Famous Inarticulate Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Corn

...pleasant sheen.
I start at fragmentary whispers, blown
From undertalks of leafy souls unknown,
Vague purports sweet, of inarticulate tone.
Dreaming of gods, men, nuns and brides, between
Old companies of oaks that inward lean
To join their radiant amplitudes of green
I slowly move, with ranging looks that pass
Up from the matted miracles of grass
Into yon veined complex of space
Where sky and leafage interlace
So close, the heaven of blue is seen
Inwoven with a heaven of gree...Read more of this...
by Lanier, Sidney


December 14

..., thy sphere,
The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work
Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,
That never touch with inarticulate pang
Those dying generations-at their song.
The One remains, the many change and pass
The expiring swan, and as he sings he dies.
The earth, the stars, the light, the day, the skies,
A white-haired shadow roaming like a dream
Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines,
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too-
Sin and her shadow De...Read more of this...
by Lehman, David

Divina Commedia

...n at this minster gate, 
.

Kneeling in prayer, and not ashamed to pray, 
.

The tumult of the time disconsolate 
.

To inarticulate murmurs dies away, 
.

While the eternal ages watch and wait.II.2.
How strange the sculptures that adorn these towers! 
.
This crowd of statues, in whose folded sleeves 
.
Birds build their nests; while canopied with leaves 
.
Parvis and portal bloom like trellised bowers, 
.
And the vast minster seems a cross of flowers! 
.
But fiends and drago...Read more of this...
by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

Enoch Arden

...d long-bearded solitary,
Brown, looking hardly human, strangely clad,
Muttering and mumbling, idiotlike it seem'd,
With inarticulate rage, and making signs
They knew not what: and yet he led the way
To where the rivulets of sweet water ran;
And ever as he mingled with the crew,
And heard them talking, his long-bounden tongue
Was loosen'd, till he made them understand;
Whom, when their casks were fill'd they took aboard:
And there the tale he utter'd brokenly,
Scarce credited ...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord

Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie

...hat perhaps in its bosom
He was already at rest, and she longed to slumber beside him.
Sometimes a rumor, a hearsay, an inarticulate whisper,
Came with its airy hand to point and beckon her forward.
Sometimes she spake with those who had seen her beloved and known him,
But it was long ago, in some far-off place or forgotten.
"Gabriel Lajeunesse!" they said; yes! we have seen him.
He was with Basil the blacksmith, and both have gone to the prairies;
Coureurs-des-Bois are they,...Read more of this...
by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth


Four Quartets 2: East Coker

...to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover wha...Read more of this...
by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)

I Come Home Wanting To Touch Everyone

...his little motor and violin--
everything, everyone is intelligible
in the language of touch,
and we sit down to dinner inarticulate
as blood, all difficulties postponed
because the weather is so good....Read more of this...
by Dunn, Stephen

Limits

...Fragments of glasses
in the empty room
of the inarticulate whispers,
bleed
our limits,
fill
with sores
the caress of our soul....Read more of this...
by Kraniotis, Dimitris P

Music

...,
And every tremulous longing, stirred
By spirit winds that come we know not whence
And go we know not where,
And every inarticulate prayer
Beating about the depths of pain or bliss,
Like some bewildered bird
That seeks its nest but knows not where it is,
And every dream that haunts, with dim delight,
The drowsy hour between the day and night,
The wakeful hour between the night and day,--
Imprisoned, waits for thee,
Impatient, yearns for thee,
The queen who comes to set the c...Read more of this...
by Dyke, Henry Van

Ode To Silence

...and for a little while her letters wedged in marble,
Which even now, behold, the friendly mumbling rain erases,
And the inarticulate snow,
Leaving at last of her least signs and traces
None whatsoever, nor whither she is vanished from these places.
"She will love well," I said,
"If love be of that heart inhabiter,
The flowers of the dead;
The red anemone that with no sound
Moves in the wind, and from another wound
That sprang, the heavily-sweet blue hyacinth,
That blossoms un...Read more of this...
by St. Vincent Millay, Edna

Schoolroom On A Wet Afternoon

...e sticks of chalk:
Afternoon is come and English Grammar.

