Famous Forgetting Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Forgetting poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous forgetting poems. These examples illustrate what a famous forgetting poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
See also:
by
Amy Levy
O say, thou wild, thou oft deceived heart,
What mean these noisy throbbings in my breast?
After thy long, unutterable woe
Wouldst thou not rest?
Fall'n from Life's tree the sweet rose-blossom lies,
And fragrant youth has fled. What made to seem
This earth as fair to thee as Paradise,
Was all a dream.
The blossom fell, the thorn was left to me;
Deep from the wound the...Read more of this...
by
Robert Penn Warren
Here is the shadow of truth, for only the shadow is true.
And the line where the incoming swell from the sunset Pacific
First leans and staggers to break will tell all you need to know
About submarine geography, and your father's death rattle
Provides all biographical data required for the Who's Who of the dead.
I cannot recall what I started to tell...Read more of this...
by
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Sitting to-day in the sunshine,
That touched me with fingers of love,
I thought of the manifold blessings
God scatters on earth, from above;
And they seemed, as I numbered them over,
Far more than we merit, or need,
And all that we lack is the angels
To make earth a heaven indeed.
The winter brings long, pleasant evenings,
The spring brings...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
We send the Wave to find the Wave --
An Errand so divine,
The Messenger enamored too,
Forgetting to return,
We make the wise distinction still,
Soever made in vain,
The sagest time to dam the sea is when the sea is gone --...Read more of this...
by
Robert Frost
He is that fallen lance that lies as hurled,
That lies unlifted now, come dew, come rust,
But still lies pointed as it ploughed the dust.
If we who sight along it round the world,
See nothing worthy to have been its mark,
It is because like men we look too near,
Forgetting that as fitted to the sphere,
Our missiles always make too short an...Read more of this...
by
Sophie Hannah
When I leave you postcode and your commuting station,
When I left undone all the things we planned to do
You may feel you have been left by association
But there is leaving and leaving you.
When I leave your town and the club that you belong to,
When I leave without much warning or much regret,
Remember, there's doing wrong and there's doing wrong...Read more of this...
by
William Carlos (WCW) Williams
Sorrow is my own yard
where the new grass
flames as it has flamed
often before but not
with the cold fire
that closes round me this year.
Thirtyfive years
I lived with my husband.
The plumtree is white today
with masses of flowers.
Masses of flowers
load the cherry branches
and color some bushes
yellow and some red
but the grief in my heart
is stronger than they
for though they were my joy
formerly,...Read more of this...
by
Vachel Lindsay
I
Within the town of Buffalo
Are prosy men with leaden eyes.
Like ants they worry to and fro,
(Important men, in Buffalo.)
But only twenty miles away
A deathless glory is at play:
Niagara, Niagara.
The women buy their lace and cry: —
"O such a delicate design,"
And over ostrich feathers sigh,
By counters there, in Buffalo.
The children haunt the trinket shops,
They buy false-faces, bells, and tops,
Forgetting great...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
For Brenda Williams
La lune diminue; divin septembre.
Divine September the moon wanes.
Pierre Jean Jouve
Themes for poems and the detritus of dreams coalesce:
This is one September I shall not forget.
The grammar-school caretaker always had the boards re-blacked
And the floors waxed, but I never shone.
The stripes of the red and black blazer
Were prison-grey. You could never see things that way:
Your home...Read more of this...
by
Ralph Waldo Emerson
IT fell in the ancient periods
Which the brooding soul surveys
Or ever the wild Time coin'd itself
Into calendar months and days.
This was the lapse of Uriel 5
Which in Paradise befell.
Once among the Pleiads walking
Sayd overheard the young gods talking;
And the treason too long pent
To his ears was evident. 10...Read more of this...
by
Lucy Maud Montgomery
Outside the afterlight's lucent rose
Is smiting the hills and brimming the valleys,
And shadows are stealing across the snows;
From the mystic gloom of the pineland alleys.
Glamour of mingled night and day
Over the wide, white world has sway,
And through their prisoning azure bars,
Gaze the calm, cold eyes of the early stars.
But here, in this long,...Read more of this...
by
Alexander Pushkin
Where the sea forever dances
Over lonely cliff and dune,
Where sweet twilight's vapor glances
In a warmer-glowing moon,
Where with the seraglio's graces
Daylong toys the Mussulman,
An enchantress 'mid embraces
Handed me a talisman.
'Mid embraces I was bidden:
"Guard this talisman of mine:
In it secret power is hidden!
Love himself has made it thine.
