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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Mary

by Edgar Bowers
 The angel of self-discipline, her guardian
Since she first knew and had to 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...Read more of this...

Outside History

by Eavan Boland
 These are outsiders, always. These stars—
these iron inklings of an Irish January,
whose light happened
thousands of years before
our pain did; they are, they have always been
outside history.
They keep their distance. Under them remains
a place where you found
you were human, and
a landscape in which you know you are mortal.
And a time to choose between them.
I have chosen:
out of myth in history...Read more of this...

Ordeal

by George William Russell
 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 Though love be withdrawn for love it bitterly grieves: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 that the heart...Read more of this...

That the Science of Cartography Is Limited

by Eavan Boland
 —and not simply by the fact that this shading of
forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,
the gloom of cypresses,
is what I wish to prove.

When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.

Look down you said: this was once a famine road.

I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone...Read more of this...

A Hundred Collars

by Robert Frost
 Lancaster bore him--such a little town, 
Such a great man. It doesn't see him often 
Of late years, though he keeps the old homestead 
And sends the children down there with their mother 
To run wild in the summer--a little wild. 
Sometimes he joins them for a day or two 
And sees old friends he somehow can't get near....Read more of this...

The Cold

by Erin Moure
 There was a cold
In which

A line of water across the chest risen
(dream)

Impetuate, or
Impetuates

Orthograph you cherish, a hand her
Of doubt importance

Her imbroglio the winnowing of ever
Does establish

An imbroglio, ever
she does repeatedly declare

to no cold end
Admonish wit, at wit's end, where "wit" is

***

The cold of which
her azul gaze impart a stuttered pool

Memoria address me here (green)

Echolalic fear
Her arm or name in...Read more of this...

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