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Famous Life Span Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Service, Robert William
...There's sunshine in the heart of me,
My blood sings in the breeze;
The mountains are a part of me,
I'm fellow to the trees.
My golden youth I'm squandering,
Sun-libertine am I;
A-wandering, a-wandering,
Until the day I die.

I was once, I declare, a Stone-Age man,
 And I roomed in the cool of a cave;
I have known, I will swear, in a new life-span,
...Read more of this...



by Mueller, Lisel
...In Sleeping Beauty's castle
the clock strikes one hundred years
and the girl in the tower returns to the world.
So do the servants in the kitchen,
who don't even rub their eyes.
The cook's right hand, lifted
an exact century ago,
completes its downward arc
to the kitchen boy's left ear;
the boy's tensed vocal cords
finally let go
the trapped, endur...Read more of this...

by Laurence Dunbar, Paul
...Silently without my window,
Tapping gently at the pane,
Falls the rain.
Through the trees sighs the breeze
Like a soul in pain.
Here alone I sit and weep;
Thought hath banished sleep.
Wearily I sit and listen
To the water's ceaseless drip.
To my lip
Fate turns up the bitter cup,
Forcing me to sip;
'T is a bitter, bitter drink,
Thus I sit and th...Read more of this...

by Levine, Philip
...fed
by such pure exhaustion. Actually
she is in the dark, for the man
she's about to address in her odd prose
had a life span of one 125th of a second
in the eye of a Nikon, and then he
politely asked the photographer to
get lost, whispering the request so as
not to offend the teacher presiding.
Those students are now in their thirties,
the Episcopal girls in their plaid skirts
and bright crested blazers have gone
unprepared, though French-speaking, into
a world of li...Read more of this...

by Petrarch, Francesco
...SONNET IV. La vita fugge, e non s' arresta un' ora. PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE ARE NOW ALIKE PAINFUL TO HIM.  Life passes quick, nor will a moment stay,And death with hasty journeys still draws near;Read more of this...



by Sexton, Anne
...Jean, death comes close to us all,
flapping its awful wings at us
and the gluey wings crawl up our nose.
Our children tremble in their teen-age cribs,
whirling off on a thumb or a motorcycle,
mine pushed into gnawing a stilbestrol cancer
I passed on like hemophilia,
or yours in the seventh grade, with her spleen
smacked in by the balance beam.
And ...Read more of this...

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