Famous Generations Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Generations poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous generations poems. These examples illustrate what a famous generations poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
See also:
by
William Butler Yeats
I
Remember all those renowned generations,
They left their bodies to fatten the wolves,
They left their homesteads to fatten the foxes,
Fled to far countries, or sheltered themselves
In cavern, crevice, or hole,
Defending Ireland's soul.
Be still, be still, what can be said?
My father sang that song,
But time amends old wrong,
All that is finished, let it fade.
Remember all those renowned generations,
Remember all that have...Read more of this...
by
Isaac Watts
Providences of God recorded.
Let children hear the mighty deeds
Which God performed of old,
Which in our younger years we saw,
And which our fathers told.
He bids us make his glories known,
His works of power and grace;
And we'll convey his wonders down
Through every rising race.
Our lips shall tell them to our sons,
And they again to theirs;
That generations yet unborn
May teach them to...Read more of this...
by
Weldon Kees
It must have been in March the rug wore through.
Now the day passes and I stare
At warped pine boards my father's father nailed,
At the twisted grain. Exposed, where emptiness allows,
Are the wormholes of eighty years; four generations' shoes
Stumble and scrape and fall
To the floor my father stained,
The new blood streaming from his head. The drift
Of autumn fires and a...Read more of this...
by
Rupert Brooke
I have been so great a lover: filled my days
So proudly with the splendour of Love's praise,
The pain, the calm, and the astonishment,
Desire illimitable, and silent content,
And all dear names men use, to cheat despair,
For the perplexed and viewless streams that bear
Our hearts at random down the dark of life.
Now, ere the unthinking silence on that strife
Steals down, I...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
Memories bursting like tears or waves
On some lonely Adriatic shore
Beating again and again
Threshings of green sea foam
Flecked like the marble Leonardo
Chipped for his ‘Moses’.
And my tears came as suddenly
In that dream, criss-crossed
With memory and desire.
Grandad Nicky had worked
Down the pits for a pittance
To bring up his six children
But nothing left over for more
Than a few nuts and an orange
For...Read more of this...
by
Philip Levine
Last night, again, I dreamed
my children were back at home,
small boys huddled in their separate beds,
and I went from one to the other
listening to their breathing -- regular,
almost soundless -- until a white light
hardened against the bedroom wall,
the light of Los Angeles burning south
of here, going at last as we
knew...Read more of this...
by
Alan Seeger
In the glad revels, in the happy fetes,
When cheeks are flushed, and glasses gilt and pearled
With the sweet wine of France that concentrates
The sunshine and the beauty of the world,
Drink sometimes, you whose footsteps yet may tread
The undisturbed, delightful paths of Earth,
To those whose blood, in pious duty shed,
Hallows the soil where...Read more of this...
by
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Mother of man's time-travelling generations,
Breath of his nostrils, heartblood of his heart,
God above all Gods worshipped of all nations,
Light above light, law beyond law, thou art.
Thy face is as a sword smiting in sunder
Shadows and chains and dreams and iron things;
The sea is dumb before thy face, the thunder
Silent, the skies are narrower than thy wings.
Angels and Gods, spirit...Read more of this...
by
Vachel Lindsay
Let not our town be large, remembering
That little Athens was the Muses' home,
That Oxford rules the heart of London still,
That Florence gave the Renaissance to Rome.
Record it for the grandson of your son —
A city is not builded in a day:
Our little town cannot complete her soul
Till countless generations pass away.
Now...Read more of this...
by
George William Russell
FROM the cool and dark-lipped furrows
Breathes a dim delight
Through the woodland’s purple plumage
To the diamond night.
Aureoles of joy encircle
Every blade of grass
Where the dew-fed creatures silent
And enraptured pass.
And the restless ploughman pauses,
Turns and, wondering,
Deep beneath his rustic habit
Finds himself a king;
For a fiery moment looking
With the eyes of God
Over fields a slave...Read more of this...
by
Nick Flynn
He reads my latest attempt at a poem
and is silent for a long time, until it feels
like that night we waited for Apollo,
my mother wandering in and out of her bedroom, asking,
Haven't they landed yet? At last
Dugan throws it on the table and says,
This reads like a cheap detective novel
and I've got nothing to say about it. It sits,
naked...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
I knew you forever and you were always old,
soft white lady of my heart. Surely you would scold
me for sitting up late, reading your letters,
as if these foreign postmarks were meant for me.
