Famous Living Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Living poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous living poems. These examples illustrate what a famous living poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Alfred Lord Tennyson
"So careful of the type?" but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, "A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.
"Thou makest thine appeal to me:
I bring to life, I bring to death:
The spirit does but mean the breath:
I know no more." And he, shall he,
Man, her last work, who seem'd so fair,
Such splendid purpose in...Read more of this...
by
Dorothy Parker
If wild my breast and sore my pride,
I bask in dreams of suicide;
If cool my heart and high my head,
I think, "How lucky are the dead!"...Read more of this...
by
William Cowper
The Lord receives his highest praise
From humble minds and hearts sincere;
While all the loud professor says
Offends the righteous Judge's ear.
To walk as children of the day,
To mark the precepts' holy light,
To wage the warfare, watch, and pray,
Show who are pleasing in His sight.
Not words alone it cost the Lord,
To purchase pardon for His own;
Nor will a soul by grace...Read more of this...
by
Adrienne Rich
She had thought the studio would keep itself;
no dust upon the furniture of love.
Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,
the panes relieved of grime. A plate of pears,
a piano with a Persian shawl, a cat
stalking the picturesque amusing mouse
had risen at his urging.
Not that at five each separate stair would writhe
under the milkman's tramp; that morning light
so coldly...Read more of this...
by
Charles Baudelaire
THEY pass before me, these Eyes full of light,
Eyes made magnetic by some angel wise;
The holy brothers pass before my sight,
And cast their diamond fires in my dim eyes.
They keep me from all sin and error grave,
They set me in the path whence Beauty came;
They are my servants, and I am their slave,...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
A sea-gull with a broken wing,
I found upon the kelp-strewn shore.
It sprawled and gasped; I sighed: "Poor thing!
I fear your flying days are o'er;
Sad victim of a savage gun,
So ends your soaring in the sun."
I only wanted to be kind;
Its icy legs I gently caught,
Thinking its fracture I might bind,
But fiercely in its fear it fought;
Till guessing that I...Read more of this...
by
Nazim Hikmet
I
Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example--
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
you must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example, your hands tied behind your...Read more of this...
by
William Strode
Keepe on your maske and hide your eye
For in beholding you I dye.
Your fatall beauty Gorgon-like
Dead with astonishment doth strike.
Your piercing eyes that now I see
Are worse than Basilisks to me.
Shut from mine eyes those hills of snow,
Their melting vally do not shew:
Those azure paths lead to despaire,
O vex me not, forbear, forbear;
For while I thus in torments dwell
The...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
If He were living -- dare I ask --
And how if He be dead --
And so around the Words I went --
Of meeting them -- afraid --
I hinted Changes -- Lapse of Time --
The Surfaces of Years --
I touched with Caution -- lest they crack --
And show me to my fears --
Reverted to adjoining Lives --
Adroitly turning out
Wherever I...Read more of this...
by
Denise Levertov
The fire in leaf and grass
so green it seems
each summer the last summer.
The wind blowing, the leaves
shivering in the sun,
each day the last day.
A red salamander
so cold and so
easy to catch, dreamily
moves his delicate feet
and long tail. I hold
my hand open for him to go.
Each minute the last minute....Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
Endow the Living -- with the Tears --
You squander on the Dead,
And They were Men and Women -- now,
Around Your Fireside --
Instead of Passive Creatures,
Denied the Cherishing
Till They -- the Cherishing deny --
With Death's Ethereal Scron --...Read more of this...
by
William Butler Yeats
I bade, because the wick and oil are spent
And frozen are the channels of the blood,
My discontented heart to draw content
From beauty that is cast out of a mould
In bronze, or that in dazzling marble appears,
Appears, but when wc have gone is gone again,
Being more indifferent to our solitude
Than 'twere an apparition. O heart, we are old;
The living beauty...Read more of this...
by
Alfred Lord Tennyson
The wish, that of the living whole
No life may fail beyond the grave,
Derives it not from what we have
The likest God within the soul?
Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life;
That I, considering everywhere
Her secret meaning in her deeds,
And finding that of fifty...Read more of this...
by
Wang Wei
A fisherman is drifting, enjoying the spring mountains,
And the peach-trees on both banks lead him to an ancient source.
Watching the fresh-coloured trees, he never thinks of distance
Till he comes to the end of the blue stream and suddenly- strange men!
It's a cave-with a mouth so narrow that he has to crawl through;
But then it opens...Read more of this...
by
A E Housman
When I watch the living meet
And the moving pageant file
Warm and breathing through the street
Where I lodge a little while,
If the heats of hate and lust
In the house of flesh are strong,
Let me mind the house of dust
Where my sojourn shall be long.
In the nation that is not
Nothing stands that stood before;
There revenges are...Read more of this...
by
Alfred Lord Tennyson
O living will that shalt endure
When all that seems shall suffer shock,
Rise in the spiritual rock,
Flow thro' our deeds and make them pure,
That we may lift from out of dust
A voice as unto him that hears,
A cry above the conquer'd years
To one that with us works, and trust,
With faith that comes of self-control,
The truths that never can be proved
Until...Read more of this...
by
John Keats
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed - see here it is -
I hold it towards you....Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
It is Thou who disposest of the lot of the living and
of the dead. It is Thou who governest this unruly Wheel
of the Heavens. Although I am bad, I am only Thy
slave, Thou art my master. Who then is guilty here
below? Art Thou not the Creator of all?
388...Read more of this...
by
William Cullen Bryant
Matron! the children of whose love,
Each to his grave, in youth have passed,
And now the mould is heaped above
The dearest and the last!
Bride! who dost wear the widow's veil
Before the wedding flowers are pale!
Ye deem the human heart endures
No deeper, bitterer grief than yours.
Yet there are pangs of keener wo,
Of which the sufferers never speak,
Nor to the world's cold...Read more of this...
by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
HALF vex'd, half pleased, thy love will feel,
Shouldst thou her knot or ribbon steal;
To thee they're much--I won't conceal;
Such self-deceit may pardon'd be;
A veil, a kerchief, garter, rings,
In truth are no mean trifling things,
But still they're not enough for me.
She who is dearest to my heart,
Gave me, with well dissembled smart,
Of her own life, a living part,
No charm in...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
Since I have come to years sedate
I see with more and more acumen
The bitter irony of Fate,
The vanity of all things human.
Why, just to-day some fellow said,
As I surveyed Fame's outer portal:
"By gad! I thought that you were dead."
Poor me, who dreamed to be immortal!
But that's the way with many men
Whose name one fancied time-defying;
We thought that they were...Read more of this...
by
John Berryman
While his wife earned the living, Rabbi Henry
studied the Torah, writing commentaries
more likely to be burnt than printed.
It was rumoured that they needed revision.
Smiling, kissing, he bent his head not with 'Please'
but with austere requests barely hinted,
like a dog with a bone he worried the Sacred Book
and often taught its fringes.
Imperishable enthusiasms.
I have only one request to make...Read more of this...
by
Oliver Wendell Holmes
NOT in the world of light alone,
Where God has built his blazing throne,
Nor yet alone in earth below,
With belted seas that come and go,
And endless isles of sunlit green,
Is all thy Maker's glory seen:
Look in upon thy wondrous frame,--
Eternal wisdom still the same!
The smooth, soft air with pulse-like waves
Flows murmuring through its...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
O LIVING always—always dying!
O the burials of me, past and present!
O me, while I stride ahead, material, visible, imperious as ever!
O me, what I was for years, now dead, (I lament not—I am content;)
O to disengage myself from those corpses of me, which I turn and look at, where I cast
them!
To pass on, (O...Read more of this...
by
Alfred Lord Tennyson
O living will that shalt endure
When all that seems shall suffer shock,
Rise in the spiritual rock,
Flow thro' our deeds and make them pure,
That we may lift from out of dust
A voice as unto him that hears,
A cry above the conquer'd years
To one that with us works, and trust,
With faith that comes of self-control,
The truths that never can...Read more of this...
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