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Famous Numbness Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Larkin, Philip
...reflect a strong

Unhindered moon. To have no son, no wife,
No house or land still seemed quite natural.
Only a numbness registered the shock
Of finding out how much had gone of life,
How widely from the others. Dockery, now:
Only nineteen, he must have taken stock
Of what he wanted, and been capable
Of . . . No, that's not the difference: rather, how

Convinced he was he should be added to!
Why did he think adding meant increase?
To me it was dilution...Read more of this...



by Rilke, Rainer Maria
...he legend meaningless that tells how in the lament for Linus
the daring first notes of song pierced through the barren numbness;
and then in the startled space which a youth as lovely as a god
had suddenly left forever the Void felt for the first time
that harmony which now enraptures and comforts and helps us....Read more of this...

by Rilke, Rainer Maria
...tells of music's beginning
in the midst of the mourning for Linos?
the daring first sounds of song piercing
the barren numbness, and how in that stunned space
an almost godlike youth suddenly left forever,
and the emptiness felt for the first time
those harmonious vibrations which now enrapture
and comfort and help us....Read more of this...

by Gregory, Rg
...tmosphere but not the view

but now you're dead - and i've been silent
for the past five months since you were burned
a numbness that called itself acceptance
sat in my heart and outward yearned

with other deaths i've not been stingy
when my mother died and then my daughter
a kind of celebration knew me
and words flowed upwards like clear water

but you were ninety-two in dying
when nature came proudly to claim its own
you went as rightly as you'd journeyed
and words had bes...Read more of this...

by Keats, John
...MY heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains 
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, 
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains 
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: 
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, 5 
But being too happy in thine happiness, 
That thou, light-wing¨¨d Dryad of the trees, 
In some melodious plot 
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, 
Singes...Read more of this...



by Verhaeren, Emile
...ach the window, and huddle our tottering bodies on heavy seats?
If our wreck is to appear one day in such guise, while numbness deadens our brains and our arms, we shall not bemoan, in spite of evil fate, and we shall hold our tears pent up in our breasts.
For even so, we shall still keep our eyes with which to gaze on the day that follows night, and to see the dawn and the sun shed their radiance on life, and make a wonderful object of the earth....Read more of this...

by Hughes, Ted
...ntrails. Now a head-pincering gale,
A spill of molten ice, smoking snow,
Pours into its steel.
At white heat of numbness it stands
In the aimed hosing of ground-level fieriness. 

It defied flesh and won't start.
Hands are like wounds already
Inside armour gloves, and feet are unbelievable
As if the toe-nails were all just torn off.
I stare at it in hatred. Beyond it
The copse hisses - capitulates miserably
In the fleeing, failing light. Starlings,...Read more of this...

by Plath, Sylvia
...a pebble to them, they tend it as water
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage ----
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.

I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat
Stubbornly hanging on to my na...Read more of this...

by Masters, Edgar Lee
...g to stone, yet burgeoning
In laurel leaves, in hosts of lambent laurel,
Quivering, fluttering, shrinking, fighting the numbness
Creeping into their veins from the dying trunk and branches!
'Tis vain, O youth, to fly the call of Apollo.
Fling yourselves in the fire, die with a song of spring,
If die you must in the spring. For none shall look
On the face of Apollo and live, and choose you must
'Twixt death in the flame and death after years of sorrow,
Rooted fast in t...Read more of this...

by Subraman, Belinda
...At the edge of winter
in crisp early March
a dull thud of numbness
delays joy and sadness
that will make us weep.

In the flow of life
every aspect bears its opposite.
Between extremes
there’s the balance of peace
or peace
in the realization of balance.

With the warm blanket of knowledge
is the freezing cold of truth.
We are greeted with tears
as we come into this world
and tears as we go out....Read more of this...

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