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Famous Ii Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Yeats, William Butler
...- 
That is to say, ascends to Heaven;
Only the dead can be forgiven;
But when I think of that my tongue's a stone.

II

My Self. A living man is blind and drinks his drop.
What matter if the ditches are impure?
What matter if I live it all once more?
Endure that toil of growing up;
The ignominy of boyhood; the distress
Of boyhood changing into man;
The unfinished man and his pain
Brought face to face with his own clumsiness;

The finished man among his enemies? -
...Read more of this...



by Wilde, Oscar
...e shore, and sought
The toll-gate of the city hastily,
And in the market showed their brown and pictured pottery.


II.


But some good Triton-god had ruth, and bare
The boy's drowned body back to Grecian land,
And mermaids combed his dank and dripping hair
And smoothed his brow, and loosed his clenching hand;
Some brought sweet spices from far Araby,
And others bade the halcyon sing her softest lullaby.

And when he neared his old Athenian home,
A mighty billow r...Read more of this...

by Aldington, Richard
...venging gods. 
Most of all I believe 
In gods of bitter dullness, 
Cruel local gods 
Who scared my childhood. 

II 

I've seen people put 
A chrysalis in a match-box, 
"To see," they told me, "what sort of moth would come." 
But when it broke its shell 
It slipped and stumbled and fell about its prison 
And tried to climb to the light 
For space to dry its wings. 

That's how I was. 
Somebody found my chrysalis 
And shut it in a match-box. 
My shrivell...Read more of this...

by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...uld bring to her husband's house delight and abundance,
Filling it full of love and the ruddy faces of children.



II

Now had the season returned, when the nights grow colder and longer,
And the retreating sun the sign of the Scorpion enters.
Birds of passage sailed through the leaden air, from the ice-bound,
Desolate northern bays to the shores of tropical islands,
Harvests were gathered in; and wild with the winds of September
Wrestled the trees of the forest, as ...Read more of this...

by Carroll, Lewis
...It MAY mean much, but how is one to know?
He opens his mouth - yet out of it, methinks,
No words of wisdom flow. 


II 

Empress of Art, for thee I twine
This wreath with all too slender skill.
Forgive my Muse each halting line,
And for the deed accept the will! 


O day of tears! Whence comes this spectre grim,
Parting, like Death's cold river, souls that love?
Is not he bound to thee, as thou to him,
By vows, unwhispered here, yet heard above? 

And still it lives, ...Read more of this...



by Ginsberg, Allen
...
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered 
 out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand 
 years. 

 II 

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open 
 their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi- 
 nation? 
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob 
 tainable dollars! Children screaming under the 
 stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men 
 weeping in the parks! 
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the 
 loveless! Mental Moloch! M...Read more of this...

by Keats, John
...r in the pearly seas,
Forward he stoop'd over the airy shore,
And plung'd all noiseless into the deep night.


BOOK II

Just at the self-same beat of Time's wide wings
Hyperion slid into the rustled air,
And Saturn gain'd with Thea that sad place
Where Cybele and the bruised Titans mourn'd.
It was a den where no insulting light
Could glimmer on their tears; where their own groans
They felt, but heard not, for the solid roar
Of thunderous waterfalls and torrents hoarse...Read more of this...

by Alighieri, Dante
...s to see 
 Who look with longing for their end to be." 

 Then he moved forward, and behind I trod. 





Canto II



 THE day was falling, and the darkening air 
 Released earth's creatures from their toils, while I, 
 I only, faced the bitter road and bare 
 My Master led. I only, must defy 
 The powers of pity, and the night to be. 
 So thought I, but the things I came to see, 
 Which memory holds, could never thought forecast. 
 O Muses high! O Genius,...Read more of this...

by Byron, George (Lord)
...ospitable blaze; 
And gay retainers gather round the hearth, 
With tongues all loudness, and with eyes all mirth. 

II. 

The chief of Lara is return'd again: 
And why had Lara cross'd the bounding main? 
Left by his sire, too young such loss to know, 
Lord of himself; — that heritage of woe, 
That fearful empire which the human breast 
But holds to rob the heart within of rest! — 
With none to check, and few to point in time 
The thousand paths that slope the way to ...Read more of this...

by Wilde, Oscar
...oped, racing with the setting sun,
And ere the crimson after-glow was passed,
I stood within Ravenna's walls at last!


II.


How strangely still! no sound of life or joy
Startles the air; no laughing shepherd-boy
Pipes on his reed, nor ever through the day
Comes the glad sound of children at their play:
O sad, and sweet, and silent! surely here
A man might dwell apart from troublous fear,
Watching the tide of seasons as they flow
From amorous Spring to Winter's rain and ...Read more of this...

by Chesterton, G K
...nd,
Singing what shameful things are done
Between the sunlit sea and the sun
When the land is left behind.




