Famous Imminent Poems by Famous Poets

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

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An Ancient To Ancients

...who met sunrise sanguine-souled, 
Gentlemen, 
Are wearing weary. We are old; 
These younger press; we feel our rout 
Is imminent to A?des' den,-- 
That evening shades are stretching out, 
Gentlemen! 

And yet, though ours be failing frames, 
Gentlemen, 
So were some others' history names, 
Who trode their track light-limbed and fast 
As these youth, and not alien 
From enterprise, to their long last, 
Gentlemen. 

Sophocles, Plato, Socrates, 
Gentlemen, 
Pythagoras, Thucydide...Read more of this...
by Hardy, Thomas


Avons Harvest

...My doom it was to see him, 
Be where I might. That was ten years ago; 
And having waited season after season
His always imminent evil recrudescence, 
And all for nothing, I was waiting still, 
When the Titanic touched a piece of ice 
And we were for a moment where we are, 
With nature laughing at us. When the noise
Had spent itself to names, his was among them; 
And I will not insult you or myself 
With a vain perjury. I was far from cold. 
It seemed as for the first time in ...Read more of this...
by Robinson, Edwin Arlington

Bishop Blougrams Apology

...o ambitious,--here's my box-- 
I need the excitation of a pinch 
Threatening the torpor of the inside-nose 
Nigh on the imminent sneeze that never comes. 
"Leave it in peace" advise the simple folk: 
Make it aware of peace by itching-fits, 
Say I--let doubt occasion still more faith! 

You'll say, once all believed, man, woman, child, 
In that dear middle-age these noodles praise. 
How you'd exult if I could put you back 
Six hundred years, blot out cosmogony, 
Geology, ethno...Read more of this...
by Browning, Robert

Bombardment

...and torn
By bursting steel,
The houses fell about us;
Three nights we dared not sleep,
Sweating, and listening for the imminent crash
Which meant our death. 

The fourth night every man,
Nerve-tortured, racked to exhaustion,
Slept, muttering and twitching,
While the shells crashed overhead.

The fifth day there came a hush;
We left our holes
And looked above the wreckage of the earth
To where the white clouds moved in silent lines
Across the untroubled blue....Read more of this...
by Aldington, Richard

Dedication

...ho loved one only and who clave to her--' 
Her--over all whose realms to their last isle, 
Commingled with the gloom of imminent war, 
The shadow of His loss drew like eclipse, 
Darkening the world. We have lost him: he is gone: 
We know him now: all narrow jealousies 
Are silent; and we see him as he moved, 
How modest, kindly, all-accomplished, wise, 
With what sublime repression of himself, 
And in what limits, and how tenderly; 
Not swaying to this faction or to that; 
No...Read more of this...
by Rilke, Rainer Maria


Jubilate Agno: Fragment B Part 3

...months are false -- the Hebrew appellatives are of God. 

For the Time of the Lord's temptation was in early youth and imminent danger. 

For an equivocal generation is a generation and no generation. 

For putrifying matter nevertheless will yield up its life in diverse creatures and combinations of creatures. 

For a TOAD can dwell in the centre of a stone, because -- there are stones whose constituent life is of those creatures. 

For a Toad hath by means of his eye the m...Read more of this...
by Smart, Christopher

Lying Down

...follows its vertical way
Parallel to the plumb line of the horizon,
Parallel to the rider.
The horse races towards its imminent fall
And the other climbs interminably.
How simple and strange everything is.
Lying on my left side
I take no interest in the landscape
And I think only of things that are very vague,
Very vague and very pleasant,
Like the tired look you walk around with
Through this beautiful summer afternoon
To the right, to the left,
Here, there,
In the delirium ...Read more of this...
by Desnos, Robert

On Being Human

...n angel has no nerves.

Far richer they! I know the senses' witchery 
Guards us like air, from heavens too big to see; 
Imminent death to man that barb'd sublimity 
And dazzling edge of beauty unsheathed would be. 
Yet here, within this tiny, charmed interior, 
This parlour of the brain, their Maker shares 
With living men some secrets in a privacy 
Forever ours, not theirs....Read more of this...
by Lewis, C S

Our Son

...ridors of dark

In nightmares of self-condemnation where random thoughts

Besiege his fevered imagination – England’s 

Imminent destruction, his own, the world’s…

Sixty to eighty cigarettes a day, unavailing depot injections,

Failed abscondings, failed everything: Eton and Balliol

Hold no sway on ward one, nor even being

‘A six language master,’ on PICU madness is the only qualification.

