Famous Inscrutable Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Inscrutable poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous inscrutable poems. These examples illustrate what a famous inscrutable poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Whitman, Walt
...Hindoo appears—the Asiatic continent itself appears—the Past, the
dead,
The murky night morning of wonder and fable, inscrutable,
The envelop’d mysteries, the old and unknown hive-bees,
The North—the sweltering South—eastern Assyria—the Hebrews—the Ancient of Ancients,
Vast desolated cities—the gliding Present—all of these, and more, are in the
pageant-procession.
Geography, the world, is in it;
The Great Sea, the brood of islands, Polynesia, the coast beyond;
T...Read more of this...
by
Wylie, Elinor
...And the lion's heart.
What has it done, this world,
With hard finger-tips,
But sweetly chiseled and curled
Your inscrutable lips?...Read more of this...
by
von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang
...t,
Midst the swords and the fans crowded thickly.
The queen spied amain
On his waistcoat a stain;
For nought was inscrutable to her,
Like Sheba's queen--Solomon's wooer.
To her chief attendant she forthwith cried
"We lately together contended,
And thou didst assert, with obstinate pride,
That the spirit through space never wended,--
That traces alone
By the present were shown,--
That afar nought was fashion'd--not even
By the stars that illumine you heaven.Read more of this...
by
Plath, Sylvia
...'s ridgepole.
Waist down, you may wind
One labyrinthine tangle
To root deep among knuckles, shinbones,
Skulls. Inscrutable,
Below shoulders not once
Seen by any man who kept his head,
You defy questions;
You defy godhood.
I walk dry on your kingdom's border
Exiled to no good.
Your shelled bed I remember.
Father, this thick air is murderous.
I would breathe water....Read more of this...
by
Crowley, Aleister
...ere, but it turns on itself like the pettiest
star.
And I am the looby that learns that all things equally are.
Inscrutable Nothing, the Gods, the cosmos of Fire and
of Mist.
Suns,atoms, the clouds and the clouds ineluctably dare
to exist-
I have made the Voyage of Thought, the Voyage of Vision,
I swam
To the heart of the Ocean of Naught from the source of
the Spring of I am:
I know myself wholly the brother alike of the All and the
One;
I know that all things are...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...upon the daybreak
and amputate the waters.
They are beating the sea,
they are hurting it,
delving down into the inscrutable salt.
*
When mother left the room
and left me in the big black
and sent away my kitty
to be fried in the camps
and took away my blanket
to wash the me out of it
I lay in the soiled cold and prayed.
It was a little jail in which
I was never slapped with kisses.
I was the engine that couldn't.
Cold wigs blew on the tre...Read more of this...
by
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
...ror
Will clear his fame from every cloud,
With the bards, and with the crowd.
He is wilful, mutable,
Shy, untamed, inscrutable,
Swifter-fashioned than the fairies,
Substance mixed of pure contraries,
His vice some elder virtue's token,
And his good is evil spoken.
Failing sometimes of his own,
He is headstrong and alone;
He affects the wood and wild,
Like a flower-hunting child,
Buries himself in summer waves,
In trees, with beasts, in mines, and caves,
Loves nature ...Read more of this...
by
Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...I fear,
Than I—though I have been the most alone,
Even when the most attended. So it was
God set the mark of his inscrutable
Necessity on one that was to grope,
And serve, and suffer, and withal be glad
For what was his, and is, and is to be,
When his old bones, that are a burden now,
Are saying what the man who carried them
Had not the power to say. Bones in a grave,
Cover them as they will with choking earth,
May shout the truth to men who put them there,
...Read more of this...
by
Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...(ALCAICS)
Confused, he found her lavishing feminine
Gold upon clay, and found her inscrutable;
And yet she smiled. Why, then, should horrors
Be as they were, without end, her playthings?
And why were dead years hungrily telling her
Lies of the dead, who told them again to her?
