Famous Limbo Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Helen all Alone

by Rudyard Kipling
 "In the Same Boat"--A Diversity of Creatures
 There was darkness under Heaven
 For an hour's space--
 Darkness that we knew was given
 Us for special grace.
 Sun and noon and stars were hid,
 God had left His Throne,
 When Helen came to me, she did,
 Helen all alone!

 Side by side (because our fate
 Damned us ere our birth)
...Read more of this...

Men Of The High North

by Robert William Service
 Men of the High North, the wild sky is blazing;
 Islands of opal float on silver seas;
Swift splendors kindle, barbaric, amazing;
 Pale ports of amber, golden argosies.
Ringed all around us the proud peaks are glowing;
 Fierce chiefs in council, their wigwam the sky;
Far, far below us the big Yukon flowing,
 Like threaded quicksilver, gleams to the eye.

Men of the...Read more of this...

Garden Francies

by Robert Browning
 I. THE FLOWER'S NAME

Here's the garden she walked across,
Arm in my arm, such a short while since:
Hark, now I push its wicket, the moss
Hinders the hinges and makes them wince!
She must have reached this shrub ere she turned,
As back with that murmur the wicket swung;
For she laid the poor snail, my chance foot spurned,
To feed and forget it the...Read more of this...

Letter to My Lover After Seven Years

by Erica Jong
 You gave me the child
that seamed my belly
& stitched up my life.

You gave me: one book of love poems,
five years of peace
& two of pain.

You gave me darkness, light, laughter
& the certain knowledge
that we someday die.

You gave me seven years
during which the cells of my body
died & were reborn.

Now we have died
into the limbo of lost loves,
that wreckage of...Read more of this...

Limbo

by Seamus Heaney
 Fishermen at Ballyshannon
Netted an infant last night
Along with the salmon.
An illegitimate spawning,

A small one thrown back
To the waters. But I'm sure
As she stood in the shallows
Ducking him tenderly

Till the frozen knobs of her wrists
Were dead as the gravel,
He was a minnow with hooks
Tearing her open.

She waded in under
The sign of the cross.
He was hauled in with the fish.
Now limbo...Read more of this...

Staying Overnight with Abbot Zan (Abbot of Dayun Temple in the capital, exiled to this place)

by Du Fu
 Cane tin how come here Autumn wind already sough Rain waste large court chrysanthemum Frost topple half pool lotus Banish rather against nature Void not leave Chan Mutual meet all night stay Gansu moon toward man round  How did your tin-edged cane get here? The autumn wind's already sighing. The rain's laid waste the great...Read more of this...

Child of Europe

by Czeslaw Milosz
 1
We, whose lungs fill with the sweetness of day.
Who in May admire trees flowering
Are better than those who perished.

We, who taste of exotic dishes,
And enjoy fully the delights of love,
Are better than those who were buried.

We, from the fiery furnaces, from behind barbed wires
On which the winds of endless autumns howled,
We, who remember battles where the wounded air roared...Read more of this...

Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell

by Denise Levertov
 Down through the tomb's inward arch
He has shouldered out into Limbo
to gather them, dazed, from dreamless slumber:
the merciful dead, the prophets,
the innocents just His own age and those
unnumbered others waiting here
unaware, in an endless void He is ending
now, stooping to tug at their hands,
to pull them from their sarcophagi,
dazzled, almost unwilling. Didmas,
neighbor in death, Golgotha dust
still streaked on the...Read more of this...

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