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Famous Pass Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Whitman, Walt
...erica brings builders, and brings its own styles. 

The immortal poets of Asia and Europe have done their work, and pass’d to other
 spheres, 
A work remains, the work of surpassing all they have done. 

America, curious toward foreign characters, stands by its own at all hazards,
Stands removed, spacious, composite, sound—initiates the true use of precedents, 
Does not repel them, or the past, or what they have produced under their forms, 
Takes the lesson with calmn...Read more of this...



by Wilde, Oscar
...s gilded prow
Back to the troubled waters of this shore
Where I am wrecked and stranded, even now
The chariot wheels of passion sweep too near,
Hence! Hence! I pass unto a life more barren, more austere.

More barren - ay, those arms will never lean
Down through the trellised vines and draw my soul
In sweet reluctance through the tangled green;
Some other head must wear that aureole,
For I am hers who loves not any man
Whose white and stainless bosom bears the sign Gorgon...Read more of this...

by Keats, John
...and the earth
Knows thee not, thus afflicted, for a God;
And ocean too, with all its solemn noise,
Has from thy sceptre pass'd; and all the air
Is emptied of thine hoary majesty.
Thy thunder, conscious of the new command,
Rumbles reluctant o'er our fallen house;
And thy sharp lightning in unpractised hands
Scorches and burns our once serene domain.
O aching time! O moments big as years!
All as ye pass swell out the monstrous truth,
And press it so upon our weary grief...Read more of this...

by Alighieri, Dante
...at fear, the while my wearied frame 
 Rested, and ever my heart's tossed lake became 
 More quiet. 
 Then from that pass released, which yet 
 With living feet had no man left, I set 
 My forward steps aslant the steep, that so, 
 My right foot still the lower, I climbed. 

 Below 
 No more I gazed. Around, a slope of sand 
 Was sterile of all growth on either hand, 
 Or moving life, a spotted pard except, 
 That yawning rose, and stretched, and purred and leapt 
...Read more of this...

by Byron, George (Lord)
...uickly seen, 
Whate'er he be, 'twas not what he had been: 
That brow in furrow'd lines had fix'd at last, 
And spake of passions, but of passion past; 
The pride, but not the fire, of early days, 
Coldness of mien, and carelessness of praise; 
A high demeanour, and a glance that took 
Their thoughts from others by a single look; 
And that sarcastic levity of tongue, 
The stinging of a heart the world hath stung, 
That darts in seeming playfulness around, 
And makes those feel...Read more of this...



by St Vincent Millay, Edna
...yours, not yours; to you she owes not breath,
Mother of Song, being sown of Zeus upon a dream of Death).
Fearing to pass unvisited some place
And later learn, too late, how all the while,
With her still face,
She had been standing there and seen me pass, without a smile,
I sought her even to the sagging board whereat
The stout immortals sat;
But such a laughter shook the mighty hall
No one could hear me say:
Had she been seen upon the Hill that day?
And no one knew at all...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...rgling by the
 ears
 and hair. 

3
O the fireman’s joys! 
I hear the alarm at dead of night,
I hear bells—shouts!—I pass the crowd—I run! 
The sight of the flames maddens me with pleasure. 

O the joy of the strong-brawn’d fighter, towering in the arena, in perfect condition,
 conscious of power, thirsting to meet his opponent. 

O the joy of that vast elemental sympathy which only the human Soul is capable of
 generating
 and emitting in steady and limitless floo...Read more of this...

by Frost, Robert
...e I know—to get you on to things
It wants to see how you will take, if backward
It’s from regret for something you have passed
And failed to see the good of. Never mind,
Things must expect to come in front of us
A many times—I don’t say just how many—
That varies with the things—before we see them.
One of the lies would make it out that nothing
Ever presents itself before us twice.
Where would we be at last if that were so?
Our very life depends on everything’s
Re...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...uzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine; 
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood
 and air through my lungs;
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore, and
 dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn; 
The sound of the belch’d words of my voice, words loos’d to the eddies
 of the wind; 
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms; 
The play of shine and shade on the trees as t...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...ouple,
The early market-man, the hearse, the moving of furniture into the town, the return back
 from
 the
 town, 
They pass—I also pass—anything passes—none can be interdicted; 
None but are accepted—none but are dear to me. 