Rain falls as though the sky has been bereaved,
Stutters its inarticulate grief on glass
Of every lachrymose pane. The children read
Their books or make pretence of concentration,
Each bowed head seems bent in supplication
Or resignation to the fate that waits
In the unmapped forests of the future.
Is it their doomed innocence noon weeps for?

In each diminutive breast a human heart
Pumps out the necessary blood: desi...Read more of this...
by Scannell, Vernon

Shattered Head

...es
blasted into a chosen place 

Revenge on the head (genitals, breast, untouched)
revenge on the mouth
packed with its inarticulate confessions
revenge on the eyes
green-gray and restless
revenge on the big and searching lips
the tender tongue
revenge on the sensual, on the nose the
carrier of history
revenge on the life devoured
in another incineration

You can walk by such a place, the earth is 
made of them
where the stretched tissue of a field or woods 
is humid
with bel...Read more of this...
by Rich, Adrienne

Silent Noon

...o this wing'd hour is dropt to us from above. 
Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower, 
This close-companioned inarticulate hour 
When twofold silence was the song of love....Read more of this...
by Rossetti, Christina

Sunday Morning

...earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receeding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
...Read more of this...
by Stevens, Wallace

The Height of Land

...s peace, and again
That Something comes by flashes
Deeper than peace, -- a spell
Golden and inappellable
That gives the inarticulate part
Of our strange being one moment of release
That seems more native than the touch of time,
And we must answer in chime;
Though yet no man may tell
The secret of that spell
Golden and inappellable.

Now are there sounds walking in the wood,
And all the spruces shiver and tremble,
And the stars move a little in their courses.
The ancient distu...Read more of this...
by Scott, Duncan Campbell

The Palace of Humbug

...ecrepit men,
The fictions of a lawyer's pen,
Who never more might breathe again. 

The serving-man of Richard Roe
Wept, inarticulate with woe:
She wept, that waiting on John Doe. 

"Oh rouse", I urged, "the waning sense
With tales of tangled evidence,
Of suit, demurrer, and defence." 

"Vain", she replied, "such mockeries:
For morbid fancies, such as these,
No suits can suit, no plea can please." 

And bending o'er that man of straw,
She cried in grief and sudden awe,
Not ina...Read more of this...
by Carroll, Lewis

The Puzzler

...r foeman's head with.

For undemocratic reasons and for motives not of State,
They arrive at their conclusions--largely inarticulate.
Being void of self-expression they confide their views to none;
But sometimes in a smoking-room, one learns why things were done.

Yes, sometimes in a smoking-room, through clouds of "Ers" an "Ums,"
Obliquely and by inference, illumination comes,
On some step that they have taken, or some action they approve
Embellished with the argot of the Up...Read more of this...
by Kipling, Rudyard

The Sad Shepherd

...en may depart.
Then he sang softly nigh the pearly rim;
But the sad dweller by the sea-ways lone
Changed all he sang to inarticulate moan
Among her wildering whirls, forgetting him....Read more of this...
by Yeats, William Butler

The Wilderness

...r of oracle or invocation,

The great ash long dead by a roofless house, its branches rotten,
The voice of the crows an inarticulate cry,
And from the wells and springs the holy water ebbed away.

A child I ran in the wind on a withered moor
Crying out after those great presences who were not there,
Long lost in the forgetfulness of the forgotten.

Only the archaic forms themselves could tell!
In sacred speech of hoodie on gray stone, or hawk in air,
Of Eden where the lonely ...Read more of this...
by Raine, Kathleen

The Wizard Way

...a stone on my sepulchre 
Seal my speech with ecstasy, 
Till a babe is born of me 
That is silent more than I; 
For its inarticulate cry 
Hushes as its mouth is pressed 
To the pearl, her honey breast; 
While its breath divinely ripples 
The rose-petals of her nipples, 
And the jetted milk he laps
From the soft delicious paps, 
Sweeter than the bee-sweet showers 
In the chalice of the flowers, 
More intoxicating than
All the purple grapes of Pan. 

Ah! my proper lips are stil...Read more of this...
by Crowley, Aleister

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