Famous Fathom Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Fathom poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous fathom poems. These examples illustrate what a famous fathom poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Burns, Robert
...or station in life.—R. B. [back]
Note 13. Take an opportunity of going unnoticed to a “bear-stack,” and fathom it three times round. The last fathom of the last time you will catch in your arms the appearance of your future conjugal yoke-fellow.—R. B. [back]
Note 14. Take an opportunity of going unnoticed to a “bear-stack,” and fathom it three times round. The last fathom of the last time you will catch in your arms the appearance of yo...Read more of this...
by
Dryden, John
...le's eyes,
And seem'd but pomp, did other ends disguise:
Achitophel had form'd it, with intent
To sound the depths, and fathom where it went,
The people's hearts; distinguish friends from foes;
And try their strength, before they came to blows.
Yet all was colour'd with a smooth pretence
Of specious love, and duty to their prince.
Religion, and redress of grievances,
Two names, that always cheat and always please,
Are often urg'd; and good King David's life
Endanger'd...Read more of this...
by
Keats, John
...to and fro, to acquaint
Himself with every mystery, and awe;
Till, weary, he sat down before the maw
Of a wide outlet, fathomless and dim
To wild uncertainty and shadows grim.
There, when new wonders ceas'd to float before,
And thoughts of self came on, how crude and sore
The journey homeward to habitual self!
A mad-pursuing of the fog-born elf,
Whose flitting lantern, through rude nettle-briar,
Cheats us into a swamp, into a fire,
Into the bosom of a hated thing.
...Read more of this...
by
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...e meal
To save the offence of charitable, flour
From his tall mill that whistled on the waste.
But Philip did not fathom Annie's mind:
Scarce could the woman when he came upon her,
Out of full heart and boundless gratitude
Light on a broken word to thank him with.
But Philip was her children's all-in-all;
From distant corners of the street they ran
To greet his hearty welcome heartily;
Lords of his house and of his mill were they;
Worried his passive ear with petty ...Read more of this...
by
Hikmet, Nazim
...asn't afraid
as I patted the aluminum rump of my plane
and stepped down on the roof...
Uncoiling the fifty-fathom-long rope wound around my waist,
I lowered it outside Gioconda's window
like a vertical bridge between heaven and hell.
I blew my shrill whistle three times.
And I got an immediate response
to those three shrill whistles.
Gioconda threw open her window.
This poor farmer's daughter
done up as the Virgin Mary
chucked her gilded frame
an...Read more of this...
by
Thomas, Dylan
...ss and the bodiless image, on a stick of folly
Star-set at Jacob's angle,
Smoke hill and hophead's valley,
And the five-fathomed Hamlet on his father's coral
Thrusting the tom-thumb vision up the iron mile.
Suffer the slash of vision by the fin-green stubble,
Be by the ships' sea broken at the manstring anchored
The stoved bones' voyage downward
In the shipwreck of muscle;
Give over, lovers, locking, and the seawax struggle,
Love like a mist or fire through the bed of ee...Read more of this...
by
Thoreau, Henry David
...The only true and sole immortal youth.
Be but thy inspiration given,
No matter through what danger sought,
I'll fathom hell or climb to heaven,
And yet esteem that cheap which love has bought.
___________________
Fame cannot tempt the bard
Who's famous with his God,
Nor laurel him reward
Who has his Maker's nod....Read more of this...
by
Milton, John
...soon failing, meets
A vast vacuity. All unawares,
Fluttering his pennons vain, plumb-down he drops
Ten thousand fathom deep, and to this hour
Down had been falling, had not, by ill chance,
The strong rebuff of some tumultuous cloud,
Instinct with fire and nitre, hurried him
As many miles aloft. That fury stayed--
Quenched in a boggy Syrtis, neither sea,
Nor good dry land--nigh foundered, on he fares,
Treading the crude consistence, half on foot,
Half flyin...Read more of this...
by
Sandburg, Carl
...red scarf and mittens, on the bobsled, in his lunch box a pork chop sandwich and a V of gooseberry pie.
The horses fathom a snow to their knees.
Snow hats are on the rolling prairie hills.
The Mississippi bluffs wear snow hats.. . .
Keep your hogs on changing corn and mashes of grain,
O farmerman.
Cram their insides till they waddle on short legs
Under the drums of bellies, hams of fat.
Kill your hogs with a knife slit under the ear.Read more of this...
by
Lanier, Sidney
...hy sight is sharp,
Would'st count the strings upon an angel's harp?
Forbear, forbear.
