Famous Pillars Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Il Penseroso

by John Milton
 Hence, vain deluding Joys,
............The brood of Folly without father bred!
How little you bested
............Or fill the fixed mind with all your toys!
Dwell in some idle brain,
............And fancies fond with gaudy shapes possess,
As thick and numberless
............As the gay motes that people the sun-beams,
Or likest hovering dreams,
............The fickle pensioners of Morpheus' train.
But, hail! thou Goddess sage and holy!
Hail, divinest Melancholy!
Whose saintly visage...Read more of this...

A Panegyric To Sir Lewis Pemberton

by Robert Herrick
 Till I shall come again, let this suffice,
I send my salt, my sacrifice
To thee, thy lady, younglings, and as far
As to thy Genius and thy Lar;
To the worn threshold, porch, hall, parlour, kitchen,
The fat-fed smoking temple, which in
The wholesome savour of thy mighty chines,
Invites to supper him who dines:
Where laden spits, warp'd with large ribs of beef,
Not represent, but...Read more of this...

While The Bannock Bakes

by Robert William Service
 Light up your pipe again, old chum, and sit awhile with me;
I've got to watch the bannock bake -- how restful is the air!
You'd little think that we were somewhere north of Sixty-three,
Though where I don't exactly know, and don't precisely care.
The man-size mountains palisade us round on every side;
The river is a-flop with fish, and ripples silver-clear;
The midnight...Read more of this...

Mutability

by Edmund Spenser
 When I bethink me on that speech whilere,
Of Mutability, and well it weigh:
Me seems,that though she all unworthy were
Of the Heav'ns Rule; yet very sooth to say,
In all things else she bears the greatest sway.
Which makes me loathe this state of life so tickle,
And love of things so vain to cast away;
Whose flow'ring pride, so fading and so fickle,
Short...Read more of this...

To Penshurst

by Ben Jonson
  II. — TO PENSHURST.                Thou hast no lantern whereof tales are told ; Or stair, or courts ;  but stand'st an ancient pile, And these grudg'd at, art reverenced the while. Thou joy'st in better marks, of soil, of air, Of wood, of water ;  therein thou art fair. Thou hast thy walks for health, as well as sport :...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...

The Skies

by William Cullen Bryant
 Ay! gloriously thou standest there, 
Beautiful, boundless firmament! 
That swelling wide o'er earth and air, 
And round the horizon bent, 
With thy bright vault, and sapphire wall, 
Dost overhang and circle all. 

Far, far below thee, tall old trees 
Arise, and piles built up of old, 
And hills, whose ancient summits freeze, 
In the fierce light and cold. 
The...Read more of this...

The Expatriates

by Anne Sexton
 My dear, it was a moment
to clutch for a moment
so that you may believe in it
and believing is the act of love, I think,
even in the telling, wherever it went.

In the false New England forest
where the misplanted Norwegian trees
refused to root, their thick synthetic
roots barging out of the dirt to work on the air,
we held hands and walked on...Read more of this...

I Saw a Chapel

by William Blake
 I saw a chapel all of gold 
That none did dare to enter in,
And many weeping stood without,
Weeping, mourning, worshipping.

I saw a serpent rise between
The white pillars of the door,
And he forc'd and forc'd and forc'd,
Down the golden hinges tore.

And along the pavement sweet,
Set with pearls and rubies bright,
All his slimy length he drew
Till upon the altar white

Vomiting his...Read more of this...

To Winter

by William Blake
 O Winter! bar thine adamantine doors:
The north is thine; there hast thou built thy dark
Deep-founded habitation. Shake not thy roofs,
Nor bend thy pillars with thine iron car.'
He hears me not, but o'er the yawning deep
Rides heavy; his storms are unchain'd, sheath?d
In ribb?d steel; I dare not lift mine eyes,
For he hath rear'd his sceptre o'er the world.

Lo! now the...Read more of this...

The Nile

by James Henry Leigh Hunt
 It flows through old hushed Egypt and its sands, 
Like some grave mighty thought threading a dream, 
And times and things, as in that vision, seem 
Keeping along it their eternal stands,-- 
Caves, pillars, pyramids, the shepherd bands 
That roamed through the young world, the glory extreme 
Of high Sesostris, and that southern beam, 
The laughing queen that caught...Read more of this...

