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Famous Granite Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...ht between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between t...Read more of this...



by Rich, Adrienne
...he walls where the dead poets
lie in their mausoleums 

If at the will of the poet the poem
could turn into a thing 

a granite flank laid bare, a lifted head
alight with dew 

If it could simply look you in the face
with naked eyeballs, not letting you turn 

till you, and I who long to make this thing,
were finally clarified together in its stare 


8.

No. Let me have this dust,
these pale clouds dourly lingering, these words 

moving with ferocious accuracy
like t...Read more of this...

by Bowers, Edgar
...eserves of, to give to friends
Or sell, in autumn, with the foxgrape, quince,
Elderberry, and muscadine. Around
The granite overhang, moist den of foxes;
Gradually up a long hill, high in pine,
Park-like, years of dry needles on the ground,
And dogwood, slopes the settlers terraced; pine
We cut at Christmas, berries, hollies, anise,
And cones for sale in Mister Haymore’s yard
In town, below the Courthouse Square. James Haymore,
One of the two good teachers at Boys’ Hi...Read more of this...

by Keats, John
...Stretching across a void, then guiding o'er
Enormous chasms, where, all foam and roar,
Streams subterranean tease their granite beds;
Then heighten'd just above the silvery heads
Of a thousand fountains, so that he could dash
The waters with his spear; but at the splash,
Done heedlessly, those spouting columns rose
Sudden a poplar's height, and 'gan to enclose
His diamond path with fretwork, streaming round
Alive, and dazzling cool, and with a sound,
Haply, like dolphin tumul...Read more of this...

by Hugo, Victor
...am. 
 
 It is not monster rising from its lair, 
 Nor phantom of the foliage and the air, 
 It is not morsel of the granite's shade 
 That walks in deepest hollows of the glade. 
 'Tis not a vampire nor a spectre pale 
 But living man in rugged coat of mail. 
 It is Alsatia's noble Chevalier, 
 Eviradnus the brave, that now is here. 
 
 The men who spoke he recognized the while 
 He rested in the thicket; words of guile 
 Most horrible were theirs as they passed ...Read more of this...



by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...cle in the winter gaslight.

 The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
The sea is the land's edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation:
The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale's backbone;
The pools where it offers to our curiosity
The more delicate algae and the sea anemone.
It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,
The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar
And the gear of foreign dead m...Read more of this...

by Bronte, Charlotte
...t, spread before 
The long front of the mansion grey, 
Her steps imprint the night-frost hoar, 
Which pale on grass and granite lay.

Not long she stayed where misty moon 
And shimmering stars could on her look, 
But through the garden arch-way, soon 
Her strange and gloomy path she took.

Some firs, coeval with the tower, 
Their straight black boughs stretched o'er her head, 
Unseen, beneath this sable bower, 
Rustled her dress and rapid tread. 

There was an alc...Read more of this...

by Ginsberg, Allen
...ds & a hung jury, 
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism 
 and subsequently presented themselves on the 
 granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads 
 and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding in- 
 stantaneous lobotomy, 
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin 
 Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho- 
 therapy occupational therapy pingpong & 
 amnesia, 
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic 
 pingpong table, resting brie...Read more of this...

by Keats, John
...r and near,
Mantled before in darkness and huge shade,
Now saw the light and made it terrible.
It was Hyperion:---a granite peak
His bright feet touch'd, and there he stay'd to view
The misery his brilliance had betray'd
To the most hateful seeing of itself.
Golden his hair of short Numidian curl,
Regal his shape majestic, a vast shade
In midst of his own brightness, like the bulk
Of Memnon's image at the set of sun
To one who travels from the dusking East:
Sighs, too...Read more of this...

by Plath, Sylvia
...ald slots of his eyes stiffened wide-open
On the incessant heat-lightning flicker of situations.

