Famous First Light Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous First Light poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous first light poems. These examples illustrate what a famous first light poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Ferlinghetti, Lawrence
...someow running backwards now
through the Moog Synthesizer of time
Chaos unscrambled
back to the first
harmonies
And the first light...Read more of this...
by
Levine, Philip
...his little beach at the end
of the world is anywhere, and I
stand in a stillness that will last
forever or until the first light
breaks beyond these waters. Don't
be scared, the book said, don't flee
as wave after wave the breakers rise
in darkness toward their ghostly crests,
for he has set a limit to the sea
and he is at your side. The sea
and I breathe in and out as one.
Maybe this is done at last
or for now, this search for what
is never here....Read more of this...
by
Cavafy, Constantine P
...candles, melted, and bent.
I do not want to look at them; their form saddens me,
and it saddens me to recall their first light.
I look ahead at my lit candles.
I do not want to turn back, lest I see and shudder
at how fast the dark line lengthens,
at how fast the extinguished candles multiply....Read more of this...
by
Levine, Philip
...1
Dawn. First light tearing
at the rough tongues of the zinnias,
at the leaves of the just born.
Today it will rain. On the road
black cars are abandoned, but the clouds
ride above, their wisdom intact.
They are predictions. They never matter.
The jet fighters lift above the flat roofs,
black arrowheads trailing their future.
2
...Read more of this...
by
Stevens, Wallace
...Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.
This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:
Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a ...Read more of this...
by
Kinnell, Galway
...,
of your year of pain and despair remitted briefly
now and then by hope that had that leaden taste?
Did you glimpse in first light the world as you loved it
and see that, now, it was not wrong to die
and that, on dying, you would leave
your beloved in a day like paradise?
Near sunrise did you loosen your hold a little?
How could you not already have felt blessed for good,
having these last days spoken your whole heart to him,
who spoke his whole heart to you, so that in the ...Read more of this...
by
Desnos, Robert
...r-present torment, far from me in the magnificent noise of
oyster shells crushed by a night owl passing a restaurant at first light.
If you only knew.
Far from me, willed, physical mirage.
Far from me there's an island that turns aside when ships pass.
Far from me a calm herd of cattle takes the wrong path, pulls up stubbornly at the
edge of a steep cliff, far from me, cruel woman.
Far from me, a shooting star falls into the poet's nightly bottle.
He c...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
... "Pass the salt. "
The tackle was already in the car, so we just got in and
drove away. Beginning at the first light of dawn we hit the
road at the bottom of the mountains, and drove up into the
dawn.
The light behind the trees was like going into a gradual
and strange department store.
"That was a good-looking girl last night, " he said.
"Yeah, "I said. "You did all right. "
"If the shoe fits....." he said.
...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...oking on the hot plate.
THE SURGEON
I watched my day begin on Little Redfish Lake as clearly as
the first light of dawn or the first ray of the sunrise, though
the dawn and the sunrise had long since passed and it was
now late in the morning.
The surgeon took a knife from the sheath at his belt and
cut the throat of the chub with a very gentle motion, showing
poetically how sharp the knife was, and then he heaved the
fish back out into the lake....Read more of this...
by
Levine, Philip
...he numbed pines.
Night after night
For four long months
My face to her dark face
We two had lain
Till the first light.
Civilization comes to Sierra Kid
They levelled Tater Hill
And I was sick.
First sun, and the chain saws
Coming on; blue haze,
Dull blue exhaust
Rising, dust rising, and the smell.
Moving from their thatched huts
The crazed wood rats
By the thousand; grouse, spotted quail
Abandoning the hills
For the sparse tra...Read more of this...
by
Levine, Philip
...First light. This misted field
is the world, that man
slipping the greased bolt
back and forth, that man
tunneled with blood
the dark smudges of whose eyes
call for sleep, calls
for quiet, and the woman
down your line,
the woman who screamed the loudest,
will be quiet.
The rushes, the grassless shale,
the dust, whiten like dro...Read more of this...
by
Nwakanma, Obi
...ing through the wind,
when its breath hissed at the earth;
as we leaned out of the window
in that moment when the first light
streaked, joyous, out of the unalterable street...
Then, tuned to the immanent choir of the grassland,
untangling from the sea -
Then, stripped to the last detail, from her sinewed skin,
disheveled in the light, one aria from the immaculate concertina -
before her rebirth
a tongue licked through the core of my soul
...Read more of this...
by
Levine, Philip
...journal found on his person
At night wakened by the freight
trains boring through the suburbs
of Lyon, I watched first light
corrode the darkness, disturb
what little wildlife was left
in the alleys: birds moved from
branch to branch, and the dogs leapt
at the garbage. Winter numbed
even the hearts of the young
who had only their hearts. We
heard the war coming; the long
wait was over, and we moved
along the crowded roads south
not looking...Read more of this...
by
Vaughan, Henry
...ore
That Lamb of God adore,
That Lamb whose days great kings and prophets wished
And longed to see, but missed.
The first light they beheld was bright and gay
And turned their night to day,
But to this later light they saw in Him,
Their day was dark, and dim....Read more of this...
Dont forget to view our wonderful member First Light poems.