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Famous Hesitates Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Gregory, Rg
...thing nothing there

he gives a brave laugh
but a laugh drained of blood
and moves down the passage 
to the masked door
hesitates and turns
wanting our support
frightened to his heart's core
steps no - is drawn - backwards
into a black space rapidly
dissolving in our misted eyes
we half-hear a short gasp - no more
the moon's grin is louder
as (on his restless clouds)
he bucks about the sky

no one returns to us
and in the morning
(rooted in fear
we could not leave the place
b...Read more of this...



by Emerson, Ralph Waldo
...To their kinsfolk and their dears,
Louder than with speech they pray,
What am I? companion; say.
And the friend not hesitates
To assign just place and mates,
Answers not in word or letter,
Yet is understood the better;—
Is to his friend a looking-glass,
Reflects his figure that doth pass.
Every wayfarer he meets
What himself declared, repeats;
What himself confessed, records;
Sentences him in his words,
The form is his own corporal form,
And his thought the penal worm...Read more of this...

by Rilke, Rainer Maria
...herself,
and yet, despite herself, she seems to move
according to the rhythm of her life to come.

She runs a bit, hesitates, stops,
half-turns around...
and, all while dreaming, shakes her head
for or against.

Then she dances a few steps
that she invents and forgets,
no doubt finding out that life
moves on too fast.

It's not so much that she steps out
of the small body enclosing her,
but that all she carries in herself
frolics and ferments.

It...Read more of this...

by Bly, Robert
...As I drive my parents home through the snow 
their frailty hesitates on the edge of a mountainside.
I call over the cliff 
only snow answers.
They talk quietly
of hauling water of eating an orange 
of a grandchild's photograph left behind last night.
When they open the door of their house they disappear.
And the oak when it falls in the forest who hears it through miles and miles of silence?
...Read more of this...

by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
....

Half-past one,
The street-lamp sputtered,
The street-lamp muttered,
The street-lamp said, “Regard that woman
Who hesitates toward you in the light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin.
You see the border of her dress
Is torn and stained with sand,
And you see the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin.”

The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the world gave up
The ...Read more of this...



by Gilbert, Jack
...The fox pushes softly, blindly through me at night, 
between the liver and the stomach. Comes to the heart 
and hesitates. Considers and then goes around it. 
Trying to escape the mildness of our violent world. 
Goes deeper, searching for what remains of Pittsburgh 
in me. The rusting mills sprawled gigantically 
along three rivers. The authority of them. 
The gritty alleys where we played every evening were 
stained pink by the inferno always ...Read more of this...

by Dickinson, Emily
...rfluous every Day
For every Day be said

That syllable whose Faith
Just saves it from Despair
And whose "I'll meet You" hesitates
If Love inquire "Where"?

Upon His dateless Fame
Our Periods may lie
As Stars that drop anonymous
From an abundant sky....Read more of this...

by Levine, Philip
...e mice-sawed potato fields dusk waits. 
My dull ones march by fours on the playground, 
Kicking up dust; The column hesitates 
As though in answer to the rising wind, 

To darkness and the coldness it must enter. 
Listen, my heroes, my half frozen men, 
The corporal calls us to that distant winter 
Where we will merge the nothingness within. 

And they salute as one and stand at peace. 
Keeping an arm's distance from everything, 
I answer them, knowing they se...Read more of this...

by Schiller, Friedrich von
...wither to the tomb,
And 'mid the universal ruin, bloom
The rosy days of Gods--With man, the choice,
Timid and anxious, hesitates between
The sense's pleasure and the soul's content;
While on celestial brows, aloft and sheen,
The beams of both are blent.

Seekest thou on earth the life of gods to share,
Safe in the realm of death?--beware
To pluck the fruits that glitter to thine eye;
Content thyself with gazing on their glow--
Short are the joys possession can bestow,
An...Read more of this...

by Seeger, Alan
...s darkens all his joy. 
He dreams of the sweet night their lips first met, 
And groans -- and turns to leave -- and hesitates . . . 
Poor stricken heart, he will, he can not fancy yet 
She will not come, the woman that he waits. 


But in an arch where deepest shadows fall 
He sits and studies the old, storied panes, 
And the calm crucifix that from the wall 
Looks on a world that quavers and complains. 
Hopeless, abandoned, desolate, aghast, 
On modes...Read more of this...

by Dickinson, Emily
...spring,
At night's delicious close.

Between the March and April line --
That magical frontier
Beyond which summer hesitates,
Almost too heavenly near.

It makes us think of all the dead
That sauntered with us here,
By separation's sorcery
Made cruelly more dear.

It makes us think of what we had,
And what we now deplore.
We almost wish those siren throats
Would go and sing no more.

An ear can break a human heart
As quickly as a spear,
We wish the ear ha...Read more of this...

by Lawrence, D. H.
...reamy coloured little tree of leaves
white, ivory white among the rambling greens
how evanescent, variegated elder, she hesitates on the green grass
as if, in another moment, she would disappear
with all her grace of foam!

And the larch that is only a column, it goes up too tall to see:
and the balsam-pines that are blue with the grey-blue blueness of
 things from the sea,
and the young copper beech, its leaves red-rosy at the ends
how still they are together, they stand so ...Read more of this...

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Book: Reflection on the Important Things