There was the ‘shaving incident’ at school, which

Made him ready to walk out at fi...Read more of this...
by Tebb, Barry

Paradise Lost: Book 06

...ion, in mid sky 
Should combat, and their jarring spheres confound. 
Together both with next to almighty arm 
Up-lifted imminent, one stroke they aimed 
That might determine, and not need repeat, 
As not of power at once; nor odds appeared 
In might or swift prevention: But the sword 
Of Michael from the armoury of God 
Was given him tempered so, that neither keen 
Nor solid might resist that edge: it met 
The sword of Satan, with steep force to smite 
Descending, and in half...Read more of this...
by Milton, John

Paradise Lost: Book 09

...st either sweet repast, or sound repose; 
Such ambush, hid among sweet flowers and shades, 
Waited with hellish rancour imminent 
To intercept thy way, or send thee back 
Despoiled of innocence, of faith, of bliss! 
For now, and since first break of dawn, the Fiend, 
Mere serpent in appearance, forth was come; 
And on his quest, where likeliest he might find 
The only two of mankind, but in them 
The whole included race, his purposed prey. 
In bower and field he sought, where...Read more of this...
by Milton, John

Paradise Lost: Book 11

...met, 
Triumphs or festivals; and to them preached 
Conversion and repentance, as to souls 
In prison, under judgements imminent: 
But all in vain: which when he saw, he ceased 
Contending, and removed his tents far off; 
Then, from the mountain hewing timber tall, 
Began to build a vessel of huge bulk; 
Measured by cubit, length, and breadth, and highth; 
Smeared round with pitch; and in the side a door 
Contrived; and of provisions laid in large, 
For man and beast: when lo...Read more of this...
by Milton, John

Siena

...hearing in tune
Heaven within heaven, at heaven's full noon,
In sacred swoon:

A solemn swoon of sense that aches
With imminent blind heat of heaven,
While all the wide-eyed spirit wakes,
Vigilant of the supreme Seven,
Whose choral flames in God's sight move,
Made unendurable with love,
That without wind or blast of breath
Compels all things through life and death
Whither God saith.

There on the dim side-chapel wall
Thy mighty touch memorial,
Razzi, raised up, for ages dead...Read more of this...
by Swinburne, Algernon Charles

The Atheist

....

Come, my Habib, the roses blush,
the waters gleam, the bulbul sings -
To pierce thy podex El Quahar's
urgent and and imminent design!...Read more of this...
by Crowley, Aleister

The Eve Of Revolution

...as the sun's name through all nations be thy name.



I take the trumpet from my lips and sing.
O life immeasurable and imminent love,
And fear like winter leading hope like spring,
Whose flower-bright brows the day-star sits above,
Whose hand unweariable and untiring wing
Strike music from a world that wailed and strove,
Each bright soul born and every glorious thing,
From very freedom to man's joy thereof,
O time, O change and death,
Whose now not hateful breath
But gives t...Read more of this...
by Swinburne, Algernon Charles

The Halt Before Rome--September 1867

...fields without harvest or culture,
Over hordes without honour or love,
Over nations that groan with their kings,
As an imminent pestilence flings
Swift death from her shadowing wings,
So he, who hath claws as a vulture,
Plumage and beak as a dove.

He saith, "I am pilot and haven,
Light and redemption I am
Unto souls overlaboured," he saith;
And to all men the blast of his breath
Is a savour of death unto death;
And the Dove of his worship a raven,
And a wolf-cub the life-gi...Read more of this...
by Swinburne, Algernon Charles

The Wandering Jew

...Was pride, that kept itself alive 
As too rebellious to be free; 
He may have told, when more than once
Humility seemed imminent, 
How many a lonely time in vain 
The Second Coming came and went. 

Whether he still defies or not 
The failure of an angry task
That relegates him out of time 
To chaos, I can only ask. 
But as I knew him, so he was; 
And somewhere among men to-day 
Those old, unyielding eyes may flash,
And flinch—and look the other way....Read more of this...
by Robinson, Edwin Arlington

To Walt Whitman In America

...sire;
Few voices it hears yet sing to it,
Few pulses of hearts reaspire;
Foresees not time, nor forehears
The noises of imminent years,
Earthquake, and thunder, and fire:

When crowned and weaponed and curbless
It shall walk without helm or shield
The bare burnt furrows and herbless
Of war's last flame-stricken field,
Till godlike, equal with time,
It stand in the sun sublime,
In the godhead of man revealed.

Round your people and over them
Light like raiment is drawn,
Close ...Read more of this...
by Swinburne, Algernon Charles

Towards The Imminent Days (Section 4)

...In my aunt's house, the milk jug's beaded crochet cover
tickles the ear. We've eaten boiled things with butter. 
Pie spiced like islands, dissolving in cream, is now
dissolving in us. We've reached the teapot of calm. 
The table we sit at is fashioned of three immense
beech boards out of England. The minute widths of the year
have been refined in the wood ...Read more of this...
by Murray, Les

Two Poems from the War

...r spent, 
And savage glory of the fluttering 
Torn banners of the rain, and frosty ring 
Of moon-white winters, and the imminent 
Long-lunging seas, and glowing students bent 
To race on some smooth beach the gull's wing:

Not these, nor all we've been, nor all we've loved, 
The pitiful familiar names, had moved 
Our hearts to weep for them; but oh, the star 
The future is! Eternity's too wan 
To give again that undefeated, far, 
All-possible irradiance of dawn.

Like moon-da...Read more of this...
by MacLeish, Archibald

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