Famous Ithaca Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Ithaca poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous ithaca poems. These examples illustrate what a famous ithaca poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...til you pass through the forest,
And compare the beauty of the summer's day and night—
Until you arrive in your own Ithaca.
There is always Venus;
New Elissa to build new Carthage,
The new Kingdom of Light.
You shall not stop until you find Venus:
One woman in all,
And all the women in One.
Until you can say—La Dolce Vita,
Until you find Paradise Lost in only one name,
Until you are able to say—
You are all women in one.
...Read more of this...
by
Stojanovic, Dejan
...Over and back,
the long waves crawl
and track the sand with foam;
night darkens, and the sea
takes on that desperate tone
of dark that wives put on
when all their love is done.
Over and back,
the tangled thread falls slack,
over and up and on;
over and all is sewn;
now while I bind the end,
I wish some fiery friend
would sweep impetuously
the...Read more of this...
by
Doolittle, Hilda
...Ithaca, October 1993: Jorie went on a lingerie
tear, wanting to look like a moll
in a Chandler novel. Dinner, consisting of three parts gin
and one part lime juice cordial, was a prelude to her hair.
There are, she said, poems that can be written
only when the poet is clad in black underwear.
But that's Jorie for you. Always cracking wise, always where
t...Read more of this...
by
Lehman, David
...o a pair of black swans
Scarlet beak to scarlet beak bend by the willow
Necks arched like the great bow of Odysseus;
Ithaca, I have returned, my Penelope lost, the tapestry
Of my journey torn, Troy long gone, a blind memory
In Homer’s song: I sing of where I was born, war-torn,
Blitzed, the iron railings stripped, the munitions
Factory at Barnbow closed.
3
There is a photograph in the archives
Of the city museum marked ‘Shed, Falmouth
Place, 1937’; it is your...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...ad and then sweet wine, water mixed with white flour
Then prayed I many a prayer to the sickly death's-heads;
As set in Ithaca, sterile bulls of the best
For sacrifice, heaping the pyre with goods,
A sheep to Tiresias only, black and a bell-sheep.
Dark blood flowed in the fosse,
Souls out of Erebus, cadaverous dead, of brides
Of youths and of the old who had borne much;
Souls stained with recent tears, girls tender,
Men many, mauled with bronze lance heads,
Battle spoil, bear...Read more of this...
by
Pound, Ezra
...In the end, I made myself
Known to your wife as
A god would, in her own house, in
Ithaca, a voice
Without a body: she
Paused in her weaving, her head turning
First to the right, then left
Though it was hopeless of course
To trace that sound to any
Objective source: I doubt
She will return to her loom
With what she knows now. When
You see her again, tell her
This is how a god says goodbye:
If I am in her head forever
I am in your life fore...Read more of this...
by
Gluck, Louise
...y certain ethnic jokes, which taper
Down through the swirling funnel of tongues and gestures
Toward their preposterous Ithaca. There's one
A journalist told me. He heard it while a hero
Of the South African freedom movement was speaking
To elderly Jews. The speaker's own right arm
Had been blown off by right-wing letter-bombers.
He told his listeners they had to cast their ballots
For the ANC--a group the old Jews feared
As "in with the Arabs." But they started weeping
As...Read more of this...
by
Pinsky, Robert
...to hide the ugliness or sweep it away
the way the violent overflow of rain over cliffs
cleans the sewers and drains of Ithaca
whose waterfalls head my list, followed by
crudites of carrots and beets, roots and all,
with rained-on radishes, too beautiful to eat,
and the pure pleasure of talking, talking and not knowing
where the talk will lead, but willing to take my chances.
Furthermore I shall enumerate some varieties of tulips
(Bacchus, Tantalus, Dardanelles) and other flo...Read more of this...
by
Lehman, David
...that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.
They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca,
humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,
a green eternity, not wonders.
Art is endless like a river flowing,
passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same
inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
and yet another, like the river flowing....Read more of this...
by
Borges, Jorge Luis
...and she is in New York, reading,
or she is wearing a sweater and sunglasses in Balboa Park and he
is raking leaves in Ithaca
or he is driving to East Hampton and she is standing disconsolate
at the window overlooking the bay
where a regatta of many-colored sails is going on
while he is stuck in traffic on the Long Island Expressway.
When a woman loves a man it is one-ten in the morning,
she is asleep he is watching the ball scores and eating pretzels
drinking lemonade
and ...Read more of this...
by
Lehman, David
...it was, "so long as it was
always the same," noted Professor Malcolm
of Cornell, a former student, in whose house
in Ithaca Wittgenstein spent hours doing
handyman chores. He was happy then.
There was no need to say a word....Read more of this...
by
Lehman, David
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