"Oh let me love my Lord more fathom deep
Than there is line to sound with: let me love
My fellow not as men that mandates keep:
Yea, all that's lovable, below, above,
That let me love by heart, by heart, because
(Free from the penal pressure of the laws)
I find it fair.
"The tears I weep by day and bitter night,
Opinion! for thy sole salt vintage fall.
-- As morn by morn I rise...Read more of this...
by
Frost, Robert
...ng would do but they must fix a day
To stand together on the crater's verge
That turned them on the world, and try to fathom
The past and get some strangeness out of it.
But rain spoiled all. The day began uncertain,
With clouds low trailing and moments of rain that misted.
The young folk held some hope out to each other
Till well toward noon when the storm settled down
With a swish in the grass. "What if the others
Are there," they said. "It isn'...Read more of this...
by
Scott, Sir Walter
...es bare,
Nor lacked they many a banner fair;
For, from their shivered brows displayed,
Far o'er the unfathomable glade,
All twinkling with the dewdrop sheen,
The briar-rose fell in streamers green,
kind creeping shrubs of thousand dyes
Waved in the west-wind's summer sighs.
XII.
Boon nature scattered, free and wild,
Each plant or flower, the mountain's child.
Here eglantine embalmed the air,
Hawthorn an...Read more of this...
by
Kipling, Rudyard
...died in Macassar Straits --
By the Little Patemosters, as you come to the Union Bank --
And we dropped her in fourteen fathom: I pricked it off where she sank.
Owners we were, full owners, and the boat was christened for her,
And she died in the Mary Gloster. My heart; how young we were!
So I went on a spree round Java and well-nigh ran her ashore,
But your mother came and warned me and I would't liquor no more:
Strict I stuck to my business, afraid to stop or I'd th...Read more of this...
by
Byron, George (Lord)
...>
VI
Lake Leman lies by Chillon's walls:
A thousand feet in depth below
Its massy waters meet and flow:
Thus much the fathom-line was sent
From Chillon's snow-white battlement,
Which round about the wave inthrals:
A double dungeon wall and wave
Have made - and like a living grave
Below the surface of the lake
The dark vault lies wherein we lay,
We heard it ripple night and day;
Sounding o'er our heads it knock'd;
And I have felt the winter's spray
Wash through the bars when...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...arch with men and we'll fight with men, and we'll see men laugh and die;
We'll know such joy as we never dreamed; we'll fathom the deeps of pain:
But the hardest bit of it all will be -- when we come back home again.
For some of us smirk in a chiffon shop, and some of us teach in a school;
Some of us help with the seat of our pants to polish an office stool;
The merits of somebody's soap or jam some of us seek to explain,
But all of us wonder what we'll do when we have t...Read more of this...
by
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
...ils,
Burnt green, and blue and white.
And some in dreams assur'ed were
Of the Spirit that plagued us so;
Nine fathom deep he had followed us
From the land of mist and snow.
And every tongue, through utter drought,
Was withered at the root;
We could not speak, no more than if
We had been choked with soot.
Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.
PART THREE
THER...Read more of this...
by
Walcott, Derek
...d sailor in her Book of Dreams."
I remembered those ghost ships, I saw me corkscrewing
to the sea bed of sae worms, fathom past fathom,
my jaw clench like a fist, and only one thing
hold me, trembling, how my family safe home.
Then a strength like it seize me and the strength said:
"I from backward people who still fear God."
Let Him, in His might, heave Leviathan upward
by the winch of His will, the beast pouring lace
from his sea-bottom bed; and that was the fai...Read more of this...
by
Carroll, Lewis
...each doth coincide.
What boots it? For the world is wide."
"The world is but a Thought," said he:
"The vast unfathomable sea
Is but a Notion - unto me."
And darkly fell her answer dread
Upon his unresisting head,
Like half a hundredweight of lead.
"The Good and Great must ever shun
That reckless and abandoned one
Who stoops to perpetrate a pun.
"The man that smokes - that reads the TIMES -
That goes to Christmas Pantomimes -
Is capable of ANY crime...Read more of this...
by
Petrarch, Francesco
...ter life.His nature baffles all created mind,In earth or heaven, to fathom, or to find.One glimpse of glory on the saints bestow'd,With eager longings fills the courts of GodFor deeper views, in that abyss of light,While mortals slumber here, content with night:Though nought, we find, below the mo...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...n your inspired arpeggios?
A thrush is thrilling as I write
Its obligato of delight;
And in its fervour, as in mine,
I fathom tenderness divine,
And pity those of earthy ear
Who cannot hear . . . who cannot hear.
Let poets pattern pretty words:
For lovely largesse - bless you, Birds!...Read more of this...
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