Neither death nor ills nor aging,
My beloved, does it ban,
Nor in gales and...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
If recollecting were forgetting,
Then I remember not.
And if forgetting, recollecting,
How near I had forgot.
And if to miss, were merry,
And to mourn, were gay,
How very blithe the fingers
That gathered this, Today!...Read more of this...
by
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I
The face, which, duly as the sun,
Rose up for me with life begun,
To mark all bright hours of the day
With hourly love, is dimmed away—
And yet my days go on, go on.
II
The tongue which, like a stream, could run
Smooth music from the roughest stone,
And every morning with ' Good day'
Make each day good, is...Read more of this...
by
Gwendolyn Brooks
Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.
My daughters and sons have put me away with marbles and dolls,
Are gone from the house.
My husband and lovers are pleasant or somewhat polite
And night is night.
It is a real chill out,
The genuine thing.
I am not deceived, I do not think it is still summer
Because sun stays and birds...Read more of this...
by
Gregory Corso
Budger of history Brake of time You Bomb
Toy of universe Grandest of all snatched sky I cannot hate you
Do I hate the mischievous thunderbolt the jawbone of an ass
The bumpy club of One Million B.C. the mace the flail the axe
Catapult Da Vinci tomahawk Cochise flintlock Kidd dagger Rathbone
Ah and the sad desparate gun...Read more of this...
by
Bertolt Brecht
Peoples of the world, together
Join to serve the common cause!
So it feeds us all for ever
See to it that it's now yours.
Forward, without forgetting
Where our strength can be seen now to be!
When starving or when eating
Forward, not forgetting
Our solidarity!
Black or white or brown or yellow
Leave your old disputes behind.
Once start talking with your fellow
Men, you'll soon be of one...Read more of this...
by
Denise Levertov
Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.
I who don't know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me
(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even
what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,
the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can't find,
and for loving me
for the...Read more of this...
by
Paul Laurence Dunbar
You bid me hold my peace
And dry my fruitless tears,
Forgetting that I bear
A pain beyond my years.
You say that I should smile
And drive the gloom away;
I would, but sun and smiles
[Pg 287]Have left my life's dark day.
All time seems cold and void,
And naught but tears remain;
Life's music beats for me
A melancholy strain.
I used at first to hope,
But hope...Read more of this...
by
Vachel Lindsay
[During an anti-saloon campaign, in central Illinois.]
In the midst of the battle I turned,
(For the thunders could flourish without me)
And hid by a rose-hung wall,
Forgetting the murder about me;
And wrote, from my wound, on the stone,
In mirth, half prayer, half play: —
"Send me a picture book,
Send me a song, to-day."
I saw...Read more of this...
by
Yehuda Amichai
Forgetting someone is like forgetting to turn off the light
in the backyard so it stays lit all the next day
But then it is the light that makes you remember....Read more of this...
by
William Morris
I heard men saying, Leave hope and praying,
All days shall be as all have been;
To-day and to-morrow bring fear and sorrow,
The never-ending toil between.
When Earth was younger mid toil and hunger,
In hope we strove, and our hands were strong;
Then great men led us, with words they fed us,
And bade us right the earthly wrong.
Go read in story their deeds...Read more of this...
by
Charles Bukowski
either peace or happiness,
let it enfold you
when i was a young man
I felt these things were
dumb,unsophisticated.
I had bad blood,a twisted
mind, a pecarious
upbringing.
I was hard as granite,I
leered at the
sun.
I trusted no man and
especially no
woman.
I was living a hell in
small rooms, I broke
things, smashed things,
walked through glass,
cursed.
I challenged everything,
was continually being
evicted,jailed,in and
out of fights,in and aout
of my mind.
women were something
to...Read more of this...
by
Wang Wei
THERE were many burning hours on the heartsweet tide,
And we passed away from ourselves, forgetting all
The immortal moods that faded, the god who died,
Hastening away to the King on a distant call.
There were ruby dews were shed when the heart was riven,
And passionate pleading and prayers to the dead we had wronged;
And we passed away, unremembering...Read more of this...
by
Stephen Crane
The impact of a dollar upon the heart
Smiles warm red light,
Sweeping from the hearth rosily upon the white table,
With the hanging cool velvet shadows
Moving softly upon the door.
The impact of a million dollars
Is a crash of flunkeys,
And yawning emblems of Persia
Cheeked against oak, France and a sabre,
The outcry of old beauty
Whored by pimping merchants
To submission before wine and chatter.
Silly...Read more of this...
Dont forget to view our wonderful member Forgetting poems.