Famous Mastering Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Mastering poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous mastering poems. These examples illustrate what a famous mastering poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
See also:
...Than the world shone then, when the sky and the sea were as love for a breath's length seems--
One utterly, mingled and mastering and mastered and laughing with love that subsides
As the glad mad night sank panting and satiate with storm, and released the tides.
In the dense mid channel the steam-souled ship hung hovering, assailed and withheld
As a soul born royal, if life or if death be against it, is thwarted and quelled.
As the glories of myriads of glow-worms in lustrous...Read more of this...
by
Swinburne, Algernon Charles
...hence remove,
To spend her living in eternal love.
''But, O my sweet, what labour is't to leave
The thing we have not, mastering what not strives,
Playing the place which did no form receive,
Playing patient sports in unconstrained gyves?
She that her fame so to herself contrives,
The scars of battle 'scapeth by the flight,
And makes her absence valiant, not her might.
''O, pardon me, in that my boast is true:
The accident which brought me to her eye
Upon the moment did her...Read more of this...
by
Shakespeare, William
...I
Blessed be this place,
More blessed still this tower;
A bloody, arrogant power
Rose out of the race
Uttering, mastering it,
Rose like these walls from these
Storm-beaten cottages -
In mockery I have set
A powerful emblem up,
And sing it rhyme upon rhyme
In mockery of a time
Half dead at the top.
II
Alexandria's was a beacon tower, and Babylon's
An image of the moving heavens, a log-book of the sun's journey and the moon's;
And Shelley had his towers, thought's cro...Read more of this...
by
Yeats, William Butler
...Thou, and thy destinies?
And if thou searchest, and art made to fear
Facing of unread riddles dark and hard,
And mastering not their majesty austere,
Their meaning locked and barred:
How would it make the weight and wonder less,
If, lifted from immortal shoulders down,
The worlds were cast on seas of emptiness
In realms without a crown.
And (if there were no God) were left to rue
Dominion of the air and of the fire?
Then if there be a God, "Let ...Read more of this...
by
Ingelow, Jean
...Where he climbed as dusk embrowned,
Waiting us who loitered round.
Strange it is this speechless thing,
Subject to our mastering,
Subject for his life and food
To our gift, and time, and mood;
Timid pensioner of us Powers,
His existence ruled by ours,
Should - by crossing at a breath
Into safe and shielded death,
By the merely taking hence
Of his insignificance--
Loom as largened to the sense,
Shape as part, above man's will,
Of the Imperturbable.
As a prisoner, flight deba...Read more of this...
by
Hardy, Thomas
...e worms
And does he grow half human, all is right.'
This to my Lady in a distant spot,
Upon the theme: While mind is mastering clay,
Gross clay invades it. If the spy you play,
My wife, read this! Strange love talk, is it not?...Read more of this...
by
Meredith, George
...omes
Bane, and in Heaven much worse would be my state.
But neither here seek I, no nor in Heaven
To dwell, unless by mastering Heaven's Supreme;
Nor hope to be myself less miserable
By what I seek, but others to make such
As I, though thereby worse to me redound:
For only in destroying I find ease
To my relentless thoughts; and, him destroyed,
Or won to what may work his utter loss,
For whom all this was made, all this will soon
Follow, as to him linked in weal or ...Read more of this...
by
Milton, John
...g blood, short wild scream, and long, dull,
tapering groan;
These so—these irretrievable.
37
O Christ! This is mastering me!
In at the conquer’d doors they crowd. I am possess’d.
I embody all presences outlaw’d or suffering;
See myself in prison shaped like another man,
And feel the dull unintermitted pain.
For me the keepers of convicts shoulder their carbines and keep watch;
It is I let out...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...
By surgeons begg'd, their art on him to try,
Which, on the living, work without remorse,
First make incision on each mastering vein,
Then staunch the bleeding, then trasnpierce the corse,
And with their balms recure the wounds again,
Then poison and with physic him restore;
Not that they fear the hopeless man to kill,
But their experience to increase the more;
Ev'n so my mistress works upon my ill,
By curing me and killing me each hour,
Only to show her beauty's so...Read more of this...
by
Drayton, Michael
...dentity? I could hazard
An answer now, if you are asking still.
We are a small and lonely human race
Showing no sign of mastering solitude
Out on this stony planet that we farm.
The most that we can do for one another
Is let our blunders and our blind mischances
Argue a certain brusque abrupt compassion.
We might as well be truthful. I should say
They're luckiest who know they're not unique;
But only art or common interchange
Can teach that kindest truth. And even art
Can onl...Read more of this...
by
Rich, Adrienne
...t, by vision led
Beyond our guess or reach,
The travail of his spirit bred
Cities in place of speech.
So huge the all-mastering thought that drove --
So brief the term allowed --
Nations, not words, he linked to prove
His faith before the crowd.
It is his will that he look forth
Across the world he won --
The granite of the ancient North --
Great spaces washed with sun.
There shall he patient take his seat
(As when the Death he dared),
And there await a people's feet...Read more of this...
by
Kipling, Rudyard
...evolve and rivers that depart -
Spake, and were turned to song: yea, all they were,
With all their works, found in his mastering art
Speech as of powers whose uttered word laid bare
The world's great heart.
From the depths of the sea, from the wellsprings of earth, from the wastes of the midmost night,
From the fountains of darkness and tempest and thunder, from heights where the soul would be,
The spell of the mage of music evoked their sense, as an unknown light
From th...Read more of this...
by
Swinburne, Algernon Charles
...I never asked you to be perfect—did I?—
Though often I’ve called you sweet, in the invasion
Of mastering love. I never prayed that you
Might stand, unsoiled, angelic and inhuman,
Pointing the way toward Sainthood like a sign-post.
Oh yes, I know the way to heaven was easy.
We found the little kingdom of our passion
That all can share who walk the road of lovers.
In wild and secret happiness we stumbled;
And gods and demons clamoured in our sen...Read more of this...
by
Sassoon, Siegfried
...ose who envy or calumniate great men hate God, for there
is no other God.
The Angel hearing this became almost blue but mastering
himself he grew yellow, & at last white pink & smiling, and then
replied,
Thou Idolater, is not God One? & is not he visible in Jesus
Christ? and has not Jesus Christ given his sanction to the law of
ten commandments and are not all other men fools, sinners, &
nothings?
The Devil answer'd; bray a fool in a morter with wheat. yet
shall not his folly...Read more of this...
by
Blake, William
...my soul! O wondrous singer!
You only I hear......yet the star holds me, (but will soon depart;)
Yet the lilac, with mastering odor, holds me.
14
Now while I sat in the day, and look’d forth,
In the close of the day, with its light, and the fields of spring, and the farmer
preparing his
crops,
In the large unconscious scenery of my land, with its lakes and forests,
In the heavenly aerial beauty, (after the perturb’d winds, and the storms;)
Under the arching...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
Dont forget to view our wonderful member Mastering poems.