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Famous Lean To Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry
...All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And...Read more of this...
by Shakespeare, William



...PRELUDE OF THE FOUNDER OF THE DANISH HOUSE

LO, praise of the prowess of people-kings
of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped,
we have heard, and what honor the athelings won!
Oft Scyld the Scefing from squadroned foes,
from many a tribe, the mead-bench tore,
awing the earls. Since erst he lay
friendless, a foundling, fate repaid him:
for he waxed ...Read more of this...
by Anonymous,
...Muse of my native land! loftiest Muse!
O first-born on the mountains! by the hues
Of heaven on the spiritual air begot:
Long didst thou sit alone in northern grot,
While yet our England was a wolfish den;
Before our forests heard the talk of men;
Before the first of Druids was a child;--
Long didst thou sit amid our regions wild
Rapt in a deep prophetic so...Read more of this...
by Keats, John
...It is full winter now: the trees are bare,
Save where the cattle huddle from the cold
Beneath the pine, for it doth never wear
The autumn's gaudy livery whose gold
Her jealous brother pilfers, but is true
To the green doublet; bitter is the wind, as though it blew

From Saturn's cave; a few thin wisps of hay
Lie on the sharp black hedges, where the wain
Dr...Read more of this...
by Wilde, Oscar
...CANTO I


 ONE night, when half my life behind me lay, 
 I wandered from the straight lost path afar. 
 Through the great dark was no releasing way; 
 Above that dark was no relieving star. 
 If yet that terrored night I think or say, 
 As death's cold hands its fears resuming are. 

 Gladly the dreads I felt, too dire to tell, 
 The hopeless, pathless, li...Read more of this...
by Alighieri, Dante



...After two sittings, now our Lady State 
To end her picture does the third time wait. 
But ere thou fall'st to work, first, Painter, see 
If't ben't too slight grown or too hard for thee. 
Canst thou paint without colors? Then 'tis right: 
For so we too without a fleet can fight. 
Or canst thou daub a signpost, and that ill? 
'Twill suit our great debauch a...Read more of this...
by Marvell, Andrew
...Aye, but she?
Your other sister and my other soul
Grave Silence, lovelier
Than the three loveliest maidens, what of her?
Clio, not you,
Not you, Calliope,
Nor all your wanton line,
Not Beauty's perfect self shall comfort me
For Silence once departed,
For her the cool-tongued, her the tranquil-hearted,
Whom evermore I follow wistfully,
Wandering Heaven and ...Read more of this...
by St. Vincent Millay, Edna
...NOTE.—The following imaginary dialogue between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, which is not based upon any specific incident in American history, may be supposed to have occurred a few months previous to Hamilton’s retirement from Washington’s Cabinet in 1795 and a few years before the political ingenuities of Burr—who has been characterized, without mu...Read more of this...
by Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...(Newdigate prize poem recited in the Sheldonian Theatre Oxford 
June
26th, 1878.

To my friend George Fleming author of 'The Nile Novel' and
'Mirage')


I.


A year ago I breathed the Italian air, -
And yet, methinks this northern Spring is fair,-
These fields made golden with the flower of March,
The throstle singing on the feathered larch,
The cawing roo...Read more of this...
by Wilde, Oscar
...A city clerk, but gently born and bred;
His wife, an unknown artist's orphan child--
One babe was theirs, a Margaret, three years old:
They, thinking that her clear germander eye
Droopt in the giant-factoried city-gloom,
Came, with a month's leave given them, to the sea:
For which his gains were dock'd, however small:
Small were his gains, and hard his wor...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...1
I CELEBRATE myself; 
And what I assume you shall assume; 
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you. 

I loafe and invite my Soul; 
I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.

Houses and rooms are full of perfumes—the shelves are crowded with
 perfumes; 
I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it; ...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt
...1
WEAPON, shapely, naked, wan! 
Head from the mother’s bowels drawn! 
Wooded flesh and metal bone! limb only one, and lip only one! 
Gray-blue leaf by red-heat grown! helve produced from a little seed sown! 
Resting the grass amid and upon,
To be lean’d, and to lean on. 

Strong shapes, and attributes of strong shapes—masculine trades, sights and sounds; 
...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt
...DEDICATION 

Of great limbs gone to chaos,
A great face turned to night--
Why bend above a shapeless shroud
Seeking in such archaic cloud
Sight of strong lords and light?

Where seven sunken Englands
Lie buried one by one,
Why should one idle spade, I wonder,
Shake up the dust of thanes like thunder
To smoke and choke the sun?

In cloud of clay so cast to ...Read more of this...
by Chesterton, G K
...  And this place our forefathers made for man!  This is the process of our love and wisdom  To each poor brother who offends against us—  Most innocent, perhaps—and what if guilty?  Is this the only cure? Merciful God!  Each pore and natural outlet shrivell'd up  By ignorance and parch...Read more of this...
by Wordsworth, William
...Thy place is biggyd above the sterrys cleer, 
Noon erthely paleys wrouhte in so statly wyse, 
Com on my freend, my brothir moost enteer, 
For the I offryd my blood in sacrifise. 
John Lydgate. 


From '41 to '51 
I was folk's contrary son; 
I bit my father's hand right through 
And broke my mother's heart in two. 
I sometimes go without my dinner 
Now that...Read more of this...
by Masefield, John
...Smith, great writer of stories, drank; found it immortalized his pen;
Fused in his brain-pan, else a blank, heavens of glory now and then;
Gave him the magical genius touch; God-given power to gouge out, fling
Flat in your face a soul-thought -- Bing!
Twiddle your heart-strings in his clutch. "Bah!" said Smith, "let my body lie
 stripped to the buff in swi...Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William
...From noiseful arms, and acts of prowess done 
In tournament or tilt, Sir Percivale, 
Whom Arthur and his knighthood called The Pure, 
Had passed into the silent life of prayer, 
Praise, fast, and alms; and leaving for the cowl 
The helmet in an abbey far away 
From Camelot, there, and not long after, died. 

And one, a fellow-monk among the rest, 
Ambrosiu...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...WHILOM*, as olde stories tellen us, *formerly
There was a duke that highte* Theseus. *was called 
Of Athens he was lord and governor,
And in his time such a conqueror
That greater was there none under the sun.
Full many a riche country had he won.
What with his wisdom and his chivalry,
He conquer'd all the regne of Feminie,
That whilom was y-cleped S...Read more of this...
by Chaucer, Geoffrey
...The Waste Land
by T. S. Eliot

"Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis
vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent:
Sibylla ti theleis; respondebat illa: apothanein thelo."

I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD
 April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter ke...Read more of this...
by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...I 
I have loved England, dearly and deeply, 
Since that first morning, shining and pure, 
The white cliffs of Dover I saw rising steeply 
Out of the sea that once made her secure. 
I had no thought then of husband or lover, 
I was a traveller, the guest of a week; 
Yet when they pointed 'the white cliffs of Dover', 
Startled I found there were tears on my ...Read more of this...
by Miller, Alice Duer

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Book: Reflection on the Important Things