Famous Loveless Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Winter Eden

...tree's young tender bark,
What well may prove the year's high girdle mark.

So near to paradise all pairing ends:
Here loveless birds now flock as winter friends,
Content with bud-inspecting. They presume
To say which buds are leaf and which are bloom.

A feather-hammer gives a double knock.
This Eden day is done at two o'clock.
An hour of winter day might seem too short
To make it worth life's while to wake and sport....Read more of this...
by Frost, Robert


Aaron Stark

...cur were chary of its bark.

Glad for the murmur of his hard renown,
Year after year he shambled through the town, --
A loveless exile moving with a staff;
And oftentimes there crept into his ears
A sound of alien pity, touched with tears, --
And then (and only then) did Aaron laugh....Read more of this...
by Robinson, Edwin Arlington

Atalantas Race

...ll; 
List to what I a second time will tell, 
And thou mayest hear perchance, and live to save 
The cruel maiden from a loveless grave.

"See, by my feet three golden apples lie-- 
Such fruit among the heavy roses falls, 
Such fruit my watchful damsels carefully 
Store up within the best loved of my walls, 
Ancient Damascus, where the lover calls 
Above my unseen head, and faint and light 
The rose-leaves flutter round me in the night.

"And note, that these are not alone mos...Read more of this...
by Morris, William

Charmides

...Sappho's golden quid!

Enough, enough that he whose life had been
A fiery pulse of sin, a splendid shame,
Could in the loveless land of Hades glean
One scorching harvest from those fields of flame
Where passion walks with naked unshod feet
And is not wounded, - ah! enough that once their lips could meet

In that wild throb when all existences
Seemed narrowed to one single ecstasy
Which dies through its own sweetness and the stress
Of too much pleasure, ere Persephone
Had bad...Read more of this...
by Wilde, Oscar

Cobwebs

...leaf-falling there for aye, 
No ripple on the sea, no shifting sand, 
No beat of wings to stir the stagnant space, 
And loveless sea: no trace of days before, 
No guarded home, no time-worn restingplace 
No future hope no fear forevermore....Read more of this...
by Rossetti, Christina


Departure

...elligible phrase, 
And frighten'd eye, 
And go your journey of all days 
With not one kiss, or a good-bye,
And the only loveless look the look with which you pass'd: 
'Twas all unlike your great and gracious ways....Read more of this...
by St. Vincent Millay, Edna

EPISTLE II: TO A LADY (Of the Characters of Women)

...and down it goes again. 
Full sixty years the World has been her Trade, 
The wisest Fool much Time has ever made. 
From loveless youth to unrespected age, 
No passion gratify'd except her Rage. 
So much the Fury still outran the Wit, 
The Pleasure miss'd her, and the Scandal hit. 
Who breaks with her, provokes Revenge from Hell, 
But he's a bolder man who dares be well. 
Her ev'ry turn with Violence pursu'd, 
Nor more a storm her Hate than Gratitude: 
To that each Passion tur...Read more of this...
by Pope, Alexander

Frances

...ve sat, the slave and prey of gloom.

One feeling­turned to utter anguish, 
Is not my being's only aim; 
When, lorn and loveless, life will languish, 
But courage can revive the flame.

He, when he left me, went a roving
To sunny climes, beyond the sea; 
And I, the weight of woe removing, 
Am free and fetterless as he.

New scenes, new language, skies less clouded,
May once more wake the wish to live; 
Strange, foreign towns, astir, and crowded, 
New pictures to the mind may ...Read more of this...
by Bronte, Charlotte

Howl

...r the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are te...Read more of this...
by Ginsberg, Allen

Monna Innominata: A Sonnet of Sonnets

...ah, woe is me!)
Faithless and hopeless turning to the wall.
And yet not hopeless quite nor faithless quite,
Because not loveless; love may toil all night,
But take at morning; wrestle till the break
Of day, but then wield power with God and man:--
So take I heart of grace as best I can,
Ready to spend and be spent for your sake. 