Nightlong, in the granite yard, invisible cats
Have been howling like women, or damaged instruments.
Already he can feel daylight, his white disease,
Creeping up with her hatful of trivial repetitions.
The city is a map of cheerful twitters now,
And everywhere people, eyes mica-silver and blank,
Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed....Read more of this...

by Bukowski, Charles
...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 screw and rail
at,i had no male
freinds,

...Read more of this...

by Emerson, Ralph Waldo
...ese gray crags
Not on crags are hung,
But beads are of a rosary
On prayer and music strung;
And, credulous, through the granite seeming
Seest the smile of Reason beaming;
Can thy style-discerning eye
The hidden-working Builder spy,
Who builds, yet makes no chips, no din,
With hammer soft as snow-flake's flight;
Knowest thou this?
O pilgrim, wandering not amiss!
Already my rocks lie light,
And soon my cone will spin.
For the world was built in order,
And the atoms march in...Read more of this...

by Jarrell, Randall
...all, I'm old.

And yet I'm afraid, as I was at the funeral
I went to yesterday.
My friend's cold made-up face, granite among its flowers,
Her undressed, operated-on, dressed body
Were my face and body.
As I think of her and I hear her telling me

How young I seem; I am exceptional;
I think of all I have.
But really no one is exceptional,
No one has anything, I'm anybody,
I stand beside my grave
Confused with my life, that is commonplace and solitary....Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...rds of
 the
 earth. 

I see the places of the sagas;
I see pine-trees and fir-trees torn by northern blasts; 
I see granite boulders and cliffs—I see green meadows and lakes; 
I see the burial-cairns of Scandinavian warriors; 
I see them raised high with stones, by the marge of restless oceans, that the dead men’s
 spirits,
 when they wearied of their quiet graves, might rise up through the mounds, and gaze on
 the
 tossing
 billows, and be refresh’d by storms, immensity,...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...the
 promenaders; 
The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the clank of the
 shod horses on the granite floor; 
The snow-sleighs, the clinking, shouted jokes, pelts of snowballs; 
The hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of rous’d mobs; 
The flap of the curtain’d litter, a sick man inside, borne to the hospital;
The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall; 
The excited crowd, the policeman with his star, quickly working his pass...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...ty endures? 
Or a teeming manufacturing state? or a prepared constitution? or the best-built
 steamships? 
Or hotels of granite and iron? or any chef-d’oeuvres of engineering, forts, armaments? 

Away! These are not to be cherish’d for themselves; 
They fill their hour, the dancers dance, the musicians play for them;
The show passes, all does well enough of course, 
All does very well till one flash of defiance. 

The great city is that which has the greatest man or woman...Read more of this...

by Byron, George (Lord)
...nnel bleak and bare,
Save shrubs that spring to perish there:
Each side the midway path there lay
Small broken crags of granite grey
By time, or mountain lightning, riven
From summits clad in mists of heaven;
For where is he that hath beheld
The peak of Liakura unveiled?


They reach the grove of pine at last:
'Bismillah! now the peril's past;
For yonder view the opening plain,
And there we'll prick our steeds amain.'
The Chiaus spake, and as he said,
A bullet whistled o'...Read more of this...

by Carroll, Lewis
...in the dusky glare? 

"The meadows breathing amber light,
The darkness toppling from the height,
The feathery train of granite Night? 

"Shall he, grown gray among his peers,
Through the thick curtain of his tears
Catch glimpses of his earlier years, 

"And hear the sounds he knew of yore,
Old shufflings on the sanded floor,
Old knuckles tapping at the door? 

"Yet still before him as he flies
One pallid form shall ever rise,
And, bodying forth in glassy eyes 

"The vision o...Read more of this...

by Crowley, Aleister
...oglyph
Of the dragon and the lamb
Shall thou and I engrave here
On Time's inscandescable cliff ?

Look ! in the plished granite,
Black as thy cartouche is with sins,
I read the searing sentence
That blasts the eyes that scan it :
"HOOR and SET be TWINS."
A fico for repentance !

Ay ! O Son of my mother
That snarled and clawed in her womb
As now we rave in our rapture,
I know thee, I love thee, brother !
Incestuous males that consumes
The light and the life that we capture...Read more of this...

by Akhmatova, Anna
...us, the unreasoned wind
Interrupts speech that's barely begun.

But not for anything will we change the pompous
Granite city of glory, pain and lies,
The glistening wide rivers' ice
Sunless and murky gardens, and the voice,
Though barely audible, of the Muse.



x x x

I remember you only rarely
And your fate I do not view
But the mark won't be stripped from my soul
Of the meaningless meeting with you.

Your red house I avoid on purpose,
Your ...Read more of this...

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Book: Reflection on the Important Things