Famous Less And Less Poems by Famous Poets

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

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8 Fragments For Kurt Cobain

...ith the news about you

I listened them...
It was all there!
Your music kept cutting deeper and deeper valleys of sound
Less and less light
Until you hit solid rock

The drill bit broke
and the valley became
A thin crevice, impassible in time,
As time itself stopped. 

And the walls became cages of brilliant notes
Pressing in...
Pressure
That's how diamonds are made
And that's WHERE it sometimes all collapses
Down in on you

5/
Then I translated your muttered lyrics
And the p...Read more of this...
by Carroll, Jim


A Hedge Of Rubber Trees

...ch and stared.

What could the offspring of the schismatic age and a 
reluctant child bride expect from life? Not much.
Less and less. A dream she'd had kept coming back,
years after. She'd taken a job in Washington with 
some right-wing lobby, and lived in one of those
bow-windowed mansions that turn into roominghouses,
and her room there had a full-length mirror: oval,
with a molding, is the way I picture it. In her dream
something woke her, she got up to look, and there 
i...Read more of this...
by Clampitt, Amy

Alfred Lord Tennyson - The Coming Of Arthur

...d what was left. 
And so there grew great tracts of wilderness, 
Wherein the beast was ever more and more, 
But man was less and less, till Arthur came. 
For first Aurelius lived and fought and died, 
And after him King Uther fought and died, 
But either failed to make the kingdom one. 
And after these King Arthur for a space, 
And through the puissance of his Table Round, 
Drew all their petty princedoms under him. 
Their king and head, and made a realm, and reigned. 

And t...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord

All Souls Night

...rous courage, before loneliness
Had driven him crazed;
For meditations upon unknown thought
Make human intercourse grow less and less;
They are neither paid nor praised.
but he d object to the host,
The glass because my glass;
A ghost-lover he was
And may have grown more arrogant being a ghost.

But names are nothing. What matter who it be,
So that his elements have grown so fine
The fume of muscatel
Can give his sharpened palate ecstasy
No living man can drink from the whole...Read more of this...
by Yeats, William Butler

At Eighty Years

...As nothingness draws near
 How I can see
Inexorably clear
 My vanity.
My sum of worthiness
 Always so small,
Dwindles from less to less
 To none at all.

As grisly destiny
 Claims me at last,
How grievous seem to me
 Sins of my past!
How keen a conscience edge
 Can come to be!
How pitiless the dredge
 Of memory!

Ye proud ones of the earth
 Who count your ...Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William


Idylls of the King: The Last Tournament (excerpt)

...e great waters break
Whitening for half a league, and thin themselves,
Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud,
From less and less to nothing; thus he fell
Head-heavy; then the knights, who watch'd him, roar'd
And shouted and leapt down upon the fall'n;
There trampled out his face from being known,
And sank his head in mire, and slimed themselves:
Nor heard the King for their own cries, but sprang
Thro' open doors, and swording right and left
Men, women, on their sodden fa...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord

Idylls of the King: The Passing of Arthur (excerpt)

...That story which the bold Sir Bedivere,
First made and latest left of all the knights,
Told, when the man was no more than a voice
In the white winter of his age, to those
With whom he dwelt, new faces, other minds.
For on their march to westward, Bedivere,
Who slowly paced among the slumbering host,
Heard in his tent the moanings of the King:
"I found Him...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord

Inheritance—His

...I. 
My face resembles your face
less and less each day. When I was young
no one mistook whose child I was.
Features build coloring
alone among my creamy fine-boned sisters
marked me Byron's daughter.

No sun set when you died, but a door
opened onto my mother. After you left
she grieved her crumpled world aloft
an iron fist sweated with business symbols
a printed blotter dwell in the house...Read more of this...
by Lorde, Audre

Juggler

...A ball will bounce; but less and less. It's not
A light-hearted thing, resents its own resilience.
Falling is what it loves, and the earth falls
So in our hearts from brilliance, 
Settles and is forgot.
It takes a sky-blue juggler with five red balls

To shake our gravity up. Whee, in the air 
The balls roll around, wheel on his wheeling hands, 
Learning the ways of lightness, alte...Read more of this...
by Wilbur, Richard

Self Communion

...'The mist is resting on the hill;
The smoke is hanging in the air;
The very clouds are standing still:
A breathless calm broods everywhere.
Thou pilgrim through this vale of tears,
Thou, too, a little moment cease
Thy anxious toil and fluttering fears,
And rest thee, for a while, in peace.' 

'I would, but Time keeps working still
And moving on for good or...Read more of this...
by Bronte, Anne

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

...As Parmigianino did it, the right hand
Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer
And swerving easily away, as though to protect
What it advertises. A few leaded panes, old beams,
Fur, pleated muslin, a coral ring run together
In a movement supporting the face, which swims
Toward and away like the hand
Except that it is in repose. It is what is
Sequestered...Read more of this...
by Ashbery, John

Sir Galahad a Christmas Mystery

...the forest deep,
And toll on steadily; a drowsiness
Came on me, so that I fell half asleep,
As I sat there not moving: less and less

I saw the melted snow that hung in beads
Upon my steel-shoes; less and less I saw
Between the tiles the bunches of small weeds:
Heartless and stupid, with no touch of awe

Upon me, half-shut eyes upon the ground,
I thought: O Galahad! the days go by,
Stop and cast up now that which you have found,
So sorely you have wrought and painfully.

Nig...Read more of this...
by Morris, William

Sonnet 102: My love is strengthened though more weak in seeming

...My love is strengthened, though more weak in seeming;
I love not less, though less the show appear;
That love is merchandized, whose rich esteeming
The owner's tongue doth publish everywhere.
Our love was new, and then but in the spring
When I was wont to greet it with my lays,
As Philomel in summer's front doth sing,
And stops her pipe in growth of riper ...Read more of this...
by Shakespeare, William

The Ballad Of Salvation Bill

...nk I heard him sigh and sob,
And then . . . a most peculiar thing occurred.
I got to reading more and more, and smoking less and less,
Till just about the day his heart was broke,
Says I: "Here, take it back, me lad. I've had enough I guess.
Your paper makes a mighty rotten smoke."

So then and there with plea and prayer he wrestled for my soul,
And I was racked and ravaged by regrets.
But God was good, for lo! next day there came the police patrol,
With paper for a thousand ...Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William

The Ballad of the White Horse

...the great kings of Wessex
Wearied and sank in gore,
And even their ghosts in that great stress
Grew greyer and greyer, less and less,
With the lords that died in Lyonesse
And the king that comes no more.

And the God of the Golden Dragon
Was dumb upon his throne,
And the lord of the Golden Dragon
Ran in the woods alone.

And if ever he climbed the crest of luck
And set the flag before,
Returning as a wheel returns,
Came ruin and the rain that burns,
And all began once more.
...Read more of this...
by Chesterton, G K

The Country Life:

...TO THE HONOURED MR ENDYMION PORTER, GROOM OF
THE BED-CHAMBER TO HIS MAJESTY

Sweet country life, to such unknown,
Whose lives are others', not their own!
But serving courts and cities, be
Less happy, less enjoying thee.
Thou never plough'st the ocean's foam
To seek and bring rough pepper home:
Nor to the Eastern Ind dost rove
To bring from thence the scorc...Read more of this...
by Herrick, Robert

The Giaour

...beam
That checkered o’er the living stream:
I gazed, till vanishing from view,
Like lessening pebble it withdrew;
Still less and less, a speck of white
That gemmed the tide, then mocked the sight;
And all its hidden secrets sleep,
Known but to Genii of the deep,
Which, trembling in their coral caves,
They dare not whisper to the waves.


As rising on its purple wing
The insect-queen of eastern spring,
O’er emerald meadows of Kashmeer
Invites the young pursuer near,
And leads ...Read more of this...
by Byron, George (Lord)

The Last Tournament

...reat waters break 
Whitening for half a league, and thin themselves, 
Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud, 
From less and less to nothing; thus he fell 
Head-heavy; then the knights, who watched him, roared 
And shouted and leapt down upon the fallen; 
There trampled out his face from being known, 
And sank his head in mire, and slimed themselves: 
Nor heard the King for their own cries, but sprang 
Through open doors, and swording right and left 
Men, women, on their ...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord

The Passing Of Arthur

...That story which the bold Sir Bedivere, 
First made and latest left of all the knights, 
Told, when the man was no more than a voice 
In the white winter of his age, to those 
With whom he dwelt, new faces, other minds. 

For on their march to westward, Bedivere, 
Who slowly paced among the slumbering host, 
Heard in his tent the moanings of the King: 

'I...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord

The Prisoner of Chillon

...st loss, of all the most;
And then the sighs he would suppress
Of fainting nature's feebleness,
More slowly drawn, grew less and less:
I listen'd, but I could not hear;
I call'd, for I was wild with fear;
I knew 'twas hopeless, but my dread
Would not be thus admonished;
I call'd, and thought I heard a sound -
I burst my chain with one strong bound,
And rush'd to him: - I found him not,
I only stirr'd in this black spot,
I only lived, I only drew
The accursed breath of dungeon...Read more of this...
by Byron, George (Lord)

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