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Famous Lingering Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Crowley, Aleister
...constraining hell.
We lived together; every hour of rest
Was honied from your tiger-lily breast.
We --- oh what lingering doubt or fear betrayed
My life to fate! --- we parted. Was I afraid?
I was afraid, afraid to live my love,
Afraid you played the serpent, I the dove,
Afraid of what I know not. I am glad 
Of all the shame and wretchedness I had,
Since those six weeks have taught me not to doubt you,
And also that I cannot live without you.

Then I came ...Read more of this...



by Amjad, Majeed
...eil

Nor voices her song

And when her heart’s ballad

Passes through distant, unexplored worlds

As the faint, lingering sounds of a flute …

Why her gaze sparkles and smiles !...Read more of this...

by Wilde, Oscar
...be
To their dull ears so musicless and thin
That they will have no joy of it, but ye
To whose wan cheeks now creeps the lingering smile,
Ye who have learned who Eros is, - O listen yet awhile.

A little space he let his greedy eyes
Rest on the burnished image, till mere sight
Half swooned for surfeit of such luxuries,
And then his lips in hungering delight
Fed on her lips, and round the towered neck
He flung his arms, nor cared at all his passion's will to check.

Nev...Read more of this...

by Milton, John
...roperty of her first being.
Such are those thick and gloomy shadows damp
Oft seen in charnel-vaults and sepulchres,
Lingering and sitting by a new-made grave,
As loth to leave the body that it loved,
And linked itself by carnal sensualty
To a degenerate and degraded state.
 SEC. BRO. How charming is divine Philosophy!
Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose,
But musical as is Apollo's lute,
And a perpetual feast of nectared sweets,
Where no crude surfeit ...Read more of this...

by Keats, John
...ossest,
But at the setting I must bid adieu
To her for the last time. Night will strew
On the damp grass myriads of lingering leaves,
And with them shall I die; nor much it grieves
To die, when summer dies on the cold sward.
Why, I have been a butterfly, a lord
Of flowers, garlands, love-knots, silly posies,
Groves, meadows, melodies, and arbour roses;
My kingdom's at its death, and just it is
That I should die with it: so in all this
We miscal grief, bale, sorrow, he...Read more of this...



by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...nt of what it needed most,
Or means to pay the voice who best could tell
What most it needed--howsoe'er it was,
After a lingering,--ere she was aware,--
Like the caged bird escaping suddenly,
The little innocent soul flitted away. 

In that same week when Annie buried it,
Philip's true heart, which hunger'd for her peace
(Since Enoch left he had not look'd upon her),
Smote him, as having kept aloof so long.
`Surely' said Philip `I may see her now,
May be some little c...Read more of this...

by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...red into the village,
Cheering with looks and words the mournful hearts of the women,
As o'er the darkening fields with lingering steps they departed,
Urged by their household cares, and the weary feet of their children.
Down sank the great red sun, and in golden, glimmering vapors
Veiled the light of his face, like the Prophet descending from Sinai.
Sweetly over the village the bell of the Angelus sounded.

Meanwhile, amid the gloom, by the church Evangeline ling...Read more of this...

by Wilde, Oscar
...agons
With lolling crimson tongues, and eglantine
In dusty velvets clad usurp the bed
And woodland empery, and when the lingering rose hath shed

Red leaf by leaf its folded panoply,
And pansies closed their purple-lidded eyes,
Chrysanthemums from gilded argosy
Unload their gaudy scentless merchandise,
And violets getting overbold withdraw
From their shy nooks, and scarlet berries dot the leafless haw.

O happy field! and O thrice happy tree!
Soon will your queen in daisy...Read more of this...

by Keats, John
...dulged tongue
Presumptuous, in thus venturing to be heard."

 So far her voice flow'd on, like timorous brook
That, lingering along a pebbled coast,
Doth fear to meet the sea: but sea it met,
And shudder'd; for the overwhelming voice
Of huge Enceladus swallow'd it in wrath:
The ponderous syllables, like sullen waves
In the half-glutted hollows of reef-rocks,
Came booming thus, while still upon his arm
He lean'd; not rising, from supreme contempt.
"Or shall we listen t...Read more of this...

by Byron, George (Lord)
...— Lara — Ezzelin, are gone, 
Alike without their monumental stone! 
The first, all efforts vainly strove to wean 
From lingering where her chieftain's blood had been. 
Grief had so tamed a spirit once too proud, 
Her tears were few, her wailing never loud; 
But furious would you tear her from the spot 
Where yet she scarce believed that he was not, 
Her eye shot forth with all the living fire 
That haunts the tigress in her whelpless ire; 
But left to waste her weary mom...Read more of this...

by Milton, John
..., while they sit contriving, shall the rest-- 
Millions that stand in arms, and longing wait 
The signal to ascend--sit lingering here, 
Heaven's fugitives, and for their dwelling-place 
Accept this dark opprobrious den of shame, 
The prison of his ryranny who reigns 
By our delay? No! let us rather choose, 
Armed with Hell-flames and fury, all at once 
O'er Heaven's high towers to force resistless way, 
Turning our tortures into horrid arms 
Against the Torturer; when, to me...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
..., well out from the water, lie the green-back’d spotted
 mossbonkers. 

