Famous Incantation Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Letter From Li Po

...lk,
the peony face behind a fan of frost,
the blue-moon eyebrow behind a fan of rain,
beyond recall by any alchemist
or incantation from the Book of Change:
unresumable, as, on Sheepfold Hill,
the fir cone of a thousand years ago:
still, in the loving, and the saying so,
as when we name the hill, and, with the name,
bestow an essence, and a meaning, too:
do we endow them with our lives?
They move
into another orbit: into a time
not theirs: and we become the bell to speak
this...Read more of this...
by Aiken, Conrad


An Incantation

...Come with me, and we will blow
Lots of bubbles, as we go;
Bubbles bright as ever Hope
Drew from fancy -- or from soap;
Bright as e'er the South Sea sent
from its frothy element!
Come with me, and we will blow
Lots of bubbles, as we go.
Mix the lather, Johnny W--lks,
Thou, who rhym'st so well to bilks;
Mix the lather - who can be
Fitter for such task than t...Read more of this...
by Moore, Thomas

Four Quartets 4: Little Gidding

...and quiet
Why should we celebrate
These dead men more than the dying?
It is not to ring the bell backward
Nor is it an incantation
To summon the spectre of a Rose.
We cannot revive old factions
We cannot restore old policies
Or follow an antique drum.
These men, and those who opposed them
And those whom they opposed
Accept the constitution of silence
And are folded in a single party.
Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leav...Read more of this...
by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)

Incantation

...Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
Is an enemy of despa...Read more of this...
by Milosz, Czeslaw

Incantation

...A white well 
In a black cave; 
A bright shell 
In a dark wave.

A white rose 
Black brambles hood; 
Smooth bright snows 
In a dark wood.

A flung white glove 
In a dark fight; 
A white dove 
On a wild black night.

A white door 
In a dark lane; 
A bright core 
To bitter black pain.

A white hand 
Waved from dark walls; 
In a burnt black land 
Bright water...Read more of this...
by Wylie, Elinor


Ode for the Keats Centenary

...h Shakespeare's?
He lies alone
Beneath the frown of the old Roman stone
And the cold Roman violets;
And not our wildest incantation
Of his most sacred lines,
Nor all the praise that sets
Towards his pale grave,
Like oceans towards the moon,
Will move the Shadow with the pensive brow
To break his dream,
And give unto him now
One word! --

When the young master reasoned
That our puissant England
Reared her great poets by neglect,
Trampling them down in the by-paths of Life
And ...Read more of this...
by Scott, Duncan Campbell

Ode to the West Wind

...mpetuous one! 
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe, 
Like wither'd leaves, to quicken a new birth; 
And, by the incantation of this verse, 65 
Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth 
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! 
Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth 
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, 
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? 70 ...Read more of this...
by Shelley, Percy Bysshe

Scent of Irises

...the bridal faint lady-smocks, 
Dissolved on the golden sorcery you should not outlast. 

You amid the bog-end’s yellow incantation, 
You sitting in the cowslips of the meadow above, 
Me, your shadow on the bog-flame, flowery may-blobs,
Me full length in the cowslips, muttering you love; 
You, your soul like a lady-smock, lost, evanescent, 
You with your face all rich, like the sheen of a dove. 

You are always asking, do I remember, remember
The butter-cup bog-end where the ...Read more of this...
by Lawrence, D. H.

The Apparition Of His Mistresscalling Him To Elysium

..., where honour'd Homer reads
His Odyssees and his high Iliads;
About whose throne the crowd of poets throng
To hear the incantation of his tongue:
To Linus, then to Pindar; and that done,
I'll bring thee, Herrick, to Anacreon,
Quaffing his full-crown'd bowls of burning wine,
And in his raptures speaking lines of thine,
Like to his subject; and as his frantic
Looks shew him truly Bacchanalian like,
Besmear'd with grapes,--welcome he shall thee thither,
Where both may rage, bot...Read more of this...
by Herrick, Robert

The Chinese Nightingale

...ver seas,
Hear the thunder.
Hear the gongs of holy China
How the waves and tunes combine
In a rhythmic clashing wonder,
Incantation old and fine:
`Dragons, dragons, Chinese dragons,
Red fire-crackers, and green fire-crackers,
And dragons, dragons, Chinese dragons.'"

Then the lady, rosy-red,
Turned to her lover Chang and said:
"Dare you forget that turquoise dawn
When we stood in our mist-hung velvet lawn,
And worked a spell this great joss taught
Till a God of the Dragons wa...Read more of this...
by Lindsay, Vachel

The Comedian As The Letter C

...48 Performed in verd apparel, and the peach, 
349 When its black branches came to bud, belle day, 
350 Should have an incantation. And again, 
351 When piled on salvers its aroma steeped 
352 The summer, it should have a sacrament 
353 And celebration. Shrewd novitiates 
354 Should be the clerks of our experience. 

355 These bland excursions into time to come, 
356 Related in romance to backward flights, 
357 However prodigal, however proud, 
358 Contained in thei...Read more of this...
by Stevens, Wallace

The Garden of Janus

...lobe
Of his right Ear,
So that the Universe one dewdrop did appear.

IX

Yea! and the end revealed a word, a spell,
An incantation, a device
Whereby the Eye of the Most Terrible
Wakes from its wilderness of ice
To flame, whereby the very core of hell
Bursts from its rind,
Sweeping the world away into the blank of mind.

XII

So then I saw my fault; I plunged within
The well, and brake the images
That I had made, as I must make - Men spin 
The webs that snare them - while the...Read more of this...
by Crowley, Aleister

The Incantation

...Scene: Federal Political Arena 
A darkened cave. In the middle, a cauldron, boiling. 
Enter the three witches. 
1ST WITCH: Thrice hath the Federal Jackass brayed. 

2ND WITCH: Once the Bruce-Smith War-horse neighed. 

3RD WITCH: So Georgie comes, 'tis time, 'tis time, 
Around the cauldron to chant our rhyme. 

1ST WITCH: In the cauldron boil and bake 
Fill...Read more of this...
by Paterson, Andrew Barton

The Recall

...strangers.
They shall remain as sons.

Over their heads in the branches
Of their new-bought, ancient trees,
I weave an incantation
And draw them to my knees.

Scent of smoke in the evening,
Smell of rain in the night--
The hours, the days and the seasons,
Order their souls aright,

Till I make plain the meaning
Of all my thousand years--
Till I fill their hearts with knowledge,
While I fill their eyes with tears....Read more of this...
by Kipling, Rudyard

To—

...! I will taste that dew, for me 'tis meet,
And when the moon her pallid face discloses,
I'll gather some by spells, and incantation....Read more of this...
by Keats, John

When He Would Have His Verses Read

...In sober mornings, do not thou rehearse
The holy incantation of a verse;
But when that men have both well drunk, and fed,
Let my enchantments then be sung or read.
When laurel spirts i' th' fire, and when the hearth
Smiles to itself, and gilds the roof with mirth;
When up the Thyrse is raised, and when the sound
Of sacred orgies, flies A round, A round;
When the rose reigns, and locks with ointments shine,...Read more of this...
by Herrick, Robert

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