You posted them first in London, wearing furs
and a new dress in the winter of eighteen-ninety.
I read how London is dull on Lord Mayor's Day,
where you guided...Read more of this...
by
Rg Gregory
(1) the ordinary
you are not interested in me
a receiver of food and a giver of ****
my brain knuckled under
i have rendered the skills of my
limbs to generations of caesars
and caesar's gods have siphoned off my spirit
by day i have been trained to dismember my own brothers
my own pieces travel through the night yearning for union
in every land i...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
When I am dead I will not care
How future generations fare,
For I will be so unaware.
Though fields their slain has carpeted,
And seas be salt with tears they shed,
Not one I'll waste, for I'll be dead.
Though atom bombs in ashes lay
Their skyey cities of to-day,
With carrion lips I cannot pray.
Though ruin reigns and madness raves,
And cowering men creep back in...Read more of this...
by
Sylvia Plath
As the gods began one world, and man another,
So the snakecharmer begins a snaky sphere
With moon-eye, mouth-pipe, He pipes. Pipes green. Pipes water.
Pipes water green until green waters waver
With reedy lengths and necks and undulatings.
And as his notes twine green, the green river
Shapes its images around his sons.
He pipes a place to stand on, but no rocks,
No floor: a...Read more of this...
by
David Lehman
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere,
The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work
Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,
That never touch with inarticulate pang
Those dying generations-at their song.
The One remains, the many change and pass
The expiring swan, and as he sings he dies.
The earth, the stars, the light, the day, the skies,
A white-haired shadow roaming...Read more of this...
by
Alan Seeger
You have the grit and the guts, I know;
You are ready to answer blow for blow
You are virile, combative, stubborn, hard,
But your honor ends with your own back-yard;
Each man intent on his private goal,
You have no feeling for the whole;
What singly none would tolerate
You let unpunished hit the state,
Unmindful that each...Read more of this...
by
Rainer Maria Rilke
Along the sun-drenched roadside, from the great
hollow half-treetrunk, which for generations
has been a trough, renewing in itself
an inch or two of rain, I satisfy
my thirst: taking the water's pristine coolness
into my whole body through my wrists.
Drinking would be too powerful, too clear;
but this unhurried gesture of restraint
fills my whole consciousness with shining water.
Thus, if you came, I could be...Read more of this...
by
Ben Jonson
As you read, a white bear leisurely
pees, dyeing the snow
saffron,
and as you read, many gods
lie among lianas: eyes of obsidian
are watching the generations of leaves,
and as you read
the sea is turning its dark pages,
turning
its dark pages....Read more of this...
by
John Keats
MY heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, 5
But being too happy in thine happiness,
That thou, light-wing¨¨d Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of...Read more of this...
by
Henry Lawson
So the time seems come at last,
And the drums go rolling past,
And above them in the sunlight Labour's banners float and flow;
They are marching with the sun,
But I look in vain for one
Of the men who fought for freedom more than fifteen years ago.
They were men who did the work
Out at Blackall,...Read more of this...
by
Jean Cocteau
...Preamble
A rough draft
for an ars poetica
. . . . . . .
Let's get our dreams unstuck
The grain of rye
free from the prattle of grass
et loin de arbres orateurs
I
plant
it
It will sprout
But forget about
the rustic festivities
For the explosive word
falls harmlessly
eternal through
the compact generations
and except for you
nothing
denotates
its sweet-scented dynamite
Greetings
I discard eloquence
the empty sail
and...Read more of this...
by
Lucy Maud Montgomery
A hundred generations have gone into its making,
With all their love and tenderness, with all their dreams and tears;
Their vanished joy and pleasure, their pain and their heart-breaking,
Have colored this rare blossom of the long-unfruitful years.
Their victory and their laughter for this have strong men given,
For this have sweet, dead women paid in patience which survives
That a great...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
A little overflowing word
That any, hearing, had inferred
For Ardor or for Tears,
Though Generations pass away,
Traditions ripen and decay,
As eloquent appears --...Read more of this...
by
William Carlos (WCW) Williams
A day on the boulevards chosen out of ten years of
student poverty! One best day out of ten good ones.
Berket in high spirits—"Ha, oranges! Let's have one!"
And he made to snatch an orange from the vender's cart.
Now so clever was the deception, so nicely timed
to the full sweep of certain wave summits,
that the rumor of the...Read more of this...
Dont forget to view our wonderful member Generations poems.