9
I see the despondent red man in the west, lingering about the banks of Moingo, and about
 Lake
 Pepin;
He has heard the quail and beheld the honey-bee, and sadly prepared to depart. 

I see the regions of snow and ice; 
I see the sharp-eyed Samoiede and the Finn; 
I see the seal-seeker in his boat, poising his lance; 
I see the Siberian on his slight-built sledge, drawn by dogs;
I see the porpoi...Read more of this...

by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...o many a summer still
Clung to their fancies) that they saw, the sea.
So now on sand they walk'd, and now on cliff,
Lingering about the thymy promontories,
Till all the sails were darken'd in the west,
And rosed in the east: then homeward and to bed:
Where she, who kept a tender Christian hope
Haunting a holy text, and still to that
Returning, as the bird returns, at night,
`Let not the sun go down upon your wrath,'
Said, `Love, forgive him:' but he did not speak;
And sil...Read more of this...

by Whittier, John Greenleaf
...ined, clear-eyed, of such as he 
Shall Freedom's young apostles be, 
Who, following in War's bloody trail, 
Shall every lingering wrong assail; 
All chains from limb and spirit strike, 
Uplift the black and white alike; 
Scatter before their swift advance 
The darkness and the ignorance, 
The pride, the lust, the squalid sloth, 
Which nurtured Treason's monstrous growth, 
Made murder pastime, and the hell 
Of prison-torture possible; 
The cruel lie of caste refute, 
Old forms...Read more of this...

by Rich, Adrienne
...wry announcement
That imperfection has a certain tang.
Maybe we shouldn't turn our pockets out
To the last crumb or lingering bit of fluff,
But all we can confess of what we are
Has in it the defeat of isolation--
If not our own, then someone's, anyway.

So I come back to saying this good-by,
A sort of ceremony of my own,
This stepping backward for another glance.
Perhaps you'll say we need no ceremony,
Because we know each other, crack and flaw,
Like two irregula...Read more of this...

by Stevens, Wallace
...
8
She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, "The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay."
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsered, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolat...Read more of this...

by Goldsmith, Oliver
...here health and plenty cheered the labouring swain,
Where smiling spring its earliest visits paid,
And parting summer's lingering blooms delayed:
Dear lovely bowers of innocence and ease,
Seats of my youth, where every sport could please,
How often have I loitered o'er your green,
Where humble happiness endeared each scene;
How often have I paused on every charm,
The sheltered cot, the cultivated farm,
The never-failing brook, the busy mill,
The decent church that topped the ...Read more of this...

by Scott, Sir Walter
...dow far away,
     The turrets of a cloister gray;
     How blithely might the bugle-horn
     Chide on the lake the lingering morn!
     How sweet at eve the lover's lute
     Chime when the groves were still and mute!
     And when the midnight moon should lave
     Her forehead in the silver wave,
     How solemn on the ear would come
     The holy matins' distant hum,
     While the deep peal's commanding tone
     Should wake, in yonder islet lone,
     A sai...Read more of this...

by Tebb, Barry
...eeding the Sunday birds, my grandmother

Framed in a trellis of mignonette, the aroma fragrant still,

The violet stock lingering and re-kindling our first garden

The autumn we moved in, the rampant blossoms cager in the soil

Of my father’s first sowing.



2

For us there was no garden, the cottage at Hall lngs

Had only a paved yard, with tufts of grass and lichen

The whole country round an abundance of hedges and ditches

Where dog-roses blossomed, meadows of cow-pa...Read more of this...

by Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...that full heart and brain.

And ever down the prone vale, like a cloud
Upon a stream of wind, the pinnace went:
Now lingering on the pools, in which abode
The calm and darkness of the deep content
In which they paused; now o'er the shallow road
Of white and dancing waters, all besprent
With sand and polished pebbles:--mortal boat
In such a shallow rapid could not float.

And down the earthquaking cataracts, which shivcr
Their snow-like waters into golden air,
Or under...Read more of this...

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