Famous Impenetrable Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Impenetrable poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous impenetrable poems. These examples illustrate what a famous impenetrable poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Chatterton, Thomas
...Almighty Framer of the Skies!
O let our pure devotion rise,
Like Incense in thy Sight!
Wrapt in impenetrable Shade
The Texture of our Souls were made
Till thy Command gave light.
The Sun of Glory gleam'd the Ray,
Refin'd the Darkness into Day,
And bid the Vapours fly;
Impell'd by his eternal Love
He left his Palaces above
To cheer our gloomy Sky.
How shall we celebrate the day,
When God appeared in mortal clay,
The mark of worldly s...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...orals, Literatures to come,)
Thou Wonder World, yet undefined, unform’d—neither do I define thee;
How can I pierce the impenetrable blank of the future?
I feel thy ominous greatness, evil as well as good;
I watch thee, advancing, absorbing the present, transcending the past;
I see thy light lighting and thy shadow shadowing, as if the entire globe;
But I do not undertake to define thee—hardly to comprehend thee;
I but thee name—thee prophecy—as now!
I merely thee ejacul...Read more of this...
by
Matthew, John
...g on his pedals,
He pulls his woes, as if there is no halcyon tomorrows.
Your grimy streets are dusty, high walled, impenetrable,
As if you wish to guard the gory secrets within.
Is this where histories, dynasties were erected, to fall?
A dynasty now rules by proxy the city of the great Akbar,
And a fratricide of a politician now fills you with awe,
When you are the city of kingly fratricides and parricides.
Remember how Dara Shukoh was marched and beheaded,
In y...Read more of this...
by
Eluard, Paul
...The wind
Undecided
Rolls a cigarette of air
The mute girl talks:
It is art's imperfection.
This impenetrable speech.
The motor car is truly launched:
Four martyrs' heads
Roll under the wheels.
Ah! a thousand flames, a fire,
The light, a shadow!
The sun is following me.
A feather gives to a hat
A touch of lightness:
The chimney smokes....Read more of this...
by
Jong, Erica
...h--
dear teachers--
but she shines like Miss Liberty
to Emma Lazarus' hordes,
while he gazes within,
always, at his own
impenetrable jungle....Read more of this...
by
Akhmatova, Anna
...somebody's dreams, slowly foundering.
Winter has already loitered here,
lightly powdering these fields,
casting an impenetrable haze
that fills the world as far as the horizon.
I used to think that after we are gone
there's nothing, simply nothing at all.
Then who's that wandering by the porch
again and calling us by name?
Whose face is pressed against the frosted pane?
What hand out there is waving like a branch?
By way of reply, in that cobwebbed corner
a sunst...Read more of this...
by
Swinburne, Algernon Charles
...e as men's kings unkingdomed in thy sight.
Through the iron years, the centuries brazen-gated,
By the ages' barred impenetrable doors,
From the evening to the morning have we waited,
Should thy foot haply sound on the awful floors.
The floors untrodden of the sun's feet glimmer,
The star-unstricken pavements of the night;
Do the lights burn inside? the lights wax dimmer
On festal faces withering out of sight.
The crowned heads lose the light on them; it may be
...Read more of this...
by
Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...wheels
Of anguish take us eastward, where the clouds
Of human gloom are lost against the gleam
That shines on Thought's impenetrable mail.
VI
When we shall hear no more the cradle-songs
Of ages -- when the timeless hymns of Love
Defeat them and outsound them -- we shall know
The rapture of that large release which all
Right science comprehends; and we shall read,
With unoppressed and unoffended eyes,
That record of All-Soul whereon God writes
In everlasting runes the ...Read more of this...
by
Finch, Anne Kingsmill
...acious Mind,
Fields to other Fields had laid,
By Force, or by injurious Bargains join'd,
With Fences for their Guard impenetrable made;
The juster Tempest mocks the wrong,
And sweeps, in its directed Flight,
Th' Inclosures of another's Right,
Driving at once the Bounds, and licens'd Herds along.
The Earth agen one general Scene appears;
No regular distinction now,
Betwixt the Grounds for Pasture, or the Plough,
The Face of Nature wears.
Free as the Men...Read more of this...
by
Milton, John
...ng to the horrid roof,
And thrice threefold the gates; three folds were brass,
Three iron, three of adamantine rock,
Impenetrable, impaled with circling fire,
Yet unconsumed. Before the gates there sat
On either side a formidable Shape.
