Get Your Premium Membership

Famous Justify Poems by Famous Poets

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

See also:

Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry
...through a paradise.
Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries:
"Waste no compassion on these separate dead!"
Statistics justify and scholars seize
The salients of colonial policy.
What is that to the white child hacked in bed?
To savages, expendable as Jews?
Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break
In a white dust of ibises whose cries
Have wheeled since civilizations dawn
>From the parched river or beast-teeming plain.
The violence of beast on beast is read
As natural ...Read more of this...
by Walcott, Derek



...ht
To gratify our passion
With a mouthful at a bite!
We'll cut it square or bias,
Or any way we please,
And faith shall justify us
When we carve our pie and cheese!

De gustibus, 't is stated,
Non disputandum est.
Which meaneth, when translated,
That all is for the best.
So let the foolish choose 'em
The vapid sweets of sin,
I will not disabuse 'em
Of the heresy they're in;
But I, when I undress me
Each night, upon my knees
Will ask the Lord to bless me
With apple-pie and che...Read more of this...
by Field, Eugene
...ots, 
Not to build for that which builds for mankind,
Not to balance ranks, complexions, creeds, and the sexes, 
Not to justify science, nor the march of equality, 
Nor to feed the arrogant blood of the brawn beloved of time. 

I swear I am for those that have never been master’d! 
For men and women whose tempers have never been master’d,
For those whom laws, theories, conventions, can never master. 

I swear I am for those who walk abreast with the whole earth! 
Who inaugura...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt
...ect the means 
Of working out our purpose straight as his, 
Nor bring a moment's trouble on success 
With after-care to justify the same? 
--Be a Napoleon, and yet disbelieve-- 
Why, the man's mad, friend, take his light away! 
What's the vague good o' the world, for which you dare 
With comfort to yourself blow millions up? 
We neither of us see it! we do see 
The blown-up millions--spatter of their brains 
And writhing of their bowels and so forth, 
In that bewildering enta...Read more of this...
by Browning, Robert
...u the architects shall appear without fail! I announce them and lead them;
I swear to you they will understand you, and justify you; 
I swear to you the greatest among them shall be he who best knows you, and encloses all,
 and is
 faithful to all; 
I swear to you, he and the rest shall not forget you—they shall perceive that you are
 not
 an
 iota less than they; 
I swear to you, you shall be glorified in them....Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt



...d a few words,
a title, perhaps a narrative,
a psalm or sermon.
But nowhere do we come upon
a blank page where we might justify
the careless way we scribbled
when we were tired and sad
and could bear no more....Read more of this...
by Wanek, Connie
...nowledge you, will I proclaim you
as no one ever has before.

And if this should be arrogance, so let me
arrogant be to justify my prayer
that stands so serious and so alone
before your forehead, circled by the clouds....Read more of this...
by Rilke, Rainer Maria
...e beating ground.

But most like chaos,--stopless, cool,--
Without a chance or spar,--
Or even a report of land
To justify despair....Read more of this...
by Dickinson, Emily
...e end, surely, we cry
Not only at exclusion, but because
It leaves us free to cry. We know what was
Won't call on us to justify
Our grief, however hard we yowl across

The gap from eye to page. So I am left
To mourn (without a chance of consequence)
You, balanced on a bike against a fence;
To wonder if you'd spot the theft
Of this one of you bathing; to condense,

In short, a past that no one now can share,
No matter whose your future; calm and dry,
It holds you like a heaven...Read more of this...
by Larkin, Philip
..., Fopling, charm the pit,
And in their folly show the writer's wit.
Yet still thy fools shall stand in thy defence,
And justify their author's want of sense.
Let 'em be all by thy own model made
Of dullness, and desire no foreign aid:
That they to future ages may be known,
Not copies drawn, but issue of thy own.
Nay let thy men of wit too be the same,
All full of thee, and differing but in name;
But let no alien Sedley interpose
To lard with wit thy hungry Epsom prose.
And wh...Read more of this...
by Dryden, John
...
Cinquez and his accomplices to La 
Havana. And it distresses us to know 
there are so many here who seem inclined 
to justify the mutiny of these blacks. 
We find it paradoxical indeed 
that you whose wealth, whose tree of liberty 
are rooted in the labor of your slaves 
should suffer the august John Quincey Adams 
to speak with so much passion of the right 
of chattel slaves to kill their lawful masters 
and with his Roman rhetoric weave a hero's 
garland for Cinquez. I te...Read more of this...
by Hayden, Robert
...ovince, and alluring prey.
A chamber of dependences was framed,
(As conquerers will never want pretence,
When armed, to justify th' offence),
And the whole fief, in right of poetry, she claimed.
The country open lay without defence;
For poets frequent inroads there had made,
And perfectly could represent
The shape, the face, with ev'ry lineament;

