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Famous Overwhelmed Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry
...farther off and purer than ourselves, we know not what, how we blend with, how we live our lives in, the unknown.
How overwhelmed we are in the presence of those hours of supreme existence; how the soul desires heavens in which to seek for new gods.
Oh! the torturing and wondrous joy and the daring hope of being one day, across death itself, the prey of these silent terrors....Read more of this...
by Verhaeren, Emile



...ose on the night, as the herds and the horses
Broke through their folds and fences, and madly rushed o'er the meadows.

Overwhelmed with the sight, yet speechless, the priest and the maiden
Gazed on the scene of terror that reddened and widened before them;
And as they turned at length to speak to their silent companion,
Lo! from his seat he had fallen, and stretched abroad on the sea-shore
Motionless lay his form, from which the soul had departed.
Slowly the priest uplifted ...Read more of this...
by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...Finite -- to fail, but infinite to Venture --
For the one ship that struts the shore
Many's the gallant -- overwhelmed Creature
Nodding in Navies nevermore --...Read more of this...
by Dickinson, Emily
...
Rejecting intermediate parts,
Horrors and falsities and wrongs;
Incapable master of all force,
Too vague idealist, overwhelmed
By an afflatus that persists.
For this, then, we endure brief lives,
The evanescent symmetries
From that meticulous potter's thumb....Read more of this...
by Stevens, Wallace
...oved from our midst and from our play, at times

overcomes us like a sense of that other
reality: yours, that we are so overwhelmed
and play our actual lives instead of the performance,
forgetting altogehter the applause....Read more of this...
by Rilke, Rainer Maria



...o having said, he thus to Eve in few. 
Say, Woman, what is this which thou hast done? 
To whom sad Eve, with shame nigh overwhelmed, 
Confessing soon, yet not before her Judge 
Bold or loquacious, thus abashed replied. 
The Serpent me beguiled, and I did eat. 
Which when the Lord God heard, without delay 
To judgement he proceeded on the accused 
Serpent, though brute; unable to transfer 
The guilt on him, who made him instrument 
Of mischief, and polluted from the end 
Of hi...Read more of this...
by Milton, John
...the floating vessel swum 
Uplifted, and secure with beaked prow 
Rode tilting o'er the waves; all dwellings else 
Flood overwhelmed, and them with all their pomp 
Deep under water rolled; sea covered sea, 
Sea without shore; and in their palaces, 
Where luxury late reigned, sea-monsters whelped 
And stabled; of mankind, so numerous late, 
All left, in one small bottom swum imbarked. 
How didst thou grieve then, Adam, to behold 
The end of all thy offspring, end so sad, 
Depop...Read more of this...
by Milton, John
...y sorrows known,
From God I sought relief;
In long complaints before his throne
I poured out all my grief.

My soul was overwhelmed with woes,
My heart began to break;
My God, who all my burden knows,
He knows the way I take.

On every side I cast mine eye,
And found my helpers gone;
While friends and strangers passed me by,
Neglected or unknown.

Then did I raise a louder cry,
And called thy mercy near,-
"Thou art my portion when I die;
Be thou my refuge here."

Lord, I am b...Read more of this...
by Watts, Isaac
...ound him with their grave-clothes on,
And this life done for them; but something else 
There was that foundered reason, overwhelmed it, 
And with a chilled, intuitive rebuff 
Beat back the self-cajoling sophistries 
That his half-tutored thought would half-project.

What was it, then? Had he become transformed 
And hardened through long watches and long grief 
Into a loveless, feelingless dead thing 
That brooded like a man, breathed like a man,— 
Did everything but ache? And...Read more of this...
by Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...red men
Dashed headlong, sword in hand;
But of that gallant band
Not one returned again. 

The sudden darkness of death
Overwhelmed them like the breath
And smoke of a furnace fire:
By the river's bank, and between
The rocks of the ravine,
They lay in their bloody attire. 

But the foemen fled in the night,
And Rain-in-the-Face, in his flight
Uplifted high in air
As a ghastly trophy, bore
The brave heart, that beat no more,
Of the White Chief with yellow hair. 

Whose was the...Read more of this...
by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...s me a slight
sensation. But who would dare to exist just for that?
You though who in the other's passion
grow until overwhelmed he begs you:
No more¡­ ; you who beneath his hands
swell with abundance like autumn grapes;
you who may disappear because the other has wholly
emerged: I am asking you about us. I know
you touch so blissfully because the caress preserves
because the place you so tenderly cover
does not vanish; because underneath it 
you feel pure duration...Read more of this...
by Rilke, Rainer Maria
...'s how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.

II

You who will come to the surface
From the flood that's overwhelmed us and drowned us all
Must think, when you speak of our weakness in times of darkness
That you've not had to face:

Days when we were used to changing countries
More often than shoes,
Through the war of the classes despairing
That there was only injustice and no outrage.

Even so we realised
Hatred of oppression still distorts the features,
Anger...Read more of this...
by Brecht, Bertolt
...t, until it
dryhumps the eardrum of the crossing guard.

Testosterone is a drug,
and they say No, No, No until
they are overwhelmed and punch
their buddy in the face for joy,

or make a joke about gravy and bottomless holes
to a middle-aged waitress who is gently
setting down the plate in front of them.

If they are grotesque, if
what they say and do is often nothing more
than a kind of psychopathic fart,

it is only because of the tractors,
the tractors in their blood,
revvi...Read more of this...
by Hoagland, Tony

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry