Famous Lesser Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Lesser poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous lesser poems. These examples illustrate what a famous lesser poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Emily Dickinson
Who Giants know, with lesser Men
Are incomplete, and shy --
For Greatness, that is ill at ease
In minor Company --
A Smaller, could not be perturbed --
The Summer Gnat displays --
Unconscious that his single Fleet
Do not comprise the skies --...Read more of this...
by
John Berryman
Muttered Henry:-”Lord of matter, thus:
upon some more unquiet spirit knock,
my madnesses have cease.
All the quarter astonishes a lonely out & back.
They set their clocks by Henry House,
the steadiest man on the block.
And Lucifer:-”I smell you for my own,
by smug.-”What have I tossed you but the least
(tho' hard); fit for your ears.
Your servant, bored with horror, sat alone
with busy teeth...Read more of this...
by
Amy Lowell
When you, my Dear, are away, away,
How wearily goes the creeping day.
A year drags after morning, and night
Starts another year of candle light.
O Pausing Sun and Lingering Moon!
Grant me, I beg of you, this boon.
Whirl round the earth as never sun
Has his diurnal journey run.
And, Moon, slip past the ladders of air
In a single flash, while your streaming hair
Catches...Read more of this...
by
Edward Taylor
The common is unusually calm--they captured the storm
last night, it's sleeping in the stockade, relieved
of its duty, pacified, tamed, a pussycat.
But not before it tied the flagpole in knots,
and not before it alarmed the firemen out of their pants.
Now it's really calm, almost too calm, as though
anything could happen, and it would be a first.
It could be the worst...Read more of this...
by
Alan Seeger
Do you remember once, in Paris of glad faces,
The night we wandered off under the third moon's rays
And, leaving far behind bright streets and busy places,
Stood where the Seine flowed down between its quiet quais?
The city's voice was hushed; the placid, lustrous waters
Mirrored the walls across where orange windows burned.
Out of the starry...Read more of this...
by
W. E. B. Du Bois
Name of God's Name!
Red murder reigns;
All hell is loose;
On gold autumnal air
Walk grinning devils, barbed and hoofed;
While high on hills of hate,
Black-blossomed, crimson-sky'd,
Thou sittest, dumb.
Father Almighty!
This earth is mad!
Palsied, our cunning hands;
Rotten, our gold;
Our argosies reel and stagger
Over empty seas;
All the long aisles
Of Thy Great Temples, God,
Stink with the entrails
Of our souls.
And Thou art dumb.
Above the thunder of Thy Thunders,...Read more of this...
by
Bliss Carman
TO the assembled folk
At great St. Kavin’s spoke
Young Brother Amiel on Christmas Eve;
I give you joy, my friends,
That as the round year ends,
We meet once more for gladness by God’s leave.
On other festal days
For penitence or praise
Or prayer we meet, or fullness of thanksgiving;
To-night we calendar
The rising of that...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
Of Tribulation, these are They,
Denoted by the White --
The Spangled Gowns, a lesser Rank
Of Victors -- designate --
All these -- did conquer --
But the ones who overcame most times --
Wear nothing commoner than Snow --
No Ornament, but Palms --
Surrender -- is a sort unknown --
On this superior soil --
Defeat -- an outgrown Anguish --
Remembered, as the Mile
Our panting Ankle...Read more of this...
by
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove;
Thine are these orbs of light and shade;
Thou madest Life in man and brute;
Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot
Is on the skull which thou hast...Read more of this...
by
Alan Seeger
To see the clouds his spirit yearned toward so
Over new mountains piled and unploughed waves,
Back of old-storied spires and architraves
To watch Arcturus rise or Fomalhaut,
And roused by street-cries in strange tongues when day
Flooded with gold some domed metropolis,
Between new towers to waken and new bliss
Spread on his pillow in a wondrous way:
These were...Read more of this...
by
Alan Seeger
I
Ay, it is fitting on this holiday,
Commemorative of our soldier dead,
When -- with sweet flowers of our New England May
Hiding the lichened stones by fifty years made gray --
Their graves in every town are garlanded,
That pious tribute should be given too
To our intrepid few
Obscurely fallen here beyond the seas.
Those to preserve...Read more of this...
by
William Butler Yeats
Earth in beauty dressed
Awaits returning spring.
All true love must die,
Alter at the best
Into some lesser thing.
Prove that I lie.
Such body lovers have,
Such exacting breath,
That they touch or sigh.
Every touch they give,
Love is nearer death.
Prove that I lie....Read more of this...
by
Stephen Crane
The successful man has thrust himself
Through the water of the years,
Reeking wet with mistakes --
Bloody mistakes;
Slimed with victories over the lesser,
A figure thankful on the shore of money.
Then, with the bones of fools
He buys silken banners
Limned with his triumphant face;
With the skins of wise men
He buys the trivial bows of all.
Flesh painted with marrow
Contributes a coverlet,
A coverlet for his...Read more of this...
by
D. H. Lawrence
Too far away, oh love, I know,
To save me from this haunted road,
Whose lofty roses break and blow
On a night-sky bent with a load
Of lights: each solitary rose,
Each arc-lamp golden does expose
Ghost beyond ghost of a blossom, shows
Night blenched with a thousand snows.
Of hawthorn and of lilac trees,
White lilac; shows...Read more of this...
by
Jerome Rothenberg
Link by link
I can disown
no link.(R. Duncan)
I search the passage
someone sends
& find a missal
like a bone.
My hands are white with sweat.
I lay my burden down
the ground below me
shrinking.
The more my fingers ply
these keys the more
words daunt me.
I am what a haunt
averts, what you who once
spoke from my dream
no longer tell.
The book is paradise.
An odor is a clue
to what was...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Lee Masters
Once in a while a curious weed unknown to me,
Needing a name from my books;
Once in a while a letter from Yeomans.
Out of the mussel-shells gathered along the shore
Sometimes a pearl with a glint like meadow rue:
Then betimes a letter from Tyndall in England,
Stamped with the stamp of Spoon River.
I, lover of Nature, beloved for my love of her,
Held...Read more of this...
by
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Of all among the fallen from on high,
We count you last and leave you to regain
Your born dominion of a life made vain
By three spheres of insidious ivory.
You dwindle to the lesser tragedy—
Content, you say. We call, but you remain.
Nothing alive gone wrong could be so plain,
Or quite so blasted with absurdity.
You...Read more of this...
by
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Thou arrant robber, Death!
Couldst thou not find
Some lesser one than he
To rob of breath,—
Some poorer mind
Thy prey to be?
His mind was like the sky,—
As pure and free;
His heart was broad and open
As the sea.
His soul shone purely through his face,
And Love made him her dwelling place.
Not less the scholar than the friend,
Not less a friend than man;
The manly life did...Read more of this...
by
Isaac Watts
O Lord, our Lord, how wondrous great
Is thine exalted name!
The glories of thy heav'nly state
Let men and babes proclaim.
When I behold thy works on high
The moon that rules the night,
And stars that well adorn the sky,
Those moving worlds of light.
Lord, what is man, or all his race,
Who dwells so far below,
That thou should visit him with grace,
And love his...Read more of this...
by
Countee Cullen
We shall not always plant while others reap
The golden increment of bursting fruit,
Not always countenance, abject and mute,
That lesser men should hold their brothers cheap;
Not everlastingly while others sleep
Shall we beguile their limbs with mellow flute,
Not always bend to some more subtle brute;
We were not made to eternally weep.
The night whose sable breast relieves the stark,
White stars is...Read more of this...
by
William Butler Yeats
Dry timber under that rich foliage,
At wine-dark midnight in the sacred wood,
Too old for a man's love I stood in rage
Imagining men. Imagining that I could
A greater with a lesser pang assuage
Or but to find if withered vein ran blood,
I tore my body that its wine might cover
Whatever could rccall the lip of lover.
And after that I held my...Read more of this...
by
Adam Lindsay Gordon
With short, sharp violent lights made vivid,
To the southward far as the sight can roam,
Only the swirl of the surges livid,
The seas that climb and the surfs that comb,
Only the crag and the cliff to nor'ward,
And rocks receding, and reefs flung forward,
And waifs wreck'd seaward and wasted shoreward
On shallows sheeted with flaming foam.
A grim grey coast and a seaboard...Read more of this...
by
Edmund Spenser
CALM was the day, and through the trembling air
Sweet-breathing Zephyrus did softly play¡ª
A gentle spirit, that lightly did delay
Hot Titan's beams, which then did glister fair;
When I, (whom sullen care, 5
Through discontent of my long fruitless stay
In princes' court, and expectation vain
Of idle hopes, which still do fly away
Like empty shadows, did...Read more of this...
by
Alan Seeger
Ruggiero, to amaze the British host,
And wake more wonder in their wondering ranks,
The bridle of his winged courser loosed,
And clapped his spurs into the creature's flanks;
High in the air, even to the topmost banks
Of crudded cloud, uprose the flying horse,
And now above the Welsh, and now the Manx,
And now across the sea...Read more of this...
by
John Donne
Some man unworthy to be possessor
Of old or new love, himself being false or weak,
Thought his pain and shame would be lesser
If on womankind he might his anger wreak,
And thence a law did grow,
One might but one man know;
But are other creatures so?
Are Sun, Moon, or Stars by law forbidden
To smile where they list, or lend away their light?
Are...Read more of this...
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