And all the large domains which the dumb-sister swayed,
All bowed beneath her government,
Received in triumph wheresoe'er she went...Read more of this...
by Dryden, John
...ine, what is low raise and support; 
That, to the height of this great argument, 
I may assert Eternal Providence, 
And justify the ways of God to men. 
 Say first--for Heaven hides nothing from thy view, 
Nor the deep tract of Hell--say first what cause 
Moved our grand parents, in that happy state, 
Favoured of Heaven so highly, to fall off 
From their Creator, and transgress his will 
For one restraint, lords of the World besides. 
Who first seduced them to that foul revol...Read more of this...
by Milton, John
...ble, so divine, 
That from her hand I could suspect no ill, 
And what she did, whatever in itself, 
Her doing seemed to justify the deed; 
She gave me of the tree, and I did eat. 
To whom the Sovran Presence thus replied. 
Was she thy God, that her thou didst obey 
Before his voice? or was she made thy guide, 
Superiour, or but equal, that to her 
Thou didst resign thy manhood, and the place 
Wherein God set thee above her made of thee, 
And for thee, whose perfection far exc...Read more of this...
by Milton, John
...frain, Wherefore, unsatisfied Soul? and Whither, O
 mocking
 Life? 

Ah, who shall soothe these feverish children? 
Who justify these restless explorations?
Who speak the secret of impassive Earth? 
Who bind it to us? What is this separate Nature, so unnatural? 
What is this Earth, to our affections? (unloving earth, without a throb to answer ours; 
Cold earth, the place of graves.) 

Yet, soul, be sure the first intent remains—and shall be carried out;
(Perhaps even now the ...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt
...t labour be in song;
And when my pencil falters down,
Oh may a final couplet crown
The years of striving I have made
To justify the jinglers trade.

Let me surrender with a rhyme
My long and lovely lease of time;
Let me be grateful for the gift
To couple words in lyric lift;
Let me song-build with humble hod,
My last brick dedicate to God....Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William
...ound to be drilled
or shown-off or to be walled away from
the incompetent, men who'd kill you
because they're crazy and justify it because
it's the law, men who stand in front of
windows 30 feet wide and see nothing,
men with luxury yachts who can sail around
the world and yet never get out of their vest
pockets, men like snails, men like eels, men
like slugs, and not as good . . .
and nothing, getting your last paycheck
at a harbor, at a factory, at a hospital, at an
aircraf...Read more of this...
by Bukowski, Charles
...n and study me!

In the name of These States, shall I scorn the antique? 
Why These are the children of the antique, to justify it. 

6Dead poets, philosophs, priests, 
Martyrs, artists, inventors, governments long since, 
Language-shapers, on other shores,
Nations once powerful, now reduced, withdrawn, or desolate, 
I dare not proceed till I respectfully credit what you have left, wafted hither:

I have perused it—own it is admirable, (moving awhile among it;) 
Think nothing...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt
...the ranks who fell
Beneath his valour!--Actions such as these,
Like incense rising to the Throne of Heaven,
Far better justify the pride, that swells
In British bosoms, than the deafening roar
Of Victory from a thousand brazen throats,
That tell with what success wide-wasting War
Has by our brave Compatriots thinned the world....Read more of this...
by Turner Smith, Charlotte
...him that mars her plan, but then would hate 
(And every voice she talked with ratify it, 
And every face she looked on justify it) 
The general foe. More soluble is this knot, 
By gentleness than war. I want her love. 
What were I nigher this although we dashed 
Your cities into shards with catapults, 
She would not love;--or brought her chained, a slave, 
The lifting of whose eyelash is my lord, 
Not ever would she love; but brooding turn 
The book of scorn, till all my fli...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord

Dont forget to view our wonderful member Justify poems.


Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry