Famous Lives Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Lives poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous lives poems. These examples illustrate what a famous lives poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Pablo Neruda
You are the daughter of the sea, oregano's first cousin.
Swimmer, your body is pure as the water;
cook, your blood is quick as the soil.
Everything you do is full of flowers, rich with the earth.
Your eyes go out toward the water, and the waves rise;
your hands go out to the earth and the seeds swell;
you know the deep essence of...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
Upon Concluded Lives
There's nothing cooler falls --
Than Life's sweet Calculations --
The mixing Bells and Palls --
Make Lacerating Tune --
To Ears the Dying Side --
'Tis Coronal -- and Funeral --
Saluting -- in the Road --...Read more of this...
by
John Clare
Love lives beyond the tomb,
And earth, which fades like dew!
I love the fond,
The faithful, and the true.
Love lives in sleep:
'Tis happiness of healthy dreams:
Eve's dews may weep,
But love delightful seems.
'Tis seen in flowers,
And in the morning's pearly dew;
In earth's green hours,
And in the heaven's eternal blue.
'Tis heard in Spring
When light and sunbeams, warm and kind,
On angel's wing
Bring love and...Read more of this...
by
Mark Strand
1
We are reading the story of our lives
which takes place in a room.
The room looks out on a street.
There is no one there,
no sound of anything.
The tress are heavy with leaves,
the parked cars never move.
We keep turning the pages, hoping for something,
something like mercy or change,
a black line that would bind us
or keep us apart.
The way it is, it...Read more of this...
by
Fleda Brown
She reads, of course, what he's doing, shaking Nixon's hand,
dating this starlet or that, while he is faithful to her
like a stone in her belly, like the actual love child,
its bills and diapers. Once he had kissed her
and time had stood still, at least some point seems to
remain back there as a place to return...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
Our lives are Swiss --
So still -- so Cool --
Till some odd afternoon
The Alps neglect their Curtains
And we look farther on!
Italy stands the other side!
While like a guard between --
The solemn Alps --
The siren Alps
Forever intervene!...Read more of this...
by
Rabindranath Tagore
None lives for ever, brother, and
nothing lasts for long. Keep that in
mind and rejoice.
Our life is not the one old burden,
our path is not the one long
journey.
One sole poet has not to sing one
aged song.
The flower fades and dies; but he
who wears the flower has not to
mourn for it for ever.
Brother, keep that in mind and
rejoice.
There must come...Read more of this...
by
Vachel Lindsay
Think not that incense-smoke has had its day.
My friends, the incense-time has but begun.
Creed upon creed, cult upon cult shall bloom,
Shrine after shrine grow gray beneath the sun.
And mountain-boulders in our aged West
Shall guard the graves of hermits truth-endowed:
And there the scholar from the Chinese hills
Shall do deep honor, with his wise...Read more of this...
by
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Deep in my heart that aches with the repression,
And strives with plenitude of bitter pain,
There lives a thought that clamors for expression,
And spends its undelivered force in vain.
What boots it that some other may have thought it?
The right of thoughts' expression is divine;
The price of pain I pay for it has bought it,
I care not who lays claim to it—'t...Read more of this...
by
Emile Verhaeren
Everything that lives about us in the fragile and gentle light, frail grasses, tender branches, hollyhocks, and the shadow that brushes them lightly by, and the wind that knots them, and the singing and hopping birds that swarm riotously in the sun like clusters of jewels,— everything that lives in the fine ruddy garden loves us artlessly, and we—we love...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
"Too many things are occurring for even a big heart to hold." - From an essay by W. B. Yeats
Big heart,
wide as a watermelon,
but wise as birth,
there is so much abundance
in the people I have:
Max, Lois, Joe, Louise,
Joan, Marie, Dawn,
Arlene, Father Dunne,
and all in their short lives
give to me...Read more of this...
by
William Topaz McGonagall
'Twas in the year of 1898, ond on the 21st of June,
The launching of the Battleship Albion caused a great gloom,
Amongst the relatives of many persons who were drowned in the River Thames,
Which their relatives will remember while life remains.
