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Famous Falls Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Wilde, Oscar
...lly whoop the black and thievish crows,
And then the chestnut-tree its glory wears,
And on the grass the creamy blossom falls
In odorous excess, and faint half-whispered madrigals

Steal from the bluebells' nodding carillons
Each breezy morn, and then white jessamine,
That star of its own heaven, snap-dragons
With lolling crimson tongues, and eglantine
In dusty velvets clad usurp the bed
And woodland empery, and when the lingering rose hath shed

Red leaf by leaf its folded p...Read more of this...



by Alighieri, Dante
...ut here the gentle sage, 
 Who knew beforehand that we faced, to me 
 Spake first, "Regard not; for a threat misaimed 
 Falls idle. Fear not to continue past. 
 His power to us, however else it be, 
 Is not to hinder." Then, that bulk inflate 
 Confronting, - "Peace, thou greed! thy lusting rage 
 Consume thee inward! Not thy word we wait 
 The path to open. It is willed on high, - 
 There, where the Angel of the Sword ye know 
 Took ruin upon the proud adulte...Read more of this...

by Frost, Robert
...ture.
And neither would I choose to be a puke
Who cares not what be does in company,
And when he can't do anything, falls back
On words, and tries his worst to make words speak
Louder than actions, and sometimes achieves it.
It seems a narrow choice the age insists on
8ow about being a good Greek, for instance)
That course, they tell me, isn't offered this year.
"Come, but this isn't choosing—puke or prude?"

Well, if I have to choose one or the other,
I choose to...Read more of this...

by Milton, John
...ul, 
For ever happy: Him who disobeys, 
Me disobeys, breaks union, and that day, 
Cast out from God and blessed vision, falls 
Into utter darkness, deep ingulfed, his place 
Ordained without redemption, without end. 
So spake the Omnipotent, and with his words 
All seemed well pleased; all seemed, but were not all. 
That day, as other solemn days, they spent 
In song and dance about the sacred hill; 
Mystical dance, which yonder starry sphere 
Of planets, and of fixed...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...narrower, swiftly
 cutting the water—I see him die; 
He gives one convulsive leap in the centre of the circle, and then falls flat and still in
 the
 bloody foam. 

10
O the old manhood of me, my joy! 
My children and grand-children—my white hair and beard,
My largeness, calmness, majesty, out of the long stretch of my life. 

O the ripen’d joy of womanhood! 
O perfect happiness at last! 
I am more than eighty years of age—my hair, too, is pure white—I am the most
 ve...Read more of this...



by Wilde, Oscar
...e Prince of chivalry, the Lord of war,
Gaston de Foix: for some untimely star
Led him against thy city, and he fell,
As falls some forest-lion fighting well.
Taken from life while life and love were new,
He lies beneath God's seamless veil of blue;
Tall lance-like reeds wave sadly o'er his head,
And oleanders bloom to deeper red,
Where his bright youth flowed crimson on the ground.

Look farther north unto that broken mound, -
There, prisoned now within a lordly tomb
...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...r his hip-band;

His glance is calm and commanding—he tosses the slouch of his hat away from
 his forehead;
The sun falls on his crispy hair and moustache—falls on the black of his
 polish’d and perfect limbs. 

I behold the picturesque giant, and love him—and I do not stop there; 
I go with the team also. 

In me the caresser of life wherever moving—backward as well as forward
 slueing; 
To niches aside and junior bending.

Oxen that rattle the yoke...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...out of itself.) 

Toward the fluid and attaching character exudes the sweat of the love of young and old; 
From it falls distill’d the charm that mocks beauty and attainments; 
Toward it heaves the shuddering longing ache of contact. 

9
Allons! whoever you are, come travel with me!
Traveling with me, you find what never tires. 

The earth never tires; 
The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first—Nature is rude and incomprehensible
 at
 first;

Be not di...Read more of this...

by Chesterton, G K
...rawing of swords,
And the tainted tower of the heathen hordes
Leans to our hammers, fires and cords,
Leans a little and falls.

"Follow the star that lives and leaps,
Follow the sword that sings,
For we go gathering heathen men,
A terrible harvest, ten by ten,
As the wrath of the last red autumn--then
When Christ reaps down the kings.

"Follow a light that leaps and spins,
Follow the fire unfurled!
For riseth up against realm and rod,
A thing forgotten, a thing downtr...Read more of this...

by Baudelaire, Charles
...gant courtesan's thin face. 

Was slimmer waist e'er in a ball-room wooed? 
Her floating robe, in royal amplitude, 
Falls in deep folds around a dry foot, shod 
With a bright flower-like shoe that gems the sod. 

