Famous Ourselves Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Summer Day

by Lucy Maud Montgomery
 I 

The dawn laughs out on orient hills 
And dances with the diamond rills; 
The ambrosial wind but faintly stirs 
The silken, beaded gossamers; 
In the wide valleys, lone and fair, 
Lyrics are piped from limpid air, 
And, far above, the pine trees free 
Voice ancient lore of sky and sea. 
Come, let us fill our hearts straightway 
With...Read more of this...

Carmel Point

by Robinson Jeffers
 The extraordinary patience of things! 
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of surburban houses-
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads-
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all...Read more of this...

The Secret People

by G K Chesterton
 Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget;
For we are the people of England, that never have spoken yet.
There is many a fat farmer that drinks less cheerfully,
There is many a free French peasant who is richer and sadder than we.
There are no folk in the whole world so helpless or so wise.
There is hunger...Read more of this...

Duino Elegies: The Fourth Elegy

by Rainer Maria Rilke
 O trees of life, oh, what when winter comes?
We are not of one mind. Are not like birds
in unison migrating. And overtaken,
overdue, we thrust ourselves into the wind
and fall to earth into indifferent ponds.
Blossoming and withering we comprehend as one.
And somewhere lions roam, quite unaware,
in their magnificence, of any weaknesss.

But we, while wholly concentrating on one thing,
already feel the...Read more of this...

Mementos

by Charlotte Bronte
 ARRANGING long-locked drawers and shelves 
Of cabinets, shut up for years, 
What a strange task we've set ourselves ! 
How still the lonely room appears ! 
How strange this mass of ancient treasures, 
Mementos of past pains and pleasures; 
These volumes, clasped with costly stone, 
With print all faded, gilding gone; 

These fans of leaves, from Indian trees­ 
These...Read more of this...

The Trail Of Ninety-Eight

by Robert William Service
 Gold! We leapt from our benches. Gold! We sprang from our stools.
Gold! We wheeled in the furrow, fired with the faith of fools.
Fearless, unfound, unfitted, far from the night and the cold,
Heard we the clarion summons, followed the master-lure--Gold!

Men from the sands of the Sunland; men from the woods of the West;
Men from the farms and the cities, into...Read more of this...

The Bishop Orders His Tomb At Saint Praxeds Church

by Robert Browning
 Vanity, saith the preacher, vanity!
Draw round my bed: is Anselm keeping back?
Nephews -- sons mine -- ah God, I know not! Well --
She, men would have to be your mother once,
Old Gandolf envied me, so fair she was!
What's done is done, and she is dead beside,
Dead long ago, and I am Bishop since,
And as she died so must we...Read more of this...

Sarabande On Attaining The Age Of Seventy-Seven

by Anthony Hecht
 The harbingers are come. See, see their mark;
White is their colour; and behold my head.
 -- George Herbert

Long gone the smoke-and-pepper childhood smell
Of the smoldering immolation of the year,
Leaf-strewn in scattered grandeur where it fell,
Golden and poxed with frost, tarnished and sere.

And I myself have whitened in the weathers
Of heaped-up Januaries as they bequeath
The annual rings and wrongs that...Read more of this...

The Hosts

by Alan Seeger
 Purged, with the life they left, of all 
That makes life paltry and mean and small, 
In their new dedication charged 
With something heightened, enriched, enlarged, 
That lends a light to their lusty brows 
And a song to the rhythm of their tramping feet, 
These are the men that have taken vows, 
These are the hardy, the flower, the...Read more of this...

To The Right Honourable The Lady Penelope Dowager Of The Late Vis-Count Bayning

by William Strode
 Great Lady,


Humble partners of like griefe
In bringing Comfort may deserve beliefe,
Because they Feele and Feyne not: Thus we say
Unto Ourselves, Lord Bayning, though away,
Is still of Christ-Church; somewhat out of sight,
As when he travel'd, or did bid good night,
And was not seen long after; now he stands
Remov'd in Worlds, as heretofore in Lands;
But is not lost. The spight of...Read more of this...

Ourselves we do inter with sweet derision

by Emily Dickinson
 Ourselves we do inter with sweet derision.
The channel of the dust who once achieves
Invalidates the balm of that religion
That doubts as fervently as it believes....Read more of this...

What Are Big Girls Made Of?

by Marge Piercy
 The construction of a woman:
a woman is not made of flesh 
of bone and sinew 
belly and breasts, elbows and liver and toe. 
She is manufactured like a sports sedan. 
She is retooled, refitted and redesigned 
every decade. 
Cecile had been seduction itself in college. 
She wriggled through bars like a satin eel, 
her hips and ass promising, her...Read more of this...

