Famous Perishable Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Perishable poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous perishable poems. These examples illustrate what a famous perishable poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...m swept away.
Thy steadfast summit, heaven-allied
(Unlike life's little span),
Looks down a mentor on the pride
Of perishable man....Read more of this...
by
Campbell, Thomas
...the true
As much as pea and pea! it's devil's-game!
Your business is not to catch men with show,
With homage to the perishable clay,
But lift them over it, ignore it all,
Make them forget there's such a thing as flesh.
Your business is to paint the souls of men--
Man's soul, and it's a fire, smoke . . . no, it's not . . .
It's vapour done up like a new-born babe--
(In that shape when you die it leaves your mouth)
It's . . . well, what matters talking, it's the soul...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Robert
...this monotonous task
Of making violins?" or flung them down
To suit with hurling act well-hurled curse
At labor on such perishable stuff.
Hence neighbors in Cremona held him dull,
Called him a slave, a mill-horse, a machine.
Naldo, a painter of eclectic school,
Knowing all tricks of style at thirty-one,
And weary of them, while Antonio
At sixty-nine wrought placidly his best,
Making the violin you heard today -
Naldo would tease him oft to tell his aims.
"Perhaps thou hast s...Read more of this...
by
Eliot, George
...he gate
Sits watchful, and the angels fear
To see us tread so boldly here.
Meanwhile, my Eve, with flower and grass
Our perishable days we pass;
Far more the thorn observe - and see
How our enormous sins go free -
Nor less admire, beside the rose,
How far a little virtue goes....Read more of this...
by
Stevenson, Robert Louis
...it is only Thou who canst show a
way of safety. I will give my hand to none of those who
wish to lead me, for all are perishable, and only Thou
eternal....Read more of this...
by
Khayyam, Omar
...h, remembering (if a soul
Remembers) your befrenzied aspiration
To smear with certain ochres and some oil
A few more perishable ells of cloth,
And once or twice, to square your vanity,
Prove it was you alone that should achieve
A mortal eye—that may, no less, tomorrow
Show an immortal reason why today
Men see no more. And what’s a mortal eye
More than a mortal herring, who has eyes
As well as you? Why not paint herrings, Rembrandt?
Or if not herrings, why not a split...Read more of this...
by
Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...Since the world is perishable, I would devise some
scheme for it; I would think only of joy, or only of the
limpid wine. They say to me: Would God might make
thee renounce it! Nay, would that He might not give
such command, for if He gave it, I would not obey!...Read more of this...
by
Khayyam, Omar
...addled the wet fern of her hair
And made an exhibition of its coil,
Let the air at her leathery beauty.
Pash of tallow, perishable treasure:
Her broken nose is dark as a turf clod,
Her eyeholes blank as pools in the old workings.
Diodorus Siculus confessed
His gradual ease with the likes of this:
Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible
Beheaded girl, outstaring axe
And beatification, outstaring
What had begun to feel like reverence....Read more of this...
by
Heaney, Seamus
...
teatime fame and by
commuters' comforts? Not for these
the paper nautilus
constructs her thin glass shell.
Giving her perishable
souvenir of hope, a dull
white outside and smooth-
edged inner surface
glossy as the sea, the watchful
maker of it guards it
day and night; she scarcely
eats until the eggs are hatched.
Buried eight-fold in her eight
arms, for she is in
a sense a devil-
fish, her glass ram'shorn-cradled freight
is hid but is not crushed;
as Hercules, bitten
by a...Read more of this...
by
Moore, Marianne
...he human will.And yet, what fierce desire the fancy wingsTo gain a grasp of perishable things;Although one fleeting hour may scatter farThe fruit of many a year's corroding care;Those spacious regions where our fancies roam,Pain'd by the past, expecting ills to come,In some dread moment, by the fates assign'd,Read more of this...
by
Petrarch, Francesco
...every threshold I have crossed and every hand clasped Familial springtime was reborn
Keeping for itself and for me its perishable snow
Death and the betrothed
The future with five fingers clenched and letting go
My age always gave me
New reasons for living through others
For having the blood of man other's heart in mine
Oh the lucid fellow I was and that I am
Before the pallor of frail blind girls
Lovelier than the delicate worn moon so fair
By the reflection of l...Read more of this...
by
Eluard, Paul
...ing beside thee? We and our existences are really non-existence;
thou art the absolute Being which manifests the perishable. We all are lions, but lions on a banner:
because of the wind they are rushing
onward from moment to moment. Their onward rush is visible,
and the wind is unseen:
may that which is unseen not fail from us! Our wind whereby we are moved and our being are of thy gift;
our whole existence is from thy bringing into being....Read more of this...
by
Rumi, Jalal ad-Din Muhammad
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