Famous Ignore Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Confession (to Alina Osipova 1826)

by Alexander Pushkin
 I love you - though it makes me beat,
Though vain it seems, and melancholy -
Yet to this shameless, hapless folly
I'll be confessing at your feet.
It ill becomes me: that I'm older,
Time I should be more sensible...
And yet the frivolous disorder
Fills every jitter of my soul.
Say you'll be gone - I'm jaded, yawning;
You're back - I'm sad, I suffer through...Read more of this...

Iii

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
To-day my skies are bare and ashen,
And bend on me without a beam.
Since love is held the master-passion,
Its loss must be the pain supreme—
And grinning Fate has wrecked my dream.
But pardon, dear departed Guest,
I will not rant, I will not rail;
For good the grain must feel the flail;
There are whom love has never blessed.
I had and have a younger brother,
One...Read more of this...

If You Only Knew

by Robert Desnos
 Far from me and like the stars, the sea and all the trappings of poetic myth,
Far from me but here all the same without your knowing,
Far from me and even more silent because I imagine you endlessly.
Far from me, my lovely mirage and eternal dream, you cannot know.
If you only knew.
Far from me and even farther yet from being...Read more of this...

A Letter

by Anthony Hecht
 I have been wondering
 What you are thinking about, and by now suppose
 It is certainly not me.
 But the crocus is up, and the lark, and the blundering
 Blood knows what it knows.
It talks to itself all night, like a sliding moonlit sea.

 Of course, it is talking of you.
 At dawn, where the ocean has netted its...Read more of this...

The Old Fools

by Philip Larkin
 What do they think has happened, the old fools,
To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose
It's more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,
And you keep on pissing yourself, and can't remember
Who called this morning? Or that, if they only chose,
They could alter things back to when they danced all night,
Or went to their wedding, or sloped...Read more of this...

Elegy In The Classroom

by Anne Sexton
 In the thin classroom, where your face
was noble and your words were all things,
I find this boily creature in your place;

find you disarranged, squatting on the window sill,
irrefutably placed up there,
like a hunk of some big frog
watching us through the V
of your woolen legs.

Even so, I must admire your skill.
You are so gracefully insane.
We fidget in our plain chairs
and...Read more of this...

Doors Doors Doors

by Anne Sexton
 1. Old Man

Old man, it's four flights up and for what?
Your room is hardly bigger than your bed.
Puffing as you climb, you are a brown woodcut
stooped over the thin tail and the wornout tread.

The room will do. All that's left of the old life
is jampacked on shelves from floor to ceiling
like a supermarket: your books, your dead wife
generously fat...Read more of this...

We are in Fate and Fate's and do but lack

by Fernando Pessoa
We are in Fate and Fate's and do but lack

Outness from soul to know ourselves its dwelling,

And do but compel Fate aside or back

By Fate's own immanence in the compelling.

We are too far in us from outward truth

To know how much we are not what we are,

And live but in the heat of error's youth,

Yet young enough its acting youth...Read more of this...

Now!

by Robert Browning
 Out of your whole life give but a moment!
All of your life that has gone before,
All to come after it, -- so you ignore,
So you make perfect the present, condense,
In a rapture of rage, for perfection's endowment,
Thought and feeling and soul and sense,
Merged in a moment which gives me at last
You around me for once, you beneath me, above...Read more of this...

agapanthus - african lily

by Rg Gregory
 [from agape (love); anthus (flower)]

you may not be willing to notice me
i have an awkward sense of myself
my name can be hard on the tongue
i do not grow easily in places
where the sun only fitfully appears

i've come a long way northwards
gardens do not flatter my needs
i am a shy sheltered plant - my leaves
first come above the earth slowly
serpenting...Read more of this...

Yesterday And To-morrow

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Yesterday I held your hand,
Reverently I pressed it,
And its gentle yieldingness
From my soul I blessed it.
But to-day I sit alone,
Sad and sore repining;
Must our gold forever know
Flames for the refining?
Yesterday I walked with you,
Could a day be sweeter?
Life was all a lyric song
Set to tricksy meter.
Ah, to-day is like a dirge,—
Place my arms around you,
Let me feel the same dear...Read more of this...

Success

by Emma Lazarus
 Oft have I brooded on defeat and pain, 
The pathos of the stupid, stumbling throng. 
These I ignore to-day and only long 
To pour my soul forth in one trumpet strain, 
One clear, grief-shattering, triumphant song, 
For all the victories of man's high endeavor, 
Palm-bearing, laurel deeds that live forever, 
The splendor clothing him whose will is strong. 
Hast...Read more of this...