Rehearsal to Ourselves

by Emily Dickinson
 Rehearsal to Ourselves
Of a Withdrawn Delight --
Affords a Bliss like Murder --
Omnipotent -- Acute --

We will not drop the Dirk --
Because We love the Wound
The Dirk Commemorate -- Itself
Remind Us that we died....Read more of this...

Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff

by Adrienne Rich
 The autumn feels slowed down,
summer still holds on here, even the light
seems to last longer than it should
or maybe I'm using it to the thin edge.
The moon rolls in the air. I didn't want this child.
You're the only one I've told.
I want a child maybe, someday, but not now.
Otto has a calm, complacent way
of following me with his eyes,...Read more of this...

Before The Flood

by W S Merwin
 Why did he promise me
that we would build ourselves
an ark all by ourselves
out in back of the house
on New York Avenue
in Union City New Jersey
to the singing of the streetcars
after the story
of Noah whom nobody
believed about the waters
that would rise over everything
when I told my father
I wanted us to build
an ark of our own there
in the back yard under
the...Read more of this...

The Revelation

by Robert William Service
 The same old sprint in the morning, boys, to the same old din and smut;
Chained all day to the same old desk, down in the same old rut;
Posting the same old greasy books, catching the same old train:
Oh, how will I manage to stick it all, if I ever get back again?

We've bidden good-bye to life in a cage,...Read more of this...

The End Of The Library

by Weldon Kees
 When the coal
Gave out, we began
Burning the books, one by one;
First the set
Of Bulwer-Lytton
And then the Walter Scott.
They gave a lot of warmth.
Toward the end, in
February, flames
Consumed the Greek
Tragedians and Baudelaire,
Proust, Robert Burton
And the Po-Chu-i. Ice
Thickened on the sills.
More for the sake of the cat,
We said, than for ourselves,
Who huddled, shivering,
Against the stove
All winter long....Read more of this...

Screw-Guns

by Rudyard Kipling
 Smokin' my pipe on the mountings, sniffin' the mornin' cool,
I walks in my old brown gaiters along o' my old brown mule,
With seventy gunners be'ind me, an' never a beggar forgets
It's only the pick of the Army that handles the dear little pets -- 'Tss! 'Tss!
 For you all love the screw-guns -- the screw-guns they all love you!
...Read more of this...

For my own Monument

by Matthew Prior
 AS doctors give physic by way of prevention, 
 Mat, alive and in health, of his tombstone took care; 
For delays are unsafe, and his pious intention 
 May haply be never fulfill'd by his heir. 

Then take Mat's word for it, the sculptor is paid; 
 That the figure is fine, pray believe your own eye; 
Yet credit...Read more of this...

We introduce ourselves

by Emily Dickinson
 We introduce ourselves
To Planets and to Flowers
But with ourselves
Have etiquettes
Embarrassments
And awes...Read more of this...

The Gift Outright

by Robert Frost
The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding...Read more of this...

We who give ourselves up to the will of wine offer

by Omar Khayyam
We who give ourselves up to the will of wine offer
with joy our souls in holocaust to the laughing lips of
the juice divine. Oh! rapturous sight! Our cup-bearer
holds in one hand the neck of the flask and in the other
the cup overflowing, as if inviting us to receive the
purest of the blood!...Read more of this...

The Spring Oracle

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 OH prophetic bird so bright,
Blossom-songster, cuckoo bight!
In the fairest time of year,
Dearest bird, oh! deign to hear
What a youthful pair would pray,
Do thou call, if hope they may:
Thy cuck-oo, thy cuck-oo.
Ever more cuck-oo, cuck-oo!

Hearest thou? A loving pair
Fain would to the altar fare;
Yes! a pair in happy youth,
Full of virtue, full of truth.
Is the hour not fix'd by fate?
Say,...Read more of this...

Ourselves were wed one summer -- dear --

by Emily Dickinson
 Ourselves were wed one summer -- dear --
Your Vision -- was in June --
And when Your little Lifetime failed,
I wearied -- too -- of mine --

And overtaken in the Dark --
Where You had put me down --
By Some one carrying a Light --
I -- too -- received the Sign.

'Tis true -- Our Futures different lay --
Your Cottage -- faced...Read more of this...

Cuba

by Paul Muldoon
 My eldest sister arrived home that morning
In her white muslin evening dress.
'Who the hell do you think you are
Running out to dances in next to nothing?
As though we hadn't enough bother
With the world at war, if not at an end.'
My father was pounding the breakfast-table. 

'Those Yankees were touch and go as it was—
If you'd heard Patton in Armagh—
But...Read more of this...

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