Famous Oblivion Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Oblivion poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous oblivion poems. These examples illustrate what a famous oblivion poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
William Soutar
All that the hand may touch;
All that the hand may own;
Crumbles beyond time’s clutch
Down to oblivion.
Fear not the boasts which wound:
Fear not the threats which bind:
Always on broken ground
The seeds fall from the mind.
Always in darkest loam
A birthday is begun;
And from its catacomb
A candle lights the sun.
...Read more of this...
by
John Dryden
All human things are subject to decay,
And, when Fate summons, monarchs must obey:
This Flecknoe found, who, like Augustus, young
Was call'd to empire, and had govern'd long:
In prose and verse, was own'd, without dispute
Through all the realms of Non-sense, absolute.
This aged prince now flourishing in peace,
And blest with issue of a large increase,
Worn out with business, did at length debate
To...Read more of this...
by
Dejan Stojanovic
When all is lost, there is still a memory
From which a new city can be built in a new world.
Those with memory will be wealthy.
Oblivion cures the old wounds, and you must agree,
There is only the past and the future on the path;
When all is lost, there is still a memory.
Memory will save oblivion...Read more of this...
by
Pablo Neruda
This salt
in the saltcellar
I once saw in the salt mines.
I know
you won't
believe me,
but
it sings,
salt sings, the skin
of the salt mines
sings
with a mouth smothered
by the earth.
I shivered in those solitudes
when I heard
the voice of
the salt
in the desert.
Near Antofagasta
the nitrous
pampa
resounds:
a broken
voice,
a mournful
song.
In its caves
the salt moans, mountain
of buried light,
translucent cathedral,
crystal of the sea, oblivion
of the waves.
And then on every table
in the...Read more of this...
by
Billy Collins
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long...Read more of this...
by
Henrik Ibsen
NOW, rallying once if ne'er again,
With flag at half-mast flown,
A people in dire need and strain
Mans Tyra's bastion.
Betrayed in danger's hour, betrayed
Before the stress of strife!
Was this the meaning that it had--
That clasp of hands at Axelstad
Which gave the North new life?
The words that seemed as if they rushed
From...Read more of this...
by
Mary Darby Robinson
"Fate snatch'd him early to the pitying sky."
- POPE.
IF WORTH, too early to the grave consign'd,
Can claim the pitying tear, or touch the mind ?
If manly sentiments unstain'd by art,
Could waken FRIENDSHIP, or delight the heart ?
Ill-fated youth ! to THEE the MUSE shall pay
The last sad tribute of a mournful lay;
On thy lone grave shall MAY'S soft...Read more of this...
by
Philip Levine
Revolving in oval loops of solar speed,
Couched in cauls of clay as in holy robes,
Dead men render love and war no heed,
Lulled in the ample womb of the full-tilt globe.
No spiritual Caesars are these dead;
They want no proud paternal kingdom come;
And when at last they blunder into bed
World-wrecked, they seek only oblivion.
Rolled round with goodly loam and cradled deep,
These...Read more of this...
by
Emile Verhaeren
In the garden yonder of yews and death,
There sojourneth
A man who toils, and has toiled for aye.
Digging the dried-up ground all day.
Some willows, surviving their own dead selves.
Weep there around him as he delves.
And a few poor flowers, disconsolate
Because the tempest and wind and wet
Vex them with ceaseless scourge and fret.
The ground is nothing but pits and cones,
Deep graves in...Read more of this...
by
Robert Seymour Bridges
The south-wind strengthens to a gale,
Across the moon the clouds fly fast,
The house is smitten as with a flail,
The chimney shudders to the blast.
On such a night, when Air has loosed
Its guardian grasp on blood and brain,
Old terrors then of god or ghost
Creep from their caves to life again;
And Reason kens he herits in
A haunted house. Tenants unknown
Assert their...Read more of this...
by
Bliss Carman
We are the vagabonds of time,
And rove the yellow autumn days,
When all the roads are gray with rime
And all the valleys blue with haze.
We came unlooked for as the wind
Trooping across the April hills,
When the brown waking earth had dreams
Of summer in the Wander Kills.
How far afield we joyed to fare,...Read more of this...
by
Andrew Barton Paterson
It was the lunatic poet escaped from the local asylum,
Loudly he twanged on his banjo and sang with his voice like a saw-mill,
While as with fervour he sang there was borne o'er the shuddering wildwood,
Borne on the breath of the poet a flavour of rum and of onions.
He sang of the Deficit Demon that dqelt...Read more of this...
by
Mary Darby Robinson
THOU art no more my bosom's FRIEND;
Here must the sweet delusion end,
That charm'd my senses many a year,
Thro' smiling summers, winters drear.
O, FRIENDSHIP! am I doom'd to find
Thou art a phantom of the mind?
