Famous Guessing Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Guessing poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous guessing poems. These examples illustrate what a famous guessing poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Edgar Allan Poe
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
...Read more of this...
by
Alan Seeger
Her courts are by the flux of flaming ways,
Between the rivers and the illumined sky
Whose fervid depths reverberate from on high
Fierce lustres mingled in a fiery haze.
They mark it inland; blithe and fair of face
Her suitors follow, guessing by the glare
Beyond the hilltops in the evening air
How bright the cressets at her...Read more of this...
by
G K Chesterton
Why do you rush through the fields in trains,
Guessing so much and so much.
Why do you flash through the flowery meads,
Fat-head poet that nobody reads;
And why do you know such a frightful lot
About people in gloves and such?...Read more of this...
by
Adrienne Rich
I know you are reading this poem
late, before leaving your office
of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window
in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet
long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem
standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean
on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven
across the plains' enormous spaces around...Read more of this...
by
Philip Larkin
Higher than the handsomest hotel
The lucent comb shows up for miles, but see,
All round it close-ribbed streets rise and fall
Like a great sigh out of the last century.
The porters are scruffy; what keep drawing up
At the entrance are not taxis; and in the hall
As well as creepers hangs a frightening smell.
There are paperbacks, and tea at so much a...Read more of this...
by
C S Lewis
Lead us, Evolution, lead us
Up the future's endless stair;
Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us.
For stagnation is despair:
Groping, guessing, yet progressing,
Lead us nobody knows where.
Wrong or justice, joy or sorrow,
In the present what are they
while there's always jam-tomorrow,
While we tread the onward way?
Never knowing where we're going,
We can never go astray.
To whatever variation
Our posterity may turn
Hairy, squashy, or...Read more of this...
by
Rg Gregory
(roundel: variation of the rondeau
consisting of three stanzas of three
lines each, linked together with but
two rhymes and a refrain at the end
of the first and third group)
1.
the blind rose
today's fullness is tomorrow's gone
(the next day after no one knows)
last year's dream now feeds upon
what blindly grows
imagine if you like a rose
on which no likely sun has shone
a darkness...Read more of this...
by
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Blest in death and life beyond man's guessing
Little children live and die, possest
Still of grace that keeps them past expressing
Blest.
Each least chirp that rings from every nest,
Each least touch of flower-soft fingers pressing
Aught that yearns and trembles to be prest,
Each least glance, gives gifts of grace, redressing
Grief's worst wrongs: each mother's nurturing breast
Feeds a flower of bliss, beyond all...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
Not seeing, still we know --
Not knowing, guess --
Not guessing, smile and hide
And half caress --
And quake -- and turn away,
Seraphic fear --
Is Eden's innuendo
"If you dare"?...Read more of this...
by
Mihai Eminescu
On the pond bright sparks are falling,
Wavelets in the sunlight glisten ;
Gazing on the woods with rapture ,
Do I let my spirit capture
Drowsiness, and lie and listen...
Quails are calling.
All the silent water sleeping
Of the streams and of the rivers ;
Only where the sun is shining
Thousand circles there designing
As with...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
A sea-gull with a broken wing,
I found upon the kelp-strewn shore.
It sprawled and gasped; I sighed: "Poor thing!
I fear your flying days are o'er;
Sad victim of a savage gun,
So ends your soaring in the sun."
I only wanted to be kind;
Its icy legs I gently caught,
Thinking its fracture I might bind,
But fiercely in its fear it fought;
Till guessing that I...Read more of this...
by
Erin Belieu
Ferdinand was systematic when
he drove his daughter mad.
With a Casanova's careful art,
he moved slowly,
stole only one child at a time
through tunnels specially dug
behind the walls of her royal
chamber, then paid the Duenna
well to remember nothing
but his appreciation.
Imagine how quietly
the servants must have worked,
loosening the dirt, the muffled
ring of pick-ends against
the castle stone. The Duenna,
one eye gauging the drugged girl's
sleep,...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
You see I cannot see -- your lifetime --
I must guess --
How many times it ache for me -- today -- Confess --
How many times for my far sake
The brave eyes film --
But I guess guessing hurts --
Mine -- got so dim!
Too vague -- the face --
My own -- so patient -- covers --
Too far -- the strength --
My...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
There's a drip of honeysuckle in the deep green lane;
There's old Martin jogging homeward on his worn old wain;
There are cherry petals falling, and a cuckoo calling, calling,
And a score of larks (God bless 'em) . . . but it's all pain, pain.
For you see I am not really there at all, not at all;
For you see I'm in...Read more of this...
by
Margaret Atwood
Cruising these residential Sunday
streets in dry August sunlight:
what offends us is
the sanities:
the houses in pedantic rows, the planted
sanitary trees, assert
levelness of surface like a rebuke
to the dent in our car door.
No shouting here, or
shatter of glass; nothing more abrupt
than the rational whine of a power mower
cutting a straight swath in the discouraged grass.
But though the driveways neatly
sidestep hysteria
by being...Read more of this...
by
Arthur Hugh Clough
"There is no God," the wicked saith,
"And truly it's a blessing,
For what He might have done with us
It's better only guessing."
"There is no God," a youngster thinks,
"or really, if there may be,
He surely did not mean a man
Always to be a baby."
"There is no God, or if there is,"
The tradesman thinks, "'twere funny
If He should take it ill in...Read more of this...
by
Jorge Luis Borges
Of all the streets that blur in to the sunset,
There must be one (which, I am not sure)
That I by now have walked for the last time
Without guessing it, the pawn of that Someone
Who fixes in advance omnipotent laws,
Sets up a secret and unwavering scale
for all the shadows, dreams, and forms
Woven into the texture of this life.
If there is...Read more of this...
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