Famous Hold Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Hold poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous hold poems. These examples illustrate what a famous hold poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Emily Dickinson
In Ebon Box, when years have flown
To reverently peer,
Wiping away the velvet dust
Summers have sprinkled there!
To hold a letter to the light --
Grown Tawny now, with time --
To con the faded syllables
That quickened us like Wine!
Perhaps a Flower's shrivelled check
Among its stores to find --
Plucked far away, some morning --
By gallant -- mouldering hand!
A curl, perhaps, from foreheads
Our Constancy...Read more of this...
by
Alfred Lord Tennyson
I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.
But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.
In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er,
Like coarsest clothes against the cold;
But that large grief which these...Read more of this...
by
Robert Southey
Hold your mad hands! for ever on your plain
Must the gorged vulture clog his beak with blood?
For ever must your Niger's tainted flood,
Roll to the ravenous shark his banquet slain?
Hold your mad hands! and learn at length to know,
And turn your vengeance on the common foe,
Yon treacherous vessel and her godless crew!
Let...Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
A nightingale, inebriate [with love of the rose], within
a garden saw the roses laughing with a cup of wine. To
me he came and whispered in my ear, in tones appropriate
to the circumstance: Be on thy guard, my friend; one
cannot hold the life that slips away....Read more of this...
by
John Matthew
He hangs on dangling handholds
As the train sways and careens
Endless nondescript buildings unfold
Their secrets as the tired warrior returns.
The day is over the night falls
Thickly through the barricaded windows
The man’s sleepy head lolls
On his shoulder in a dream disturbed.
The days are a hard white collar brawl
The sleepless night stretches ahead
There’s no space for a fly to crawl
The morning paper...Read more of this...
by
Emile Verhaeren
Our bright garden is health itself.
It is squandered in its brightness from the thousand hands of the branches and leaves as they wave to and fro.
And the pleasant shade that welcomes our feet after the long roads pours into our tired limbs a quickening strength, gentle as the garden's mosses.
When the pond plays with the wind and the sun, a...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
1. DREAMS
I was an ice baby.
I turned to sky blue.
My tears became two glass beads.
My mouth stiffened into a dumb howl.
They say it was a dream
but I remember that hardening.
My sister at six
dreamt nightly of my death:
"The baby turned to ice.
Someone put her in the refrigerator
and she turned as hard as a Popsicle."
I remember the stink of the liverwurst.
How...Read more of this...
by
A E Housman
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers...Read more of this...
by
William Carlos (WCW) Williams
I will teach you my townspeople
how to perform a funeral
for you have it over a troop
of artists—
unless one should scour the world—
you have the ground sense necessary.
See! the hearse leads.
I begin with a design for a hearse.
For Christ's sake not black—
nor white either — and not polished!
Let it be whethered—like a farm wagon—
with gilt wheels (this could be
applied fresh...Read more of this...
by
Kahlil Gibran
A mason came forth and said, "Speak to us of Houses."
And he answered and said:
Build of your imaginings a bower in the wilderness ere you build a house within the city walls.
For even as you have home-comings in your twilight, so has the wanderer in you, the ever distant and alone.
Your house is your larger...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
There's a whisper down the field where the year has shot her yield,
And the ricks stand grey to the sun,
Singing: "Over then, come over, for the bee has quit the dover,
"And your English summer's done."
You have heard the beat of the off-shore wind,
And the thresh of the deep-sea rain;
You have heard the song --...Read more of this...
by
Dylan Thomas
Hold hard, these ancient minutes in the cuckoo's month,
Under the lank, fourth folly on Glamorgan's hill,
As the green blooms ride upward, to the drive of time;
Time, in a folly's rider, like a county man
Over the vault of ridings with his hound at heel,
Drives forth my men, my children, from the hanging south.
Country, your sport is summer, and December's pools
By...Read more of this...
by
Eugene Field
Where wail the waters in their flaw
A spectre wanders to and fro,
And evermore that ghostly shore
Bemoans the heir of Yvytot.
