Famous Furnace Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Furnace poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous furnace poems. These examples illustrate what a famous furnace poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...throne,
Loud-thund'ring thence o'er Judah's spoiled land,
Boasts her proud rule no more. Rome pagan next,
The raging furnace where the saints were tried,
No more enslaves mankind. Rome papal too
Contracts her reign and speaks proud things no more.
The throne of Ottoman is made to shake,
The Russian thund'ring to his firmest seat;
Another age shall see his empire fall.
Yet in the east the light of truth shall shine,
And like the sun returning after storms
Which long...Read more of this...
by
Brackenridge, Hugh Henry
...All vanishes! The Sun, from topmost heaven precipitated,
Like a globe of iron which is tossed back fiery red
Into the furnace stirred to fume,
Shocking the cloudy surges, plashed from its impetuous ire,
Even to the zenith spattereth in a flecking scud of fire
The vaporous and inflamèd spaume.
O contemplate the heavens! Whenas the vein-drawn day dies pale,
In every season, every place, gaze through their every veil?
With love that has not speech for need!
Beneath the...Read more of this...
by
Hugo, Victor
...his listless hand
Hung like dead bone within its withered skin;
Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone,
As in a furnace burning secretly,
From his dark eyes alone. The cottagers,
Who ministered with human charity
His human wants, beheld with wondering awe
Their fleeting visitant. The mountaineer,
Encountering on some dizzy precipice
That spectral form, deemed that the Spirit of Wind,
With lightning eyes, and eager breath, and feet
Disturbing not the drifted snow, had...Read more of this...
by
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and ...Read more of this...
by
Shakespeare, William
...rections is
cover’d
with
pine straw:
—In Tennessee and Kentucky, slaves busy in the coalings, at the forge, by the
furnace-blaze, or
at the corn-shucking;
In Virginia, the planter’s son returning after a long absence, joyfully welcom’d
and
kiss’d by the aged mulatto nurse;
On rivers, boatmen safely moor’d at night-fall, in their boats, under shelter of high
banks,
Some of the younger men dance to the sound of the banjo or fiddle—others sit on the
gunwale,
smokin...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...!
CVIII
When Sorrow (vsing mine owne fiers might)
Melts downe his lead into my boyling brest
Through that darke furnace to my hart opprest,
There shines a ioy from thee my only light:
But soone as thought of thee breeds my delight,
And my yong soule flutters to thee his nest,
Most rude Despaire, my daily vnbidden guest,
Clips streight my wings, streight wraps me in his night,
And makes me then bow downe my heade, and say,
Ah, what doth Phoebus gold that wretch ...Read more of this...
by
Sidney, Sir Philip
...hat waits for all who fear not God, and not
Them only.
Then the demon Charon rose
To herd them in, with eyes that furnace-hot
Glowed at the task, and lifted oar to smite
Who lingered.
As the leaves, when autumn shows,
One after one descending, leave the bough,
Or doves come downward to the call, so now
The evil seed of Adam to endless night,
As Charon signalled, from the shore's bleak height,
Cast themselves downward to the bark. The brown
And bitter f...Read more of this...
by
Alighieri, Dante
...hips he saw,
Pregnant with sulphur, to him nearer draw,
Captain, lieutenant, ensign, all make haste
Ere in the fiery furnace they be cast--
Three children tall, unsinged, away they row,
Like Shadrack, Meschack, and Abednego.
Not so brave Douglas, on whose lovely chin
The early down but newly did begin,
And modest beauty yet his sex did veil,
While envious virgins hope he is a male.
His yellow locks curl back themselves to seek,
Nor other courtship knew but to his ...Read more of this...
by
Marvell, Andrew
...ar as Angels ken, he views
The dismal situation waste and wild.
A dungeon horrible, on all sides round,
As one great furnace flamed; yet from those flames
No light; but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all, but torture without end
Still urges, and a fiery deluge, fed
With ever-burning sulphur unconsumed.
Such place Eternal Justice ha...Read more of this...
by
Milton, John
...ad ensigns marching, mibht pass through
With horse and chariots ranked in loose array;
So wide they stood, and like a furnace-mouth
Cast forth redounding smoke and ruddy flame.
Before their eyes in sudden view appear
The secrets of the hoary Deep--a dark
Illimitable ocean, without bound,
Without dimension; where length, breadth, and height,
And time, and place, are lost; where eldest Night
And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold
Eternal anarchy, amidst the noise
Of en...Read more of this...
by
Milton, John
...rk in mines, or forging iron!
