Famous Only Serves Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Only Serves poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous only serves poems. These examples illustrate what a famous only serves poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Gerard Manley Hopkins
To what serves mortal beauty '—dangerous; does set danc-
ing blood—the O-seal-that-so ' feature, flung prouder form
Than Purcell tune lets tread to? ' See: it does this: keeps warm
Men's wits to the things that are; ' what good means—where a glance
Master more may than gaze, ' gaze out of countenance.
Those lovely lads once, wet-fresh ' windfalls of war's storm,
How then...Read more of this...
by
Rainer Maria Rilke
1906
The stamina of an old long-noble race
in the eyebrows' heavy arches. In the mild
blue eyes the solemn anguish of a child
and here and there humility-not a fool's
but feminine: the look of one who serves.
The mouth quite ordinary large and straight
composed yet not willing to speak out
when necessary. The forehead still na?ve
most comfortable in shadows looking down.
This as a whole just...Read more of this...
by
Matthew Prior
The merchant, to secure his treasure,
Conveys it in a borrowed name:
Euphelia serves to grace my measure,
But Cloe is my real flame.
My softest verse, my darling lyre
Upon Euphelia's toilet lay—
When Cloe noted her desire
That I should sing, that I should play.
My lyre I tune, my voice I raise,
But with my numbers mix my sighs;
And whilst I sing Euphelia's praise,
I...Read more of this...
by
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
What an image of peace and rest
Is this little church among its graves!
All is so quiet; the troubled breast,
The wounded spirit, the heart oppressed,
Here may find the repose it craves.
See, how the ivy climbs and expands
Over this humble hermitage,
And seems to caress with its little hands
The rough, gray stones, as a child that stands
Caressing the wrinkled cheeks of...Read more of this...
by
Wendell Berry
I.
The poem is important, but
not more than the people
whose survival it serves,
one of the necessities, so they may
speak what is true, and have
the patience for beauty: the weighted
grainfield, the shady street,
the well-laid stone and the changing tree
whose branches spread above.
For want of songs and stories
they have dug away the soil,
paved over what is left,
set up their perfunctory walls
in tribute...Read more of this...
by
Edward Thomas
RUNNING along a bank, a parapet
That saves from the precipitous wood below
The level road, there is a path. It serves
Children for looking down the long smooth steep,
Between the legs of beech and yew, to where
A fallen tree checks the sight: while men and women
Content themselves with the road and what they see
Over...Read more of this...
by
Amy Clampitt
While you walk the water's edge,
turning over concepts
I can't envision, the honking buoy
serves notice that at any time
the wind may change,
the reef-bell clatters
its treble monotone, deaf as Cassandra
to any note but warning. The ocean,
cumbered by no business more urgent
than keeping open old accounts
that never balanced,
goes on shuffling its millenniums
of quartz, granite, and basalt.
It behaves
toward the permutations of...Read more of this...
by
George Herbert
O Sacred Providence, who from end to end
Strongly and sweetly movest! shall I write,
And not of thee, through whom my fingers bend
To hold my quill? shall they not do thee right?
Of all the creatures both in sea and land
Onely to Man thou hast made known thy wayes,
And put the penne alone into his hand,
And made him Secretarie of...Read more of this...
by
Czeslaw Milosz
Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills—
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.
Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn’t matter whether...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
You make it in your mess-tin by the brazier's rosy gleam;
You watch it cloud, then settle amber clear;
You lift it with your bay'nit, and you sniff the fragrant steam;
The very breath of it is ripe with cheer.
You're awful cold and dirty, and a-cursin' of your lot;
You scoff the blushin' 'alf of it, so rich and rippin'...Read more of this...
by
Richard Hugo
You might come here Sunday on a whim.
Say your life broke down. The last good kiss
you had was years ago. You walk these streets
laid out by the insane, past hotels
that didn't last, bars that did, the tortured try
of local drivers to accelerate their lives.
Only churches are kept up. The jail
turned 70 this year. The only prisoner
is always in, not...Read more of this...
by
Li Po
I love Master Meng.
Free as a flowing breeze,
He is famous
Throughout the world.
In rosy youth, he cast away
Official cap and carriage.
Now, a white-haired elder, he reclines
Amid pines and cloud.
Drunk beneath the moon,
He often attains sagehood.
Lost among the flowers,
He serves no lord.
How can I aspire
to such a high mountain?
Here below, to his clear fragrance,
I bow....Read more of this...
by
Robert Herrick
Get up, get up for shame! the blooming morn
Upon her wings presents the god unshorn.
See how Aurora throws her fair
Fresh-quilted colours through the air!
Get up, sweet slug-a-bed, and see
The dew bespangled herb and tree.
Each flower has wept and bowed toward the east
Above an hour since,—yet you not dressed;
Nay! not so much as out of bed?