The one seemed woman to the waist, and fair,
But ended foul in many a scaly fold,
Voluminous and vast--a serpent armed
With mortal sting. About her middle round
A cry of Hell-hounds never-ceasing barked
With wide Cerbere...Read more of this...
by
Milton, John
...blaze
Insufferably bright. O! might I here
In solitude live savage; in some glade
Obscured, where highest woods, impenetrable
To star or sun-light, spread their umbrage broad
And brown as evening: Cover me, ye Pines!
Ye Cedars, with innumerable boughs
Hide me, where I may never see them more!--
But let us now, as in bad plight, devise
What best may for the present serve to hide
The parts of each from other, that seem most
To shame obnoxious, and unseemliest see...Read more of this...
by
Byron, George (Lord)
...h his own mind;
But baffled as thou wert from high,
Still in thy patient energy,
In the endurance, and repulse
Of thine impenetrable Spirit,
Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse,
A mighty lesson we inherit:
Thou art a symbol and a sign
To Mortals of their fate and force;
Like thee, Man is in part divine,
A troubled stream from a pure source;
And Man in portions can foresee
His own funereal destiny;
His wretchedness, and his resistance,
And his sad unallied existence:
To ...Read more of this...
by
Bishop, Elizabeth
...ay around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?
But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pan...Read more of this...
by
Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...at you most admire.
No, there was never anything like that;
Nature has never fastened such a mask
Of radiant and impenetrable merit
On any woman as you say there is
On this one. Not a mask? I thank you, sir,
But you see more with your determination,
I fear, than with your prudence or your conscience;
And you have never met me with my eyes
In all the mirrors I’ve made faces at.
No, I shall never call you strange again:
You are the young and inconvincible ...Read more of this...
by
Swinburne, Algernon Charles
...of time to carry
And all the fears and hopes of life to keep,
Thy vesture wrought of ages legendary
Hides usward thine impenetrable sleep,
And thy veiled head, night's oldest tributary,
We know not if it speak or smile or weep.
But where for us began
The first live light of man
And first-born fire of deeds to burn and leap,
The first war fair as peace
To shine and lighten Greece,
And the first freedom moved upon the deep,
God's breath upon the face of time
Moving, a pres...Read more of this...
by
Muir, Edwin
...t one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
"They'll molder away and be like other loam."
We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,
Long laid aside. We have gone back...Read more of this...
by
Bonnefoy, Yves
...
He had put aside his pick and his spade,
The air was fresh on that morning of the world,
But even freshness can be impenetrable, and cruel
The memory of the mornings of childhood.
Who was he, who had he been in the light,
I did not know, I still do not.
But I also see him on the boulevard,
Walking slowly, so much weariness
Weighing down the way he now moved,
He was going back to work, while I
Was wandering about with some of my classmates
At the beginning of an ...Read more of this...
by
Bishop, Elizabeth
...those nights.
--Suddenly the bus driver
stops with a jolt,
turns off his lights.
A moose has come out of
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus's hot hood.
Towering, antlerless,
high as a church,
homely as a house
(or, safe as houses).
A man's voice assures us
"Perfectly harmless. . . ."
Some of the passengers
exclaim in whispers,
childishly, softly,
"Sure a...Read more of this...
by
Hecht, Anthony
...he tousled snarl of intersecting limbs,
That mackled, cinder grayness. It's a riddle
Beyond the eye's solution. Impenetrable.
If there is order in all that anarchy
Of granite mezzotint, that wilderness,
It takes a better eye than mine to see it.
It set me on to wondering how to deal
With such a thickness of particulars,
Deal with it faithfully, you understand,
Without blurring the issue. Of course I know
That within a month the sleeving snows will come
Wit...Read more of this...
by
Bidart, Frank
...e Ritz Brothers)
in The Gorilla,
once we'd been battered by the gorilla
we searched the walls, the intricately carved
impenetrable paneling
for a button, lever, latch
that unlocks a secret door that
reveals at last the secret chambers,
CORRIDORS within WALLS,
(the disenthralling, necessary, dreamed structure
beneath the structure we see,)
that is the HOUSE within the HOUSE . . .
There is a NIGHT within the NIGHT,--
. . . there were (for exampl...Read more of this...
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