Famous Palpitating Poems by Famous Poets

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

See also:

Old And New

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
 Long have the poets vaunted, in their lays, 
Old times, old loves, old friendships, and old wine
Why should the old monopolise all praise? 
Then let the new claim mine.

Give me strong new friends, when the old prove weak, 
Or fail me in my darkest hour of need; 
Why perish with the ship that springs a leak, 
Or lean upon...Read more of this...

Gentleman Alone

by Pablo Neruda
 The young maricones and the horny muchachas,
The big fat widows delirious from insomnia,
The young wives thirty hours' pregnant,
And the hoarse tomcats that cross my garden at night,
Like a collar of palpitating sexual oysters
Surround my solitary home,
Enemies of my soul,
Conspirators in pajamas
Who exchange deep kisses for passwords.
Radiant summer brings out the lovers
In melancholy regiments,
Fat and thin and happy and sad...Read more of this...

The Sleep-Worker

by Thomas Hardy
 When wilt thou wake, O Mother, wake and see - 
As one who, held in trance, has laboured long 
By vacant rote and prepossession strong - 
The coils that thou hast wrought unwittingly; 

Wherein have place, unrealized by thee, 
Fair growths, foul cankers, right enmeshed with wrong, 
Strange orchestras of victim-shriek and song, 
And curious blends of ache and...Read more of this...

Dream-Confused

by D. H. Lawrence
      Is that the moon
At the window so big and red?
No one in the room,
No one near the bed----?

      Listen, her shoon
Palpitating down the stair?
--Or a beat of wings at the window there?

      A moment ago
She kissed me warm on the mouth,
The very moon in...Read more of this...

Doctors

by Anne Sexton
 They work with herbs
and penicillin
They work with gentleness
and the scalpel.
They dig out the cancer,
close an incision
and say a prayer
to the poverty of the skin.
They are not Gods
though they would like to be;
they are only a human
trying to fix up a human.
Many humans die.
They die like the tender,
palpitating berries
in November.
But all along the doctors remember:
First do no harm.
They would kiss...Read more of this...

The Alien Boy

by Mary Darby Robinson
 'Twas on a Mountain, near the Western Main
An ALIEN dwelt. A solitary Hut
Built on a jutting crag, o'erhung with weeds,
Mark'd the poor Exile's home. Full ten long years
The melancholy wretch had liv'd unseen
By all, save HENRY, a lov'd, little Son
The partner of his sorrows. On the day
When Persecution, in the sainted guise
Of Liberty, spread wide its venom'd pow'r,
The brave,...Read more of this...

Submergence

by D. H. Lawrence
 When along the pavement,
Palpitating flames of life, 
People flicker round me, 
I forget my bereavement, 
The gap in the great constellation,
The place where a star used to be.

Nay, though the pole-star 
Is blown out like a candle, 
And all the heavens are wandering in disarray,
Yet when pleiads of people are
Deployed around me, and I see 
The street’s long outstretched...Read more of this...

The Bells

by Edgar Allan Poe
 I

Hear the sledges with the bells-
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells-
From the jingling and...Read more of this...

Sonnet XLIII: While From the Dizzy Precipice

by Mary Darby Robinson
 While from the dizzy precipice I gaze,
The world receding from my pensive eyes,
High o'er my head the tyrant eagle flies,
Cloth'd in the sinking sun's transcendent blaze!
The meek-ey'd moon, 'midst clouds of amber plays
As o'er the purpling plains of light she hies,
Till the last stream of living lustre dies,
And the cool concave owns her temper'd rays!
So shall this glowing, palpitating...Read more of this...

I have never seen Volcanoes

by Emily Dickinson
 I have never seen "Volcanoes" --
But, when Travellers tell
How those old -- phlegmatic mountains
Usually so still --

Bear within -- appalling Ordnance,
Fire, and smoke, and gun,
Taking Villages for breakfast,
And appalling Men --

If the stillness is Volcanic
In the human face
When upon a pain Titanic
Features keep their place --

If at length the smouldering anguish
Will not overcome --
And the palpitating Vineyard
In the dust,...Read more of this...

The Shroud of Color

by Countee Cullen
 "Lord, being dark," I said, "I cannot bear
The further touch of earth, the scented air;
Lord, being dark, forewilled to that despair
My color shrouds me in, I am as dirt
Beneath my brother's heel; there is a hurt
In all the simple joys which to a child
Are sweet; they are contaminate, defiled
By truths of wrongs the childish vision fails
To see; too great...Read more of this...

Hiawathas Fasting

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 You shall hear how Hiawatha 
Prayed and fasted in the forest, 
Not for greater skill in hunting, 
Not for greater craft in fishing, 
Not for triumphs in the battle, 
And renown among the warriors, 
But for profit of the people, 
For advantage of the nations.
First he built a lodge for fasting, 
Built a wigwam in the forest, 
By the...Read more of this...

Lovers Gifts XLIV: Where Is Heaven

by Rabindranath Tagore
 Where is heaven? you ask me, my child,-the sages tell us it is
beyond the limits of birth and death, unswayed by the rhythm of day
and night; it is not of the earth.
But your poet knows that its eternal hunger is for time and
space, and it strives evermore to be born in the fruitful dust.
Heaven is fulfilled in your sweet...Read more of this...

Facility

by Robert William Service
 So easy 'tis to make a rhyme,
That did the world but know it,
Your coachman might Parnassus climb,
Your butler be a poet.

Then, oh, how charming it would be
If, when in haste hysteric
You called the page, you learned that he
Was grappling with a lyric.

Or else what rapture it would yield,
When cook sent up the salad,
To find within its depths concealed
A touching...Read more of this...

Dont forget to view our wonderful member Palpitating poems.

Get a Premium Membership
Turn off ads, get more exposure for your poetry, and get more features with a Premium Membership.
Book: Diverse Voices: The Poetry of Human Rights and the Pursuit of Peace