Sometimes, when, like a fleecy pall,
The mists upon the waters fall,
Across the main float shadows twain
That do not heed the spectre's call.
The king his son of Yvytot
Stood once and saw the waters go
Boiling around with hissing sound
The sullen phantom rocks...Read more of this...
by
John Berryman
'All virtues enter into this world:')
A Buddhist, doused in the street, serenely burned.
The Secretary of State for War,
winking it over, screwed a redhaired whore.
Monsignor Capovilla mourned. What a week.
A journalism doggy took a leak
against absconding coon ('but take one virtue,
without which a man can hardly hold his own')
the sun in the willow
shivers itself & shakes itself green-yellow
(Abba Pimen groaned,...Read more of this...
by
Dylan Thomas
On almost the incendiary eve
Of several near deaths,
When one at the great least of your best loved
And always known must leave
Lions and fires of his flying breath,
Of your immortal friends
Who'd raise the organs of the counted dust
To shoot and sing your praise,
One who called deepest down shall hold his peace
That cannot sink or cease
...Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
How long can I hold you by my ignorance? My own
annihilation oppresses my heart. Straightway I gird my
loins with the ephod of the priests. Do you know why?
Because it is the fashion of the Musulman, and I am one....Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
THE SEA is large.
The sea hold on a leg of land in the Chesapeake hugs an early sunset and a last morning star over the oyster beds and the late clam boats of lonely men.
Five white houses on a half-mile strip of land … five white dice rolled from a tube.
Not so long ago … the sea was large…
And...Read more of this...
by
Henry Lawson
When the heavy sand is yielding backward from your blistered feet,
And across the distant timber you can SEE the flowing heat;
When your head is hot and aching, and the shadeless plain is wide,
And it's fifteen miles to water in the scrub the other side --
Don't give up, don't be down-hearted, to a man's strong heart...Read more of this...
by
Anne Killigrew
TEll me thou safest End of all our Woe,
Why wreched Mortals do avoid thee so:
Thou gentle drier o'th' afflicteds Tears,
Thou noble ender of the Cowards Fears;
Thou sweet Repose to Lovers sad dispaire,
Thou Calm t'Ambitions rough Tempestuous Care.
If in regard of Bliss thou wert a Curse,
And then the Joys of Paradise art worse;...Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
The stars, who dwell on heaven's exalted stage,
Baffle the wise diviners of our age;
Take heed, hold fast the rope of mother wit.
These augurs all distrust their own presage....Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
If starry space no limit knows
And sun succeeds to sun,
There is no reason to suppose
Our earth the only one.
'Mid countless constellations cast
A million worlds may be,
With each a God to bless or blast
And steer to destiny.
Just think! A million gods or so
To guide each vital stream,
With over all to boss the show
A Deity...Read more of this...
by
William Shakespeare
If thy soul check thee that I come so near,
Swear to thy blind soul that I was thy Will,
And will thy soul knows is admitted there;
Thus far for love, my love suit, sweet, fulfil.
Will will fulfil the treasure of thy love,
Ay, fill it full with wills, and my will one.
In things of great receipt with case we prove
Among a...Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
Do you see those two or three imbeciles who hold the
world in their hands, and who, in their candid ignorance,
believe themselves the wisest in the universe? Do not
disturb yourself for, in their high content, they deem
all heretics who are not asses [like themselves]....Read more of this...
by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
SONG OF THE IMPRISONED COUNT.
COUNT.
I KNOW a flower of beauty rare,
Ah, how I hold it dear!
To seek it I would fain repair,
Were I not prison'd here.
My sorrow sore oppresses me,
For when I was at liberty,
I had it close beside me.
Though from this castle's walls so steep
I cast mine eyes around,
And gaze oft from the lofty keep,
The flower can not...Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
Take care you never hold a drinking-bout
With an ill-tempered, ill-conditioned lout;
He'll make a vile disturbance all night long,
And vile apologies next day, no doubt....Read more of this...
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