When all the birds have...Read more of this...
by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
WITHIN the chamber, far away
From the glad feast, sits Love in dread
Lest guests disturb, in wanton play,
The silence of the bridal bed.
His torch's pale flame serves to gild
The scene with mystic sacred glow;
The room with incense-clouds is fil'd,
That ye may perfect rapture know.
How beats thy heart, when thou dost hear
The chime that warns thy guests to fly!
How glow'st thou...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
I will not fight: though proud of pith
I hold no one worth striving with;
And should resentment burn my breast
I deem that silence serves me best:
So having not a word to say,
Contemptuous I turn away.
I will not fret: my rest of life
Free I will keep from hate and strife;
Let lust and sin and anger sleep,
I will not delve the subsoil...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
You always read about it:
the plumber with the twelve children
who wins the Irish Sweepstakes.
From toilets to riches.
That story.
Or the nursemaid,
some luscious sweet from Denmark
who captures the oldest son's heart.
from diapers to Dior.
That story.
Or a milkman who serves the wealthy,
eggs, cream, butter, yogurt, milk,
the white truck like an ambulance
who goes into real estate
and makes a pile.
From homogenized to martinis at...Read more of this...
by
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I Alphonso live and learn,
Seeing nature go astern.
Things deteriorate in kind,
Lemons run to leaves and rind,
Meagre crop of figs and limes,
Shorter days and harder times.
Flowering April cools and dies
In the insufficient skies;
Imps at high Midsummer blot
Half the sun's disk with a spot;
'Twill not now avail to tan
Orange cheek, or skin of man:
Roses bleach, the goats are dry,
Lisbon quakes, the...Read more of this...
by
Francesco Petrarch
SONNET CCXX. Vive faville uscian de' duo bei lumi. A SMILING WELCOME, WHICH LAURA GAVE HIM UNEXPECTEDLY, ALMOST KILLS HIM WITH JOY. Live sparks were glistening from her twin bright eyes,So sweet on me whose lightning flashes beam'd,And softly from a feeling heart and wise,Of lofty eloquence a rich flood stream'd:Even...Read more of this...
by
Friedrich von Schiller
I.
A bridge of pearls its form uprears
High o'er a gray and misty sea;
E'en in a moment it appears,
And rises upwards giddily.
Beneath its arch can find a road
The loftiest vessel's mast most high,
Itself hath never borne a load,
And seems, when thou draw'st near, to fly.
It comes first with the stream, and goes
Soon as the watery flood is dried.
Where may be...Read more of this...
by
Richard Wilbur
Sidling upon the river, the white boat
Has volleyed with its cannon all the morning,
Shaken the shore towns like a Judgment warning,
Telling the palsied water its demand
That the crime come to the top again, and float,
That the sunk murder rise to the light and land.
Blam! In the noon's perfected brilliance burn
Brief blooms of flame, which soil away in smoke;
And down...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
1
TO think of time—of all that retrospection!
To think of to-day, and the ages continued henceforward!
Have you guess’d you yourself would not continue?
Have you dreaded these earth-beetles?
Have you fear’d the future would be nothing to you?
Is to-day nothing? Is the beginningless past nothing?
If the future is nothing, they are just as surely nothing.
To think...Read more of this...
by
Robert Browning
I.
Your ghost will walk, you lover of trees,
(If our loves remain)
In an English lane,
By a cornfield-side a-flutter with poppies.
Hark, those two in the hazel coppice---
A boy and a girl, if the good fates please,
Making love, say,---
The happier they!
Draw yourself up from the light of the moon,
And let them pass, as they will too soon,
With the bean-flowers' boon,
And the...Read more of this...
by
Richard Brautigan
My God, I heard this day,
That none doth build a stately habitation,
But he that means to dwell therein.
What house more stately hath there been,
Or can be, than is Man? to whose creation
All things are in decay.
For Man is ev'ry thing,
And more:
He is a tree, yet bears no fruit;
A beast, yet is,...Read more of this...
by
Confucius
I climbed the barren mountain,
And my gaze swept far and wide
For the red-lit eaves of my father's home,
And I fancied that he sighed:
My son has gone for a soldier,
For a soldier night and day;
But my son is wise, and may yet return,
...Read more of this...
by
Hilaire Belloc
Remote and ineffectual Don
That dared attack my Chesterton,
With that poor weapon, half-impelled,
Unlearnt, unsteady, hardly held,
Unworthy for a tilt with men--
Your quavering and corroded pen;
Don poor at Bed and worse at Table,
Don pinched, Don starved, Don miserable;
Don stuttering, Don with roving eyes,
Don nervous, Don of crudities;
Don clerical, Don ordinary,
Don self-absorbed and solitary;
Don here-and-there, Don epileptic;
Don puffed and empty, Don dyspeptic;
Don...Read more of this...
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