Famous Merest Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Man I Am and Man Would Be Love

by Robert Browning
 Man I am and man would be, Love--merest man and nothing more. 
Bid me seem no other! Eagles boast of pinions--let them soar! 
I may put forth angel's plumage, once unmanned, but not before. 

Now on earth to stand suffices,--nay, if kneeling serves, to kneel: 
Here you front me, here I find the all of heaven that earth can...Read more of this...

Heritage

by Countee Cullen
 What is Africa to me:
Copper sun or scarlet sea,
Jungle star or jungle track,
Strong bronzed men, or regal black
Women from whose loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his fathers loved,
Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,
What is Africa to me?

So I lie, who all day long
Want no sound except the song
Sung by wild barbaric birds
Goading massive...Read more of this...

The Lost Mistress

by Robert Browning
 All's over, then: does truth sound bitter
As one at first believes?
Hark, 'tis the sparrows' good-night twitter
About your cottage eaves!

And the leaf-buds on the vine are woolly,
I noticed that today;
One day more bursts them open fully
—You know the red turns grey.

Tomorrow we meet the same then, dearest?
May I take your hand in mine?
Mere friends are we,—well, friends the merest
Keep much...Read more of this...

Lost Mistress

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
        I.
 
All's over, then: does truth sound bitter
  As one at first believes?
Hark, 'tis the sparrows' good-night twitter
  About your cottage eaves!

        II.

And the leaf-buds on the vine are woolly,
  I noticed that, to-day;
One day more bursts them open fully
  ---You...Read more of this...

The Glove

by Robert Browning
 (PETER RONSARD _loquitur_.)

``Heigho!'' yawned one day King Francis,
``Distance all value enhances!
``When a man's busy, why, leisure
``Strikes him as wonderful pleasure:
`` 'Faith, and at leisure once is he?
``Straightway he wants to be busy.
``Here we've got peace; and aghast I'm
``Caught thinking war the true pastime.
``Is there a reason in metre?
``Give us your speech, master Peter!''
I who, if mortal dare say so,
Ne'er...Read more of this...

The Deepest Dream

by Mark Van Doren
 The deepest dream is of mad governors, 
Down, down we feel it, till the very crust 
Of the world cracks, and where there was no dust, 
Atoms of ruin rise. Confusion stirs, 
And fear; and all our thoughts--dark scavengers-- 
Feed on the center's refuse. Hope is thrust 
Like wind away, and love sinks into lust 
For merest safety, meanest...Read more of this...

Christel

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 My senses ofttimes are oppress'd,

Oft stagnant is my blood;
But when by Christel's sight I'm blest,

I feel my strength renew'd.
I see her here, I see her there,

And really cannot tell
The manner how, the when, the where,

The why I love her well.

If with the merest glance I view

Her black and roguish eyes,
And gaze on her black eyebrows too,

My spirit upward flies.
Has...Read more of this...

Into My Own

by Robert Frost
 One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
Were not, as 'twere, the merest mask of gloom,
But stretched away unto th eedge of doom.

I should not be withheld but that some day
into their vastness I should steal away,
Fearless of ever finding open land,
or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.

I...Read more of this...

The Bonfire

by Robert Frost
 “OH, let’s go up the hill and scare ourselves,
As reckless as the best of them to-night,
By setting fire to all the brush we piled
With pitchy hands to wait for rain or snow.
Oh, let’s not wait for rain to make it safe.
The pile is ours: we dragged it bough on bough
Down dark converging paths between the pines.
Let’s not care what...Read more of this...

Pan with Us

by Robert Frost
 Pan came out of the woods one day,--
His skin and his hair and his eyes were gray,
The gray of the moss of walls were they,--
And stood in the sun and looked his fill
At wooded valley and wooded hill.

He stood in the zephyr, pipes in hand,
On a height of naked pasture land;
In all the country he did command
He saw no...Read more of this...

The Years Awakening

by Thomas Hardy
 How do you know that the pilgrim track
Along the belting zodiac
Swept by the sun in his seeming rounds
Is traced by now to the Fishes' bounds
And into the Ram, when weeks of cloud
Have wrapt the sky in a clammy shroud,
And never as yet a tinct of spring
Has shown in the Earth's apparelling;
O vespering bird, how do you know,
How do you...Read more of this...

The Hangmans Great Hands

by Kenneth Patchen
 And all that is this day. . . 
The boy with cap slung over what had been a face. .. 

Somehow the cop will sleep tonight, will make love to his
wife... 
Anger won't help. I was born angry. Angry that my father was
being burnt alive in the mills; Angry that none of us knew
anything but filth, and poverty. Angry...Read more of this...

Too scanty twas to die for you

by Emily Dickinson
 Too scanty 'twas to die for you,
The merest Greek could that.
The living, Sweet, is costlier --
I offer even that --

The Dying, is a trifle, past,
But living, this include
The dying multifold -- without
The Respite to be dead....Read more of this...

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