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Famous Gauge Poems by Famous Poets

These are examples of famous Gauge poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous gauge poems. These examples illustrate what a famous gauge poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).

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by Sexton, Anne
...The next April the plane 
bucked me like a horse, my elevators turned 
and fear blew down my throat, that last profane 
gauge of a stomach coming up. And then returned 
to land, as unlovely as any seasick sailor, 
sincerely eighteen; my first story, my funny failure. 
Maybe Rose, there is always another story, 
better unsaid, grim or flat or predatory. 
Half a mile down the lights of the in-between cities 
turn up their eyes at me. And I remember Betsy's 
stor...Read more of this...



by Hardy, Thomas
...w 
So small a shade, and Heaven's high human scheme 
Be hemmed within the coasts yon arc implies? 

Is such the stellar gauge of earthly show, 
Nation at war with nation, brains that teem, 
Heroes, and women fairer than the skies?...Read more of this...

by Ingelow, Jean
...eight, and pry into her age,
  Count her old beach lines by their tidal swell;
Her sunken mountains name, her craters gauge,
      Her cold volcanoes tell;
"And treat her as a ball, that one might pass
  From this hand to the other—such a ball
As he could measure with a blade of grass,
      And say it was but small!
"Honors! O friend, I pray you bear with me:
  The grass hath time to grow in meadow lands,
And leisurely the opal murmuring sea
      Breaks on her ye...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...later than you think!

Hello! there's a pregnant phrase.
Bravo! let me write it down;
Hold it with a hopeful gaze,
Gauge it with a fretful frown;
Tune it to my lyric lyre . . .
Ah! upon starvation's brink,
How the words are dark and dire:
It is later than you think.

Weigh them well. . . . Behold yon band,
Students drinking by the door,
Madly merry, bock in hand,
Saucers stacked to mark their score.
Get you gone, you jolly scamps;
Let ...Read more of this...

by Arnold, Matthew
...and when I will, I sleep.
Yet that severe, that earnest air,
I saw, I felt it once--but where?

'I knew not yet the gauge of time,
Nor wore the manacles of space;
I felt it in some other clime,
I saw it in some other place.
'Twas when the heavenly house I trod,
And lay upon the breast of God.'...Read more of this...



by Hopkins, Gerard Manley
...that was found wanting when Good weighed. 

Man lives that list, that leaning in the will
No wisdom can forecast by gauge or guess, 
The selfless self of self, most strange, most still, 
Fast furled and all foredrawn to No or Yes. 

Your feast of; that most in you earnest eye 
May but call on your banes to more carouse.
Worst will the best. What worm was here, we cry, 
To have havoc-pocked so, see, the hung-heavenward boughs?

Enough: corruption was the world’...Read more of this...

by Kipling, Rudyard
...thee
Strength, whose mate is Courtesy.
Send no lunge beyond thy length.
Lend no rotten bough thy strength.
Gauge thy gape with buck or goat,
Lest thine eye should choke thy throat.
After gorging, wouldst thou sleep ?
Look thy den be hid and deep,
Lest a wrong, by thee forgot,
Draw thy killer to the spot.
East and West and North and South,
Wash thy hide and close thy mouth.
(Pit and rift and blue pool-brim,
Middle-Jungle follow him!)
Wood and Water, Wi...Read more of this...

by Kipling, Rudyard
...Colonel from Chatham who managed the Bhamo State Line
(The wich was on mile and one furlong -- a guaranteed twenty-inch gauge),
So Exeter Battleby Tring consented his claims to resign,
And died, on four thousand a month, in the ninetieth year of his age!...Read more of this...

by Ashbery, John
...the room, only alcoves,
And the window doesn't matter much, or that
Sliver of window or mirror on the right, even
As a gauge of the weather, which in French is
Le temps, the word for time, and which
Follows a course wherein changes are merely
Features of the whole. The whole is stable within
Instability, a globe like ours, resting
On a pedestal of vacuum, a ping-pong ball
Secure on its jet of water.
And just as there are no words for the surface, that is,
No words to...Read more of this...

by Whittier, John Greenleaf
...eeks, 
A Turk's head at each saddle-bow! 
Welcome to us its week-old news, 
Its corner for the rustic Muse 
Its monthly gauge of snow and rain, 
Its record, mingling in a breath 
The wedding bell and dirge of death: 
Jest, anecdote, and love-lorn tale, 
The latest culprit sent to jail; 
Its hue and cry of stolen and lost, 
Its vendue sales and goods at cost, 
And traffic calling loud for gain. 
We felt the stir of hall and street, 
The pulse of life that round us beat; 
T...Read more of this...

by Goldsmith, Oliver
...n he could write, and cipher too;
Lands he could measure, terms and tides presage,
And even the story ran that he could gauge.
In arguing too, the parson owned his skill,
For e'en though vanquished, he could argue still;
While words of learned length and thundering sound
Amazed the gazing rustics ranged around,
And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew
That one small head could carry all he knew.

But past is all his fame. The very spot
Where many a time he ...Read more of this...

by Verhaeren, Emile
...e flights of human science tend.


Here—'tis a room where thought, assertive, saith
That there are weights exact to gauge her by,
That inane ether, only, rounds the sky.
And that in phials of glass men breed up death.


Here—'tis a workship, where, all fiery bright,
Matter intense vibrates with fierce turmoil
In vaults where wonders new, 'mid stress and toil,
Are forged, that can absorb space, time and night.


—A palace—of an architecture grown
Effete, and we...Read more of this...

by Dickinson, Emily
...f your delirious Hem --
And you dropt, lost,
When something broke --
And let you from a Dream --

As if a Goblin with a Gauge --
Kept measuring the Hours --
Until you felt your Second
Weigh, helpless, in his Paws --

And not a Sinew -- stirred -- could help,
And sense was setting numb --
When God -- remembered -- and the Fiend
Let go, then, Overcome --

As if your Sentence stood -- pronounced --
And you were frozen led
From Dungeon's luxury of Doubt
To Gibbets, and the Dead -...Read more of this...

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