3
You air that serves me with breath to speak! 
You objects that call from diffusion my meanings, and give them shape!
You light that wraps me and all things in delicate equable showers! 
You paths worn in the irregular hollows by the roadsides! 
I...Read more of this...

by Chesterton, G K
...ng the road to Frome.




BOOK I THE VISION OF THE KING


Before the gods that made the gods
Had seen their sunrise pass,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was cut out of the grass.

Before the gods that made the gods
Had drunk at dawn their fill,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was hoary on the hill.

Age beyond age on British land,
Aeons on aeons gone,
Was peace and war in western hills,
And the White Horse looked on.

For the White Horse knew ...Read more of this...

by Byron, George (Lord)
...s,
They do divide our being; they become
A portion of ourselves as of our time,
And look like heralds of eternity;
They pass like spirits of the past—they speak
Like sibyls of the future; they have power— 
The tyranny of pleasure and of pain;
They make us what we were not—what they will,
And shake us with the vision that's gone by,
The dread of vanished shadows—Are they so?
Is not the past all shadow?—What are they?
Creations of the mind?—The mind can make
Substances, and peo...Read more of this...

by Chaucer, Geoffrey
...n anguish and in woe,
Dwellen this Palamon, and eke Arcite,
For evermore, there may no gold them quite* *set free

Thus passed year by year, and day by day,
Till it fell ones in a morn of May
That Emily, that fairer was to seen
Than is the lily upon his stalke green,
And fresher than the May with flowers new
(For with the rose colour strove her hue;
I n'ot* which was the finer of them two), *know not
Ere it was day, as she was wont to do,
She was arisen, and all ready dight*,...Read more of this...

by Blake, William
...are necessary to
Human existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call Good &
Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason[.] Evil is the active
springing from Energy.
Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.

PLATE 4
The voice of the Devil


All Bibles or sacred codes. have been the causes of the
following Errors.

That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a
Soul.
That Energy. calld Evil. is alone from the Body.Read more of this...

by Carroll, Lewis
...Voice 


HE trilled a carol fresh and free,
He laughed aloud for very glee:
There came a breeze from off the sea: 

It passed athwart the glooming flat -
It fanned his forehead as he sat -
It lightly bore away his hat, 

All to the feet of one who stood
Like maid enchanted in a wood,
Frowning as darkly as she could. 

With huge umbrella, lank and brown,
Unerringly she pinned it down,
Right through the centre of the crown. 

Then, with an aspect cold and grim,
Regardl...Read more of this...

by Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...
From which a thousand climbers have before
"Fall'n as Napoleon fell."--I felt my cheek
Alter to see the great form pass away
Whose grasp had left the giant world so weak
That every pigmy kicked it as it lay--
And much I grieved to think how power & will
In opposition rule our mortal day--
And why God made irreconcilable
Good & the means of good; and for despair
I half disdained mine eye's desire to fill
With the spent vision of the times that were
And scarce have ceased ...Read more of this...

by Byron, George (Lord)
...ever where his household virtues, was neither a successful nor a patriot king, — inasmuch as several years of his reign passed in war with America and Ireland, to say nothing of the aggression upon France, — like all other exaggeration, necessarily begets opposition. In whatever manner he may be spoken of in this new 'Vision,' his public career will not be more favourably transmitted by history. Of his private virtues (although a little expense to the nation) there ca...Read more of this...

by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover; 
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
"Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over."
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.
 "This music crept by me upon the waters"
And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.
O City city, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public b...Read more of this...

by Plath, Sylvia
...,
Turning through my time, the suns and stars
Regarding me with attention.
The moon's concern is more personal:
She passes and repasses, luminous as a nurse.
Is she sorry for what will happen? I do not think so.
She is simply astonished at fertility.

When I walk out, I am a great event.
I do not have to think, or even rehearse.
What happens in me will happen without attention.
The pheasant stands on the hill;
He is arranging his brown feathers.Read more of this...

by Akhmatova, Anna
...sed for now
And muteness utter and divine?



x x x

In intimacy there exists a line
That can't be crossed by passion or love's art --
In awful silence lips melt into one
And out of love to pieces bursts the heart.

And friendship here is impotent, and years
Of happiness sublime in fire aglow,
When soul is free and does not hear
The dulling of sweet passion, long and slow.

Those who are striving toward it are in fever,
But those that reach it stru...Read more of this...

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Book: Reflection on the Important Things