Famous Imagined Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Thing of Beauty (Endymion)

...mid-forest brake, 
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms: 
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms 
We have imagined for the mighty dead; 
An endless fountain of immortal drink, 
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink....Read more of this...
by Keats, John


Bishop Blougrams Apology

...o speak it humbly, he and I 
Are dowered alike--I'll ask you, I or he, 
Which in our two lives realizes most? 
Much, he imagined--somewhat, I possess. 
He had the imagination; stick to that! 
Let him say, "In the face of my soul's works 
"Your world is worthless and I touch it not 
"Lest I should wrong them"--I'll withdraw my plea. 
But does he say so? look upon his life! 
Himself, who only can, gives judgment there. 
He leaves his towers and gorgeous palaces 
To build the tr...Read more of this...
by Browning, Robert

Deer Dancer

...o find
us.She was no slouch, and neither were we, watching.

The music ended.And so does the story.I wasn't there.But I imagined her
like this, not a stained red dress with tape on her heels but the deer who
entered our dream in white dawn, breathed mist into pine trees, her fawn a 
blessing of meat, the ancestors who never left....Read more of this...
by Harjo, Joy

Duino Elegies

...exhausted takes lovers back
into herself as if there were not enough strength
to create them a second time. Have you imagined
Gaspara Stampa intensely enough so that any girl
deserted by her beloved might be inspired
by that fierce example of soaring objectless love
and might say to herself Perhaps I can be like her ?
Shouldn't this most ancient suffering finally grow
more fruitful for us? Isn't it time that we lovingly
freed ourselves from the beloved and quivering...Read more of this...
by Rilke, Rainer Maria

Emblems of Love

...ion of thee!
But music mixt with music are, in love,
Bodily senses; and as flame hath light,
Spirit this nature hath imagined round it,
No way concealed therein, when love comes near,
Nor in the perfect wedding of desires
Suffering any hindrance.

She

Ah, but now,
Now am I given love’s eternal secret!
Yea, thou and I who speak, are but the joy
Of our for ever mated spirits; but now
The wisdom of my gladness even through Spirit
Looks, divinely elate. Who hath f...Read more of this...
by Abercrombie, Lascelles


Endymion: Book I

...he mid forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.

 Nor do we merely feel these essences
For one short hour; no, even as the trees
That whisper round a temple become soon
Dear as the temple's self, so does the moon,
The passion poesy, glories infinite,
Ha...Read more of this...
by Keats, John

Incompatabilities

....



Forgetting your glasses for the eleven plus,

No money for the uniform for the pass at thirteen.

It wasn’t - as I imagined - shame that kept you from telling

But fear of the consequences for your mother

Had you sobbed the night’s terrors

Of your father’s drunken homecomings,

Your mother sat with the door open

In all weathers while you, the oldest,

Waited with her, perhaps

Something might have been done.



He never missed a day’s work digging graves,

Boasting he...Read more of this...
by Tebb, Barry

Lara

...some phantom's wound. 
Herself would question, and for him reply; 
Then rising, start, and beckon him to fly 
From some imagined spectre in pursuit; 
Then seat her down upon some linden's root, 
And hide her visage with her meagre hand, 
Or trace strange characters along the sand. — 
This could not last — she lies by him she loved; 
Her tale untold — her truth too dearly proved....Read more of this...
by Byron, George (Lord)

Meditations In Time Of Civil War

...candle and written page.
Il Penseroso's Platonist toiled on
In some like chamber, shadowing forth
How the daemonic rage
Imagined everything.
Benighted travellers
From markets and from fairs
Have seen his midnight candle glimmering.

Two men have founded here. A man-at-arms
Gathered a score of horse and spent his days
In this tumultuous spot,
Where through long wars and sudden night alarms
His dwinding score and he seemed castaways
Forgetting and forgot;
And I, that after me
M...Read more of this...
by Yeats, William Butler

My Suicide

...shelf:
"You saw no one," I told myself.

"No need to call the local law,
For after all its not your business.
You just imagined what you saw . . ."
Then I was seized with sudden dizziness:
For at my feet, beyond denying,
A pair of spectacles were lying.

And so I simply let them lie,
And sped from that accursed spot.
No lover of the police am I,
And sooner would be drunk than not.
"I'll scram," said I, "and leave the locals
To find and trace them dam bi-focals."...Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William

O We Are The Outcasts

...s on his
shirt.

anyhow, when I finally got hold of one of his
x-wives I was too drunk to
make it.

scared too. sure, I imagined him peering
through the window-
he didn't want to give up a damn thing-
and
leveling the luger while I was 
working
while "The March to the Gallows" was playing over
the Muzak
and shooting me in the ass first and
my poor brain
later.

