Famous Overshadowing Poems by Famous Poets

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

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In The Willow Shade

by Christina Rossetti
 I sat beneath a willow tree,
Where water falls and calls;
While fancies upon fancies solaced me,
Some true, and some were false.

Who set their heart upon a hope
That never comes to pass,
Droop in the end like fading heliotrope
The sun's wan looking-glass.

Who set their will upon a whim
Clung to through good and ill,
Are wrecked alike whether they sink or swim,
Or hit or...Read more of this...

A Fairy Tale

by Amy Lowell
 On winter nights beside the nursery fire
We read the fairy tale, while glowing coals
Builded its pictures. There before our eyes
We saw the vaulted hall of traceried stone
Uprear itself, the distant ceiling hung
With pendent stalactites like frozen vines;
And all along the walls at intervals,
Curled upwards into pillars, roses climbed,
And ramped and were confined, and clustered leaves
Divided where there peered a...Read more of this...

In the shadow of a broken house

by Laurence Binyon
 In the shadow of a broken house, 
Down a deserted street, 
Propt walls, cold hearths, and phantom stairs, 
And the silence of dead feet —
Locked wildly in one another's arms 
I saw two lovers meet.

And over that hearthless house aghast 
Rose from the mind's abyss 
Lost stars and ruined, peering moons, 
Worlds overshadowing this, —
Time's stony palace crumbled down...Read more of this...

Vergissmeinnicht

by Keith Douglas
 Three weeks gone and the combatants gone
returning over the nightmare ground
we found the place again, and found
the soldier sprawling in the sun.

The frowning barrel of his gun
overshadowing. As we came on
that day, he hit my tank with one
like the entry of a demon.

Look. Here in the gunpit spoil
the dishonoured picture of his girl
who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht.
in a copybook...Read more of this...

Hymn 60

by Isaac Watts
 The Virgin Mary's song.

Luke 1:46ff. 

Our souls shall magnify the Lord,
In God the Savior we rejoice:
While we repeat the Virgin's song,
May the same Spirit tune our voice!

[The Highest saw her low estate,
And mighty things his hand hath done:
His overshadowing power and grace
Makes her the mother of his Son.

Let ev'ry nation call her blest,
And endless years prolong her fame;
But God...Read more of this...

Epipsychidion (excerpt)

by Percy Bysshe Shelley
 Emily, 
A ship is floating in the harbour now,
A wind is hovering o'er the mountain's brow;
There is a path on the sea's azure floor,
No keel has ever plough'd that path before;
The halcyons brood around the foamless isles;
The treacherous Ocean has forsworn its wiles;
The merry mariners are bold and free:
Say, my heart's sister, wilt thou sail with me?
Our bark is...Read more of this...

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