Famous First Year Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous First Year 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 year poems. These examples illustrate what a famous first year poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Graves, Robert
...d up,
Cursed, battered on the table. “No,” he said,
“Not that! The Three-and-Twentieth Legion’s dead,
Dead in the first year of this damned campaign—
The Legion’s dead, dead, and won’t rise again.
Pity? Rome pities her brave lads that die,
But we need pity also, you and I,
Whom Gallic spear and Belgian arrow miss,
Who live to see the Legion come to this,
Unsoldierlike, slovenly, bent on loot,
Grumblers, diseased, unskilled to thrust or shoot.
O, brown che...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...friendship, of the land? its substratums and objects?
Have you consider’d the organic compact of the first day of the first year of
Independence, sign’d by the Commissioners, ratified by The States, and read by
Washington
at the head of the army?
Have you possess’d yourself of the Federal Constitution?
Do you see who have left all feudal processes and poems behind them, and assumed the poems
and
processes of Democracy?
Are you faithful to things? do you teach as the...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...that substantial life,
Bequeathing, hence, types of athletic love,
Afternoon, this delicious Ninth-month, in my forty-first year,
I proceed, for all who are, or have been, young men,
To tell the secret of my nights and days,
To celebrate the need of comrades....Read more of this...
by
Yeats, William Butler
...r>
'God I have loved, but should I ask return
Of God or woman, the time were come to die.'
He bade, his hundred and first year at end,
Diggers and carpenters make grave and coffin;
Saw that the grave was deep, the coffin sound,
Summoned the generations of his house,
Lay in the coffin, stopped his breath and died....Read more of this...
by
Marvell, Andrew
...far off.
Modern geographers, 'twas there, they thought,
Where Venice twenty years the Turk had fought,
While the first year our navy is but shown,
The next divided, and the third we've none.
They, by the name, mistook it for that isle
Where Pilgrim Palmer travelled in exile
With the bull's horn to measure his own head
And on Pasipha?'s tomb to drop a bead.
But Morice learn'd dem?nstrates, by the post,
This Isle of Candy was on Essex' coast.
Fresh m...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...
Well, I married yer
An' thought Heav'n was comin'
To set on the door-step.
Heav'n didn't do no settin',
Though the first year warn't so bad.
The baby's fever threw you off some, I guess,
An' then I took her death real hard,
An' a mopey wife kind o' disgusts a man.
I ain't blamin' yer exactly.
But that's how 'twas.
Do lay quiet,
I know I'm slow, but it's harder to say 'n I thought.
There come a time when I got to be
More wife agin than mother.
The ...Read more of this...
by
Byron, George (Lord)
...front,
Like Saint John's foretold beast; but ours are born
Less formidable in the head than horn.
VIII
In the first year of freedom's second dawn
Died George the Third; although no tyrant, one
Who shielded tyrants, till each sense withdrawn
Left him nor mental nor external sun:
A better farmer ne'er brush'd dew from lawn,
A worse king never left a realm undone!
He died — but left his subjects still behind,
One half as mad — and t'other no less blind.
IX...Read more of this...
Dont forget to view our wonderful member First Year poems.