Without Looking

by Patricia Goedicke
 Either at my friend's daughter's
sixteen-year-old body dumped
on the morgue slab, T-shirt
stuck fast to one ripped 
breast I identified quick, and then
got out of there

or at the old gentleman
with tubes in the living room, spittle
stained in his wispy 
beard, out of 
the corner of my eye I hardly
notice it, how

could I, drink in hand
at five-thirty, at the least
sign of pain...Read more of this...

Night on The Prairies

by Walt Whitman
 NIGHT on the prairies; 
The supper is over—the fire on the ground burns low; 
The wearied emigrants sleep, wrapt in their blankets: 
I walk by myself—I stand and look at the stars, which I think now I never realized
 before.


Now I absorb immortality and peace,
I admire death, and test propositions. 

How plenteous! How spiritual! How resumé! 
The same Old...Read more of this...

Head Against The Walls

by Paul Eluard
 There were only a few of them 
In all the earth
Each one thought he was alone
They sang, they were right
To sing
But they sang the way you sack a city
The way you kill yourself. 

Frayed moist night
Shall we endure you
Longer
Shall we not shake
Your cloacal evidence
We shall not wait for a morning
Made to measure
We wanted to see in other people's eyes
Their...Read more of this...

The Temptation

by Charles Baudelaire
 THE Demon, in my chamber high, 
This morning came to visit me, 
And, thinking he would find some fault, 
He whispered: "I would know of thee 

Among the many lovely things 
That make the magic of her face, 
Among the beauties, black and rose, 
That make her body's charm and grace, 

Which is most fair?" Thou didst reply 
To...Read more of this...

Every Dead One Has a Name

by Taja Kramberger
Every dead one has a name,
only the names of the living make us falter.
Some names are impossible to utter
without a stammer and a fidget,
some can only be spoken 
through allusion,
and some, mostly women’s,
are forbidden in these parts.

Every dead one has a name,
engraved in stone,
printed in obituary or directory,
but my name must be undermined,
every few years
soiled and substituted
with another one.

A decade...Read more of this...

What Almost Every Woman Knows Sooner Or Later

by Ogden Nash
 Husbands are things that wives have to get used to putting up with.
And with whom they breakfast with and sup with.
They interfere with the discipline of nurseries,
And forget anniversaries,
And when they have been particularly remiss
They think they can cure everything with a great big kiss,
And when you tell them about something awful they have done they just
look unbearably patient...Read more of this...

Landscapes

by John Burnside
 Behind faces and gestures
We remain mute
And spoken words heavy
With what we ignore or keep silent
Betray us

I dare not speak for mankind
I know so little of myself

But the Landscape

I see as a reflection
Is also a lie stealing into
My words I speak without remorse
Of this image of myself
And mankind my unequaled torment

I speak of Desert without repose
Carved by relentless winds
Torn up...Read more of this...

From The Testament of Beauty

by Robert Seymour Bridges
 'Twas at that hour of beauty when the setting sun
squandereth his cloudy bed with rosy hues, to flood
his lov'd works as in turn he biddeth them Good-night;
and all the towers and temples and mansions of men
face him in bright farewell, ere they creep from their pomp
naked beneath the darkness;- while to mortal eyes
'tis given, ifso they close not of...Read more of this...

American Beauty

by Carolyn Kizer
 For Ann London 

As you described your mastectomy in calm detail
and bared your chest so I might see
the puckered scar,
"They took a hatchet to your breast!" I said. "What an
Amazon you are."

When we were girls we climbed Mt. Tamalpais
chewing bay leaves we had plucked
along the way;
we got high all right, from animal pleasure in each other,
shouting to the sky.

On...Read more of this...

Landscapes

by John Burnside
 Behind faces and gestures 
We remain mute 
And spoken words heavy 
With what we ignore or keep silent 
Betray us 

I dare not speak for mankind 
I know so little of myself 

But the Landscape 

I see as a reflection 
Is also a lie stealing into 
My words I speak without remorse 
Of this image of myself 
And mankind...Read more of this...

Since Then

by Henry Lawson
 I met Jack Ellis in town to-day -- 
Jack Ellis -- my old mate, Jack -- 
Ten years ago, from the Castlereagh, 
We carried our swags together away 
To the Never-Again, Out Back. 

But times have altered since those old days, 
And the times have changed the men. 
Ah, well! there's little to blame or praise -- 
Jack Ellis...Read more of this...

The Parent

by Ogden Nash
 Children aren't happy with nothing to ignore,
And that's what parents were created for....Read more of this...

Act of Union

by Seamus Heaney
 I

To-night, a first movement, a pulse,
As if the rain in bogland gathered head
To slip and flood: a bog-burst,
A gash breaking open the ferny bed.
Your back is a firm line of eastern coast
And arms and legs are thrown
Beyond your gradual hills. I caress
The heaving province where our past has grown.
I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder
That you would neither...Read more of this...

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