A glitt'ring shade, an empty name,
An air-born vision's vap'rish flame?
And yet, the dear DECEIT so long
Has wak'd...Read more of this...
by
Countee Cullen
"Lord, being dark," I said, "I cannot bear
The further touch of earth, the scented air;
Lord, being dark, forewilled to that despair
My color shrouds me in, I am as dirt
Beneath my brother's heel; there is a hurt
In all the simple joys which to a child
Are sweet; they are contaminate, defiled
By truths of wrongs the childish vision fails
To see; too great...Read more of this...
by
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Aye, but she?
Your other sister and my other soul
Grave Silence, lovelier
Than the three loveliest maidens, what of her?
Clio, not you,
Not you, Calliope,
Nor all your wanton line,
Not Beauty's perfect self shall comfort me
For Silence once departed,
For her the cool-tongued, her the tranquil-hearted,
Whom evermore I follow wistfully,
Wandering Heaven and Earth and Hell and the four seasons through;
Thalia, not you,
Not you, Melpomene,
Not...Read more of this...
by
William Shakespeare
Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain
Full character'd with lasting memory,
Which shall above that idle rank remain
Beyond all date, even to eternity;
Or at the least, so long as brain and heart
Have faculty by nature to subsist;
Till each to razed oblivion yield his part
Of thee, thy record never can be miss'd.
That poor retention could not so much hold,
Nor...Read more of this...
by
T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
I
Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?
Because I do not hope to know
The infirm glory of the...Read more of this...
by
Aleister Crowley
As night hath stars, more rare than ships
In ocean, faint from pole to pole,
So all the wonder of her lips
Hints her innavigable soul.
Such lights she gives as guide my bark;
But I am swallowed in the swell
Of her heart's ocean, sagely dark,
That holds my heaven and holds my hell.
In her I live, a mote minute
Dancing a moment in the sun:
In...Read more of this...
by
Francesco Petrarch
[Pg 172] SONNET CLVI. Passa la nave mia colma d' oblio. UNDER THE FIGURE OF A TEMPEST-TOSSED VESSEL, HE DESCRIBES HIS OWN SAD STATE. My bark, deep laden with oblivion, ridesO'er boisterous waves, through winter's midnight gloom,'Twixt Scylla and Charybdis, while, in roomOf pilot, Love, mine enemy, presides;At...Read more of this...
by
Philip Larkin
What do they think has happened, the old fools,
To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose
It's more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,
And you keep on pissing yourself, and can't remember
Who called this morning? Or that, if they only chose,
They could alter things back to when they danced all night,
Or went to their wedding, or sloped...Read more of this...
by
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I.
Solemnly, mournfully,
Dealing its dole,
The Curfew Bell
Is beginning to toll.
Cover the embers,
And put out the light;
Toil comes with the morning,
And rest with the night.
Dark grow the windows,
And quenched is the fire;
Sound fades into silence,--
All footsteps retire.
No voice in the chambers,
No sound in the hall!
Sleep and oblivion
Reign over all!
II.
The book is completed,
And closed, like the day;
And the hand that has written...Read more of this...
by
Henry Van Dyke
I
LEGEND
Long ago Apollo called to Aristæus,
youngest of the shepherds,
Saying, "I will make you keeper of my bees."
Golden were the hives, and golden was the honey;
golden, too, the music,
Where the honey-makers hummed among the trees.
Happy Aristæus loitered in the garden, wandered
in the orchard,
Careless and contented, indolent and free;
Lightly took his labour, lightly took his...Read more of this...
by
Rupert Brooke
I dreamt I was in love again
With the One Before the Last,
And smiled to greet the pleasant pain
Of that innocent young past.
But I jumped to feel how sharp had been
The pain when it did live,
How the faded dreams of Nineteen-ten
Were Hell in Nineteen-five.
The boy's woe was as keen and clear,
The boy's love just as true,
And the One Before the...Read more of this...
by
Mary Darby Robinson
Oh Sigh! thou steal'st, the herald of the breast,
The lover's fears, the lover's pangs to tell;
Thou bid'st with timid grace the bosom swell,
Cheating the day of joy, the night of rest!
Oh! lucid Tears! with eloquence confest,
Why on my fading cheek unheeded dwell,
Meek, as the dew-drops on the flowret's bell
By ruthless tempests to the green-sod prest.
Fond sigh be hush'd! congeal,...Read more of this...
by
Dejan Stojanovic
It is not possible to say more than it is possible.
Ambition kills value; if unjustified it will
Eat its own life,
Kill someone else's desire to fly,
Cut their wings, suck their air.
Get out, but don't cause unneeded accidents;
There is only as much space, only as much time,
Only as much desire, only as many words,
Only...Read more of this...
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