If now she knew, there might be kindness
Clamoring yet where a faith lay stifled.
A little faith in him, and the ruinous
Past would be for time to...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...ons of sun and moon, and countless stars, above;
Below, the manifold grass and waters, animals, mountains, trees;
With inscrutable purpose—some hidden, prophetic intention;
Now, first, it seems, my thought begins to span thee.
Down from the gardens of Asia, descending, radiating,
Adam and Eve appear, then their myriad progeny after them,
Wandering, yearning, curious—with restless explorations,
With questionings, baffled, formless, feverish—with never-happy hearts,
...Read more of this...
by
Bishop, Elizabeth
...r>
Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house....Read more of this...
by
Webb, Charles
...acable as "Might Makes Right,"
ineffable as tomorrow's second r,
incomprehensible as imbroglio's g,
the e that finishes inscrutable,
imponderable, immense,
the terrifying k in "I don't know."...Read more of this...
by
Stevens, Wallace
...s, instead of apricots,
13 And on silentious porpoises, whose snouts
14 Dibbled in waves that were mustachios,
15 Inscrutable hair in an inscrutable world.
16 One eats one pat¨¦, even of salt, quotha.
17 It was not so much the lost terrestrial,
18 The snug hibernal from that sea and salt,
19 That century of wind in a single puff.
20 What counted was mythology of self,
21 Blotched out beyond unblotching. Crispin,
22 The lutanist of fleas, ...Read more of this...
by
Schiller, Friedrich von
...g hangs, by awe possessed,
And homage pays to that dread might,
That judges what is hid from sight,--
That, fathomless, inscrutable,
The gloomy skein of fate entwines,
That reads the bosom's depths full well,
Yet flies away where sunlight shines.
When sudden, from the tier most high,
A voice is heard by all to cry:
"See there, see there, Timotheus!
Behold the cranes of Ibycus!"
The heavens become as black as night,
And o'er the theatre they see,
Far over-head, a dusky fl...Read more of this...
by
Swinburne, Algernon Charles
...it set.
Surely the day is on our side,
And heaven, and the sacred sun;
Surely the stars, and the bright
Immemorial inscrutable night:
Yea, the darkness, because of our light,
Is no darkness, but blooms as a bower-side
When the winter is over and done;
Blooms underfoot with young grasses
Green, and with leaves overhead,
Windflowers white, and the low
New-dropped blossoms of snow;
And or ever the May winds blow,
And or ever the March wind passes,
Flames with anemones red....Read more of this...
by
Hood, Thomas
...among those flags so dull and livid,
The banner of the bloody hand shone out
So ominously vivid.
Some key to that inscrutable appeal
Which made the very frame of Nature quiver,
And every thrilling nerve and fiber feel
So ague-like a shiver.
For over all there hung a cloud of fear,
A sense of mystery the spirit daunted,
And said, as plain as whisper in the ear,
The place is haunted!
Prophetic hints that filled the soul with dread,
But through one gloomy entrance po...Read more of this...
by
Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...before the chaos and the glare
As if he were the last god going home
Unto his last desire.
Dark, marvelous, and inscrutable he moved on
Till down the fiery distance he was gone,
Like one of those eternal, remote things
That range across a man’s imaginings
When a sure music fills him and he knows
What he may say thereafter to few men,—
The touch of ages having wrought
An echo and a glimpse of what he thought
A phantom or a legend until then;
For whether lighted ...Read more of this...
by
Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name....Read more of this...
by
von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang
...ed mountain's
Snow-begirded summit,
Which foreboding nations
Crown'd with spirit-dances.
Thou stand'st with breast inscrutable,
Mysteriously disclosed,
High o'er the wondering world,
And look'st from clouds
Upon its realms and its majesty,
Which thou from the veins of thy brethren
Near thee dost water.
1777....Read more of this...
by
Cullen, Countee
...
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!...Read more of this...
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