"an intruder," I could hear him telling them,
"ravishing one of my helpless x-wives."

I see him published in some o...Read more of this...
by Bukowski, Charles

Paradise Lost: Book 03

..., carbuncle most or chrysolite, 
Ruby or topaz, to the twelve that shone 
In Aaron's breast-plate, and a stone besides 
Imagined rather oft than elsewhere seen, 
That stone, or like to that which here below 
Philosophers in vain so long have sought, 
In vain, though by their powerful art they bind 
Volatile Hermes, and call up unbound 
In various shapes old Proteus from the sea, 
Drained through a limbeck to his native form. 
What wonder then if fields and regions here 
Breat...Read more of this...
by Milton, John

Paradise Lost: Book 05

...he garden of God, with cedars crowned 
Above all hills. As when by night the glass 
Of Galileo, less assured, observes 
Imagined lands and regions in the moon: 
Or pilot, from amidst the Cyclades 
Delos or Samos first appearing, kens 
A cloudy spot. Down thither prone in flight 
He speeds, and through the vast ethereal sky 
Sails between worlds and worlds, with steady wing 
Now on the polar winds, then with quick fan 
Winnows the buxom air; till, within soar 
Of towering eagl...Read more of this...
by Milton, John

Paradise Lost: Book 10

...Hell; 
As when two polar winds, blowing adverse 
Upon the Cronian sea, together drive 
Mountains of ice, that stop the imagined way 
Beyond Petsora eastward, to the rich 
Cathaian coast. The aggregated soil 
Death with his mace petrifick, cold and dry, 
As with a trident, smote; and fixed as firm 
As Delos, floating once; the rest his look 
Bound with Gorgonian rigour not to move; 
And with Asphaltick slime, broad as the gate, 
Deep to the roots of Hell the gathered beach 
T...Read more of this...
by Milton, John

Questions of Travel

...en golden silence 
in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes: 

"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come 
to imagined places, not just stay at home? 
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right 
about just sitting quietly in one's room? 

Continent, city, country, society: 
the choice is never wide and never free. 
And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home, 
wherever that may be?"...Read more of this...
by Bishop, Elizabeth

Saul

...ask any faculty highest, to image success?
``I but open my eyes,---and perfection, no more and no less,
``In the kind I imagined, full-fronts me, and God is seen God
``In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the clod.
``And thus looking within and around me, I ever renew
``(With that stoop of the soul which in bending upraises it too)
``The submission of man's nothing-perfect to God's all-complete,
``As by each new obeisance in spirit, I climb to his feet.
``...Read more of this...
by Browning, Robert

Self-Portrait

...ens ahead of me
I look over my shoulder
to where it curves back
to childhood, its white line
bisecting the real and the imagined
the way the ridgepole of the spine
divides the two parts of the body, leaving
the soft belly in the center
vulnerable to anything.
As for my country, it blunders along
as well intentioned as Eve choosing
cider and windfalls, oblivious
to the famine soon to come.
I stir pots, bury my face in books, or hold
a telephone to my ear as if its cord
were th...Read more of this...
by Pastan, Linda

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

...m
And it accommodates everything. The sample
One sees is not to be taken as
Merely that, but as everything as it
May be imagined outside time--not as a gesture
But as all, in the refined, assimilable state.
But what is this universe the porch of
As it veers in and out, back and forth,
Refusing to surround us and still the only
Thing we can see? Love once
Tipped the scales but now is shadowed, invisible,
Though mysteriously present, around somewhere.
But we know it cannot be s...Read more of this...
by Ashbery, John

Tale Of A Tub

...fringe of kelp; green soap
navigates the tidal slosh of seas
breaking on legendary beaches; in faith
we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail
among sacred islands of the mad till death
shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real....Read more of this...
by Plath, Sylvia

The Three Voices

...abbling brook,
To con, with inexpressive look,
An unintelligible book." 

Low spake the voice within his head,
In words imagined more than said,
Soundless as ghost's intended tread: 

"If thou art duller than before,
Why quittedst thou the voice of lore?
Why not endure, expecting more?" 

"Rather than that," he groaned aghast,
"I'd writhe in depths of cavern vast,
Some loathly vampire's rich repast." 

"'Twere hard," it answered, "themes immense
To coop within the narrow fenc...Read more of this...
by Carroll, Lewis

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