BOOK II THE GATHERING OF THE CHIEFS


Up across windy wastes and up
Went Alfred over the shaws,
Shaken of the joy of giants,
The joy without a cause.

In the slopes away to the western bays,
Where blows not ever a tree,
He washed his soul in the west wind
And his body in the sea.

And he set to rhyme his ale-measures,
And he sang aloud his laws,
Because o...Read more of this...

by Poe, Edgar Allan
...y wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells-
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

II

Hear the mellow wedding bells,
Golden bells!
What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!
Through the balmy air of night
How they ring out their delight!
From the molten-golden notes,
And an in tune,
What a liquid ditty floats
To the turtle-dove that listens, while she gloats
On the moon!
Oh, from out the sounding cells,
What a gush of euphony volu...Read more of this...

by Byron, George (Lord)
...[2] 
Oh! wild as the accents of lovers' farewell 
Are the hearts which they bear, and the tales which they tell. 

II. 

Begirt with many a gallant slave, 
Apparell'd as becomes the brave, 
Awaiting each his lord's behest 
To guide his steps, or guard his rest, 
Old Giaffir sate in his Divan: 
Deep thought was in his aged eye; 
And though the face of Mussulman 
Not oft betrays to standers by 
The mind within, well skill'd to hide 
All but unconquerable pride, 
His pe...Read more of this...

by Byron, George (Lord)
...n sleep—for in itself a thought,
A slumbering thought, is capable of years,
And curdles a long life into one hour.

II

I saw two beings in the hues of youth
Standing upon a hill, a gentle hill,
Green and of mild declivity, the last
As 'twere the cape of a long ridge of such,
Save that there was no sea to lave its base,
But a most living landscape, and the wave
Of woods and corn-fields, and the abodes of men
Scattered at intervals, and wreathing smoke
Arising from such ru...Read more of this...

by Carroll, Lewis
...ful day,
 Whenever the Butcher was by,
The Beaver kept looking the opposite way,
 And appeared unaccountably shy.


II.--THE BELLMAN'S SPEECH.

Fit the Second.

THE BELLMAN'S SPEECH.


The Bellman himself they all praised to the skies--
 Such a carriage, such ease and such grace!
Such solemnity, too! One could see he was wise,
 The moment one looked in his face!

He had bought a large map representing the sea,
 Without the least vestige of land:
And the cr...Read more of this...

by Scott, Sir Walter
...nded up the rocky way,
     And faint, from farther distance borne,
     Were heard the clanging hoof and horn.
     II.

     As Chief, who hears his warder call,
     'To arms! the foemen storm the wall,'
     The antlered monarch of the waste
     Sprung from his heathery couch in haste.
     But ere his fleet career he took,
     The dew-drops from his flanks he shook;
     Like crested leader proud and high
     Tossed his beamed frontlet to the sky;
     A ...Read more of this...

by Byron, George (Lord)
...ta'en a longer, stronger pull, 
And 'a pull altogether,' as they say 
At sea — which drew most souls another way. 

II 

The angels all were singing out of tune, 
And hoarse with having little else to do, 
Excepting to wind up the sun and moon, 
Or curb a runaway young star or two, 
Or wild colt of a comet, which too soon 
Broke out of bounds o'er th' ethereal blue, 
Splitting some planet with its playful tail, 
As boats are sometimes by a wanton whale. 

III 

The gu...Read more of this...

by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...that's friend to men,
"Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!
"You! hypocrite lecteur! - mon semblable, - mon frere!"
II. A GAME OF CHESS
 The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Glowed on the marble, where the glass
Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
From which a golden Cupidon peeped out 
(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)
Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra
Reflecting light upon the table as
The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it...Read more of this...

by Miller, Alice Duer
...is my home and I still am alone. 
Now in her hour of trial and danger, 
Only the English are really her own. 

II 
It happened the first evening I was there. 
Some one was giving a ball in Belgrave Square.
At Belgrave Square, that most Victorian spot.—
Lives there a novel-reader who has not 
At some time wept for those delightful girls, 
Daughters of dukes, prime ministers and earls, 
In bonnets, berthas, bustles, buttoned basques, 
Hiding behind their pu...Read more of this...

by Akhmatova, Anna
...the groom came to me
Having shown me the pathway holy,
And that sad muse of mine
Led me like one blind.


 * II * 


December 9, 1913
The darkest days of the year
Must become the most clear.
I can't find words to compare -
Your lips are so tender and dear.

Only to raise your eyes do not dare,
Keeping the life of me.
They're lighter than vials premier,
And deadlier for me.

I understand now, that we need no words,
The snowed branch...Read more of this...

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Book: Shattered Sighs