The swarms that hum about her collar-bones 
As the lascivious streams caress the stones, 
Conceal from every scornful jest that flies, 
Her gloomy beauty; and her fathomless eyes 

Are made of shade and void; with flowery sprays 
Her skull is wreathed artisti...Read more of this...

by Bradstreet, Anne
...ies my cold stomach hath bred?
2.74 Whence vomits, worms, and flux have issued?
2.75 What breaches, knocks, and falls I daily have?
2.76 And some perhaps, I carry to my grave.
2.77 Sometimes in fire, sometimes in water fall:
2.78 Strangely preserv'd, yet mind it not at all.
2.79 At home, abroad, my danger's manifold
2.80 That wonder 'tis, my glass till now doth hold.
2.81 I've done: unto my elders I give way,
2.82 For 'tis but l...Read more of this...

by Bridges, Robert Seymour
...her, loves again.
So from her beauty both our loves are moved,
And by her beauty are sustain'd; nor when
The earth falls from the sun is this disproved. 

31
In all things beautiful, I cannot see
Her sit or stand, but love is stir'd anew:
'Tis joy to watch the folds fall as they do,
And all that comes is past expectancy.
If she be silent, silence let it be;
He who would bid her speak might sit and sue
The deep-brow'd Phidian Jove to be untrue
To his two thousand ...Read more of this...

by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...es, rivalries, 
And earthly heats that spring and sparkle out 
Among us in the jousts, while women watch 
Who wins, who falls; and waste the spiritual strength 
Within us, better offered up to Heaven.' 

To whom the monk: `The Holy Grail!--I trust 
We are green in Heaven's eyes; but here too much 
We moulder--as to things without I mean-- 
Yet one of your own knights, a guest of ours, 
Told us of this in our refectory, 
But spake with such a sadness and so low 
We heard n...Read more of this...

by Scott, Sir Walter
...flounders in the brake,
     Now sinks his barge upon the lake;
     Now leader of a broken host,
     His standard falls, his honor's lost.
     Then,—from my couch may heavenly might
     Chase that worst phantom of the night!—
     Again returned the scenes of youth,
     Of confident, undoubting truth;
     Again his soul he interchanged
     With friends whose hearts were long estranged.
     They come, in dim procession led,
     The cold, the faithless, and...Read more of this...

by Poe, Edgar Allan
...ah, nevermore! 

Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer 
Swung by seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor. 80 
"Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee¡ªby these angels he hath sent thee 
Respite¡ªrespite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore!" 
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore." 
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore." 

"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil! prophet still, if bird or dev...Read more of this...

by Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...le
And die in rain,--the fiery band which held
Their natures, snaps . . . ere the shock cease to tingle
One falls and then another in the path
Senseless, nor is the desolation single,
Yet ere I can say where the chariot hath
Past over them; nor other trace I find
But as of foam after the Ocean's wrath
Is spent upon the desert shore.--Behind,
Old men, and women foully disarrayed
Shake their grey hair in the insulting wind,
Limp in the dance & strain, with limbs...Read more of this...

by Schiller, Friedrich von
...etching,
And in a purple-tinged hill terminates sweetly the world.

Deep at the foot of the mountain, that under me falls away steeply,
Wanders the greenish-hued stream, looking like glass as it flows.
Endlessly under me see I the ether, and endlessly o'er
Giddily look I above, shudderingly look I below,
But between the infinite height and the infinite hollow
Safely the wanderer moves over a well-guarded path.
Smilingly past me are flying the banks all teeming wit...Read more of this...

by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...external sensations are no less private to myself than are my
thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within
my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and, with all its
elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which surround
it. . . . In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul,
the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul."
425. V. Weston, From Ritual to Romance; chapter on t...Read more of this...

by Walker, Alice
...
We alone can devalue gold
by not caring
if it falls or rises
in the marketplace.
Wherever there is gold
there is a chain, you know,
and if your chain
is gold
so much the worse
for you.


Feathers, shells
and sea-shaped stones
are all as rare.


This could be our revolution:
to love what is plentiful
as much as
what's scarce. ...Read more of this...

by Akhmatova, Anna
...eva's ice is no longer still.



x x x

God is unkind to gardeners and reapers.
Slanted rain coils and falls from up high
And the wide raincoats catch water,
That once had reflected the sky.

In underwater realm are fields and meadows
And the free currents sing a lot,
Plums rupture on bloated branches
And grass strands, lying down, rot.

And through the dense and watery net
I see your darling face,
A quiet park, a round porch
And a Chinese...Read more of this...

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Book: Reflection on the Important Things