Famous Hesitant Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Hesitant poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous hesitant poems. These examples illustrate what a famous hesitant poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Amy Clampitt
Nothing's certain. Crossing, on this longest day,
the low-tide-uncovered isthmus, scrambling up
the scree-slope of what at high tide
will be again an island,
to where, a decade since well-being staked
the slender, unpremeditated claim that brings us
back, year after year, lugging the
makings of another picnic—
the cucumber sandwiches, the sea-air-sanctified
fig newtons—there's no knowing what the slamming
seas, the gales...Read more of this...
by
Delmore Schwartz
Faithful to your commandments, o consciousness, o
Holy bird of words soaring ever whether to nothingness or
to inconceivable fulfillment slowly:
And still I follow you, awkward as that dandy of ontology
and as awkward as his albatross and as
another dandy of ontology before him, another shepherd
and watchdog of being, the one who
Talked forever of forever as if forever of...Read more of this...
by
Rainer Maria Rilke
You who are close to my heart always,
I welcome you, ancient coffins of stone,
which the cheerful water of Roman days
still flows through, like a wandering song.
Or those other ones that are open wide
like the eyes of a happily waking shepard
-with silence and bee-suck nettle inside,
from which ecstatic butterflies flittered;
everything that has been wrestled from doubt
I welcome-the mouths that burst...Read more of this...
by
Delmore Schwartz
Some who are uncertain compel me. They fear
The Ace of Spades. They fear
Loves offered suddenly, turning from the mantelpiece,
Sweet with decision. And they distrust
The fireworks by the lakeside, first the spuft,
Then the colored lights, rising.
Tentative, hesitant, doubtful, they consume
Greedily Caesar at the prow returning,
Locked in the stone of his act and office.
While the brass band brightly bursts over the...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Lee Masters
There is the caw of a crow,
And the hesitant song of a thrush.
There is the tinkle of a cowbell far away,
And the voice of a plowman on Shipley's hill.
The forest beyond the orchard is still
With midsummer stillness;
And along the road a wagon chuckles,
Loaded with corn, going to Atterbury.
And an old man sits under a tree asleep,
And an old woman...Read more of this...
by
Yves Bonnefoy
I woke up, it was the house where I was born.
It was raining softly in all the rooms,
I went from one to another, looking at
The water that shone on the mirrors
Piled up everywhere, some broken or even
Pushed between the furniture and the walls.
It was from these reflections that sometimes a face
Would emerge, laughing, of a gentleness
That was different...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
WHO knows what I know
when I have asked the night questions
and the night has answered nothing
only the old answers?
Who picked a crimson cryptogram,
the tail light of a motor car turning a corner,
or the midnight sign of a chile con carne place,
or a man out of the ashes of false dawn muttering “hot-dog” to the night watchmen:
Is there a spieler...Read more of this...
by
Rainer Maria Rilke
But you now, dear girl, whom I loved like a flower whose
name
I didn't know, you who so early were taken away:
I will once more call up your image and show it to them,
beautiful companion of the unsubduable cry.
Dancer whose body filled with your hesitant fate,
pausing, as though your young flesh had been cast in bronze;
grieving and listening--. Then,...Read more of this...
by
Conrad Aiken
As evening falls,
The walls grow luminous and warm, the walls
Tremble and glow with the lives within them moving,
Moving like music, secret and rich and warm.
How shall we live to-night, where shall we turn?
To what new light or darkness yearn?
A thousand winding stairs lead down before us;
And one by one in myriads we descend
By lamplit flowered walls, long balustrades,
Through half-lit...Read more of this...
by
A S J Tessimond
In love's dances, in love's dances
One retreats and one advances,
One grows warmer and one colder,
One more hesitant, one bolder.
One gives what the other needed
Once, or will need, now unheeded.
One is clenched, compact, ingrowing
While the other's melting, flowing.
One is smiling and concealing
While the other's asking kneeling.
One is arguing or sleeping
While the other's weeping, weeping.
And the question finds no answer
And the...Read more of this...
by
Delmore Schwartz
Let me not, ever, to the marriage in Cana
Of Galilee admit the slightest sentiment
Of doubt about the astonishing and sustaining manna
Of chance and choice to throw a shadow's element
Of disbelief in truth -- Love is not love
Nor is the love of love its truth in consciousness
If it can be made hesitant by any crow or dove or
seeming...Read more of this...
by
Philip Levine
Four bright steel crosses,
universal joints, plucked
out of the burlap sack --
"the heart of the drive train,"
the book says. Stars
on Lemon's wooden palm,
stars that must be capped,
rolled, and anointed,
that have their orders
and their commands as he
has his.
Under the blue
hesitant light another day
at Automotive
in the city of dreams.
We're all here to count
and be counted, Lemon,
Rosie, Eugene, Luis,
and me, too young...Read more of this...
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