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Famous Ordeal Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Frost, Robert
...ad four hours to wait at Woodsville Junction 
After eleven o'clock at night. Too tired 
To think of sitting such an ordeal out, 
He turned to the hotel to find a bed. 
"No room," the night clerk said. "Unless----" 
Woodsville's a place of shrieks and wandering lamps 
And cars that shook and rattle--and one hotel. 
"You say 'unless.'" 
"Unless you wouldn't mind 
Sharing a room with someone else." 
"Who is it?" 
"A man." 
"So I should hope. What ...Read more of this...



by Bowers, Edgar
...go away
From home that spring to have her child with strangers,
Sustained her, till the vanished boy next door
And her ordeal seemed fiction, and the true
Her mother’s firm insistence she was the mother
And the neighbors’ acquiescence. So she taught school,
Walking a mile each way to ride the street car—
First books of the Aeneid known by heart,
French, and the French Club Wednesday afternoon;
Then summer replacement typist in an office,
Her sister’s family moving in wit...Read more of this...

by Russell, George William
...LOVE and pity are pleading with me this hour.
 What is this voice that stays me forbidding to yield,
Offering beauty, love, and immortal power,
 Æons away in some far-off heavenly field?


Though I obey thee, Immortal, my heart is sore.
 Though love be withdrawn for love it bitterly grieves:
Pity withheld in the breast makes sorrow more.
 Oh th...Read more of this...

by Boland, Eavan
...are mortal.
And a time to choose between them.
I have chosen:
out of myth in history I move to be
part of that ordeal
who darkness is
only now reaching me from those fields,
those rivers, those roads clotted as
firmaments with the dead.
How slowly they die
as we kneel beside them, whisper in their ear.
And we are too late. We are always too late....Read more of this...

by Boland, Eavan
...ked down at ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in

1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads to build.

Where they died, there the road ended

and ends still and when I take down
the map of this island, it is never so
I can say here is
the masterful, the apt rendering of
the spherical as flat, nor
an ingenious design which persuades a curve
int...Read more of this...



by Moure, Erin
...demurred?
Whose wall shored up became
houses?
Whose "will"?

Whose sympathetic concatenation? Whose picture
withstood "ordeal"?
Who caressed "that tiger"?
Whose laugh at an airport called forth? Whose ground
shifted?...Read more of this...

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