myself
But all of you who stood there with me
Through fiercest cold and scorching July heat
Under a towering, completely blind red wall.

2.
The hour has come to remember the dead.
I see you, I hear you, I feel you:
The one who resisted the long drag to th...Read more of this...
by Akhmatova, Anna

The Growth of Love

...that conjure back the hour and place,
And evermore I look upon thy face,
As in the spring of years long pass'd away;
No fading of thy beauty's rich array,
No detriment of age on thee I trace,
But time's defeat written in spoils of grace,
From rivals robb'd, whom thou didst pity and slay. 
So hath thy growth been, thus thy faith is true,
Unchanged in change, still to my growing sense,
To life's desire the same, and nothing new:
But as thou wert in dream and prescience
At love'...Read more of this...
by Bridges, Robert Seymour

The Lady of the Lake

...ll is glistening show,
     Like the idle gleam that December's beam
          Can dart on ice and snow.

     'And fading, like that varied gleam,
          Is our inconstant shape,
     Who now like knight and lady seem,
          And now like dwarf and ape.

     'It was between the night and day,
          When the Fairy King has power,
     That I sunk down in a sinful fray,
     And 'twixt life and death was snatched away
          To the joyless Elfin bowe...Read more of this...
by Scott, Sir Walter

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

...ey jogg'd each other, "Brother! Brother!
Now for the Porter's shoulder-knot a-creaking!" 

LXXXI.
Ah, with the Grape my fading Life provide,
And wash my Body whence the Life has died,
And in a Windingsheet of Vine-leaf wrapt,
So bury me by some sweet Garden-side. 

LXXXII.
That ev'n my buried Ashes such a Snare
Of Perfume shall fling up into the Air,
As not a True Believer passing by
But shall be overtaken unaware. 

LXXXIII.
Indeed the Idols I have loved so long
Have done my...Read more of this...
by Khayyam, Omar

The Seasons: Winter

...
From every low Pursuit! and feed my Soul,
With Knowledge, conscious Peace, and Vertue pure,
Sacred, substantial, never-fading Bliss! 

LO! from the livid East, or piercing North,
Thick Clouds ascend, in whose capacious Womb,
A vapoury Deluge lies, to Snow congeal'd:
Heavy, they roll their fleecy World along;
And the Sky saddens with th'impending Storm. 
Thro' the hush'd Air, the whitening Shower descends,
At first, thin-wavering; till, at last, the Flakes
Fall broad, and wid...Read more of this...
by Thomson, James

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