The vessel was christened by the Duchess of York,
And the spectators' hearts felt light as cork
As the Duchess cut...Read more of this...
by
Charles Bukowski
the wind blows hard tonight
and it's a cold wind
and I think about
the boys on the row.
I hope some of them have a bottle of
red.
it's when you're on the row
that you notice that
everything
is owned
and that there are locks on
everything.
this is the way a democracy
works:
you get what you can,
try to keep that
and add to it
if possible.
this is the way...Read more of this...
by
Philip Larkin
The little lives of earth and form,
Of finding food, and keeping warm,
Are not like ours, and yet
A kinship lingers nonetheless:
We hanker for the homeliness
Of den, and hole, and set.
And this identity we feel
- Perhaps not right, perhaps not real -
Will link us constantly;
I see the rock, the clay, the chalk,
The flattened grass, the swaying stalk,
And...Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
Skies like a zone our weary lives enclose,
And from our tear-stained eyes a Jihun flows;
Hell is a fire enkindled of our griefs;
Heaven but a moment's peace, stolen from our woes....Read more of this...
by
Francesco Petrarch
CANZONE VI. Spirto gentil che quelle membra reggi. TO RIENZI, BESEECHING HIM TO RESTORE TO ROME HER ANCIENT LIBERTY. Spirit heroic! who with fire divineKindlest those limbs, awhile which pilgrim holdOn earth a Chieftain, gracious, wise, and bold;Since, rightly, now the rod of state is thineRome and her wandering children to...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
Lives he in any other world
My faith cannot reply
Before it was imperative
'Twas all distinct to me --...Read more of this...
by
Fernando Pessoa
My weary life, that lives unsatisfied
On the foiled off-brink of being e'er but this,
To whom the power to will hath been denied
And the will to renounce doth also miss;
My sated life, with having nothing sated,
In the motion of moving poisèd aye,
Within its dreams from its own dreams abated--
This life let the Gods change or take away.
For this endless succession of...Read more of this...
by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
[Goethe began to write an opera called Lowenstuhl,
founded upon the old tradition which forms the subject of this Ballad,
but he never carried out his design.]
OH, enter old minstrel, thou time-honour'd one!
We children are here in the hall all alone,
The portals we straightway will bar.
Our mother is praying, our father is gone
To the forest, on wolves to make...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
The Mind lives on the Heart
Like any Parasite --
If that is full of Meat
The Mind is fat.
But if the Heart omit
Emaciate the Wit --
The Aliment of it
So absolute....Read more of this...
by
Philip Levine
It's wonderful how I jog
on four honed-down ivory toes
my massive buttocks slipping
like oiled parts with each light step.
I'm to market. I can smell
the sour, grooved block, I can smell
the blade that opens the hole
and the pudgy white fingers
that shake out the intestines
like a hankie. In my dreams
the snouts drool on the marble,
suffering children, suffering flies,
suffering the consumers
who won't...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
It feels a shame to be Alive --
When Men so brave -- are dead --
One envies the Distinguished Dust --
Permitted -- such a Head --
The Stone -- that tells defending Whom
This Spartan put away
What little of Him we -- possessed
In Pawn for Liberty --
The price is great -- Sublimely paid --
Do we deserve -- a Thing --
That lives --...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
I know lives, I could miss
Without a Misery --
Others -- whose instant's wanting --
Would be Eternity --
The last -- a scanty Number --
'Twould scarcely fill a Two --
The first -- a Gnat's Horizon
Could easily outgrow --...Read more of this...
by
Robinson Jeffers
I. Reference to a Passage in Plutarch's Life of Sulla
The people buying and selling, consuming pleasures, talking in the archways,
Were all suddenly struck quiet
And ran from under stone to look up at the sky: so shrill and mournful,
So fierce and final, a brazen
Pealing of trumpets high up in the air, in the summer blue over Tuscany.
They marvelled; the soothsayers...Read more of this...
by
Bob Hicok
My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers
of my palms tell me so.
Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finish
at the same time. I think
praying, I think clapping is how hands mourn. I think
staying up and waiting
for paintings to sigh is science. In another dimension this
is exactly what's happening,
it's what...Read more of this...
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