Foundry casting—the foundry itself—the rude high roof—the ample and
shadow’d space,
The furnace—the hot liquid pour’d out and running.
8
O to resume the joys of the soldier:
To feel the presence of a brave general! to feel his sympathy!
To behold his calmness! to be warm’d in the rays of his smile!
To go to battle! to hear the bugles play, and the drums beat!
To hear the crash of artillery! to see the glittering of the bayonets and musket-...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...moulders
under
them,
The crowd with their lit faces, watching—the glare and dense shadows;
—The forger at his forge-furnace, and the user of iron after him,
The maker of the axe large and small, and the welder and temperer,
The chooser breathing his breath on the cold steel, and trying the edge with his thumb,
The one who clean-shapes the handle, and sets it firmly in the socket;
The shadowy processions of the portraits of the past users also,
The primal patient mecha...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...he lakes, thy pilots at their wheels—thy oarsmen!
Behold how the ash writhes under those muscular arms!
There by the furnace, and there by the anvil,
Behold thy sturdy blacksmiths, swinging their sledges;
Overhand so steady—overhand they turn and fall, with joyous clank,
Like a tumult of laughter.
Behold! (for still the procession moves,)
Behold, Mother of All, thy countless sailors, boatmen, coasters!
The myriads of thy young and old mechanics!
Mark—mark the spirit...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...eat and foolish heart
Stood open like his door.
A mighty man was Eldred,
A bulk for casks to fill,
His face a dreaming furnace,
His body a walking hill.
In the old wars of Wessex
His sword had sunken deep,
But all his friends, he signed and said,
Were broken about Ethelred;
And between the deep drink and the dead
He had fallen upon sleep.
"Come not to me, King Alfred, Save always for the ale:
Why should my harmless hinds be slain
Because the chiefs cry once again,
As in al...Read more of this...
by
Chesterton, G K
...right, look left, look straight before,---
Beneath they mine, above they smelt,
Copper-ore and iron-ore,
And forge and furnace mould and melt,
And so on, more and ever more,
Till at the last, for a bounding belt,
Comes the salt sand hoar of the great sea-shore,
---And the whole is our Duke's country.
III.
I was born the day this present Duke was---
(And O, says the song, ere I was old!)
In the castle where the other Duke was---
(When I was happy and young, not old!)
I in t...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Robert
...anoint;
He was a lord full fat and in good point;
His eyen steep,* and rolling in his head, *deep-set
That steamed as a furnace of a lead.
His bootes supple, his horse in great estate,
Now certainly he was a fair prelate;
He was not pale as a forpined* ghost; *wasted
A fat swan lov'd he best of any roast.
His palfrey was as brown as is a berry.
A FRIAR there was, a wanton and a merry,
A limitour , a full solemne man.
In all the orders four is none that can* *knows
So muc...Read more of this...
by
Chaucer, Geoffrey
...ail.'
Then in my madness I essayed the door;
It gave; and through a stormy glare, a heat
As from a seventimes-heated furnace, I,
Blasted and burnt, and blinded as I was,
With such a fierceness that I swooned away--
O, yet methought I saw the Holy Grail,
All palled in crimson samite, and around
Great angels, awful shapes, and wings and eyes.
And but for all my madness and my sin,
And then my swooning, I had sworn I saw
That which I saw; but what I saw was veiled
An...Read more of this...
by
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...more of him shall yet be given,
Bereft of all retreat,
To sevenfold heat,—
As on a day when three in Dura shared
The furnace, and were spared
For glory by that king of Babylon
Who made himself so great that God, who heard,
Covered him with long feathers, like a bird.
Again, he may have gone down easily,
By comfortable altitudes, and found,
As always, underneath him solid ground
Whereon to be sufficient and to stand
Possessed already of the promised land,
Far stretc...Read more of this...
by
Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...bow that scissor the sea like milk,
I swear to you all, by my mother's milk,
by the stars that shall fly from tonight's furnace,
that I loved them, my children, my wife, my home;
I loved them as poets love the poetry
that kills them, as drowned sailors the sea.
You ever look up from some lonely beach
and see a far schooner? Well, when I write
this poem, each phrase go be soaked in salt;
I go draw and knot every line as tight
as ropes in this rigging; in simple speech
my comm...Read more of this...
by
Walcott, Derek
...
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? and what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry...Read more of this...
by
Blake, William
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