10 

Con miglior corso e con migliore stella. - Dante
La vita fugge e non s'arresta un' ora. - Petrarca

Time flies, hope flags, life plies a wear...Read more of this...
by Rossetti, Christina

Paradise Lost: Book 04

...re lights 
His constant lamp, and waves his purple wings, 
Reigns here and revels; not in the bought smile 
Of harlots, loveless, joyless, unendeared, 
Casual fruition; nor in court-amours, 
Mixed dance, or wanton mask, or midnight ball, 
Or serenate, which the starved lover sings 
To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain. 
These, lulled by nightingales, embracing slept, 
And on their naked limbs the flowery roof 
Showered roses, which the morn repaired. Sleep on, 
Blest ...Read more of this...
by Milton, John

Sonnet VIII

...Oft as by chance, a little while apart 
The pall of empty, loveless hours withdrawn, 
Sweet Beauty, opening on the impoverished heart, 
Beams like the jewel on the breast of dawn: 
Not though high heaven should rend would deeper awe 
Fill me than penetrates my spirit thus, 
Nor all those signs the Patmian prophet saw 
Seem a new heaven and earth so marvelous; 
But, clad thenceforth in iridescent dyes, 
The fair worl...Read more of this...
by Seeger, Alan

Sunflower Sutra

...trial-- modern--all that civilization spotting your crazy golden crown--

and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what more could I name, the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of cars, wornout ...Read more of this...
by Ginsberg, Allen

The Book of Annandale

...d half-project.

What was it, then? Had he become transformed 
And hardened through long watches and long grief 
Into a loveless, feelingless dead thing 
That brooded like a man, breathed like a man,— 
Did everything but ache? And was a day
To come some time when feeling should return 
Forever to drive off that other face— 
The lineless, indistinguishable face— 
That once had thrilled itself between his own 
And hers there on the pillow,—and again
Between him and the coffin-l...Read more of this...
by Robinson, Edwin Arlington

The Growth of Love

...dost mock my praise. 
Now doth my drop of time transcend the whole:
I see no fame in Khufu's pyramid,
No history where loveless Nile doth roll.
--This is eternal life, which doth forbid
Mortal detraction to the exalted soul,
And from her inward eye all fate hath hid. 

30
My lady pleases me and I please her;
This know we both, and I besides know well
Wherefore I love her, and I love to tell
My love, as all my loving songs aver.
But what on her part could the passion stir,
Th...Read more of this...
by Bridges, Robert Seymour

The New Helen

...y face again,
But in this poisonous garden-close must stay,
Crowning my brows with the thorn-crown of pain,
Till all my loveless life shall pass away.

O Helen! Helen! Helen! yet a while,
Yet for a little while, O, tarry here,
Till the dawn cometh and the shadows flee!
For in the gladsome sunlight of thy smile
Of heaven or hell I have no thought or fear,
Seeing I know no other god but thee:
No other god save him, before whose feet
In nets of gold the tired planets move,
The i...Read more of this...
by Wilde, Oscar

The Quiet Rural Church

...d past with plaint or prayer. 
 
 Mournful and still it was at day's decline, 
 The day we entered there; 
 As in a loveless heart, at the lone shrine, 
 The fires extinguished were. 
 
 Scarcely was heard to float some gentlest sound, 
 Scarcely some low breathed word, 
 As in a forest fallen asleep, is found 
 Just one belated bird. 


 A STORM SIMILE. 
 
 ("Oh, regardez le ciel!") 
 
 {June, 1828.} 


 See, where on high the moving masses, piled ...Read more of this...
by Hugo, Victor

The Secret People

...have bright dead alien eyes;
They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.
And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs,
Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs.

We hear men speaking for us of new laws strong and sweet,
Yet is there no man speaketh as we speak in the street.
It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first,
Our wrath come after Russia's wrath and our wrath be the worst.
It may be ...Read more of this...
by Chesterton, G K

The Supplanter: A Tale

...be kind to me! 
For do you love her, do you hate, 
 She knows not--cares not she: 
Only the living feel the weight 
 Of loveless misery! 

XV 

"I own my sin; I've paid its cost, 
 Being outcast, shamed, and bare: 
I give you daily my whole heart, 
 Your babe my tender care, 
I pour you prayers; and aye to part 
 Is more than I can bear!" 

XVI 

He turns--unpitying, passion-tossed; 
 "I know you not!" he cries, 
"Nor know your child. I knew this maid, 
 But she's in Paradise...Read more of this...
by Hardy, Thomas

To My Wife - With A Copy Of My Poems

...n petals
One to you seem fair,
Love will waft it till it settles
On your hair.

And when wind and winter harden
All the loveless land,
It will whisper of the garden,
You will understand....Read more of this...
by Wilde, Oscar

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