Psalm 119 part 5

by Isaac Watts
 Delight in Scripture; or, The word of God dwelling in us.

ver. 97 

O how I love thy holy law!
'Tis daily my delight;
And thence my meditations draw
Divine advice by night.

ver. 148 

My waking eyes prevent the day
To meditate thy word;
My soul with longing melts away
To hear thy gospel, Lord.

ver. 3,13,54 

How doth thy word my heart engage!
How well employ my...Read more of this...

Summer Wind

by William Cullen Bryant
 It is a sultry day; the sun has drank 
The dew that lay upon the morning grass, 
There is no rustling in the lofty elm 
That canopies my dwelling, and its shade 
Scarce cools me. All is silent, save the faint 
And interrupted murmur of the bee, 
Settling on the sick flowers, and then again 
Instantly on the wing....Read more of this...

The Sharks Parlor

by James Dickey
 Memory: I can take my head and strike it on a wall on Cumberland Island 
Where the night tide came crawling under the stairs came up the first 
Two or three steps and the cottage stood on poles all night 
With the sea sprawled under it as we dreamed of the great fin circling 
Under the bedroom floor. In...Read more of this...

The Cathedral of Rheims

by Joyce Kilmer
 (From the French of Emile Verhaeren)

He who walks through the meadows of Champagne
At noon in Fall, when leaves like gold appear,
Sees it draw near
Like some great mountain set upon the plain,
From radiant dawn until the close of day,
Nearer it grows
To him who goes
Across the country. When tall towers lay
Their shadowy pall
Upon his way,
He enters, where
The solid stone is hollowed...Read more of this...

Come down O Maid

by Alfred Lord Tennyson
 COME down, O maid, from yonder mountain height: 
What pleasure lives in height (the shepherd sang), 
In height and cold, the splendour of the hills? 
But cease to move so near the Heavens, and cease 
To glide a sunbeam by the blasted Pine, 
To sit a star upon the sparkling spire; 
And come, for Love is of the valley,...Read more of this...

A Thought or Two on Reading Pomfrets

by James Henry Leigh Hunt
 I have been reading Pomfret's "Choice" this spring, 
A pretty kind of--sort of--kind of thing, 
Not much a verse, and poem none at all, 
Yet, as they say, extremely natural. 
And yet I know not. There's an art in pies, 
In raising crusts as well as galleries; 
And he's the poet, more or less, who knows 
The charm that...Read more of this...

Baile And Aillinn

by William Butler Yeats
 ARGUMENT. Baile and Aillinn were lovers, but Aengus, the
Master of Love, wishing them to he happy in his own land
among the dead, told to each a story of the other's death, so
that their hearts were broken and they died.

 I hardly hear the curlew cry,
 Nor thegrey rush when the wind is high,
 Before my thoughts begin to run
...Read more of this...

Transformations

by Rg Gregory
 WHAT miracle was it that made this grey Rathgar
Seem holy earth, a leaping-place from star to star?
I know I strode along grey streets disconsolate,
Seeing nowhere a glimmer of the Glittering Gate,
My vision baffled amid many dreams, for still
The airy walls rose up in fabulous hill on hill.
The stars were fortresses upon the dizzy slope
And one and all were unassailable...Read more of this...

The Revolutionary

by D. H. Lawrence
 Look at them standing there in authority 
The pale-faces, 
As if it could have any effect any more. 

Pale-face authority,
Caryatids, 
Pillars of white bronze standing rigid, lest the skies fall. 

What a job they've got to keep it up. 
Their poor, idealist foreheads naked capitals 
To the entablature of clouded heaven. 

When the skies are going to fall, fall...Read more of this...

The Two Kings

by William Butler Yeats
 King Eochaid came at sundown to a wood
Westward of Tara. Hurrying to his queen
He had outridden his war-wasted men
That with empounded cattle trod the mire,
And where beech-trees had mixed a pale green light
With the ground-ivy's blue, he saw a stag
Whiter than curds, its eyes the tint of the sea.
Because it stood upon his path and seemed
More hands in height...Read more of this...

Any Woman

by Katharine Tynan
 I am the pillars of the house;
The keystone of the arch am I.
Take me away, and roof and wall
Would fall to ruin me utterly.

I am the fire upon the hearth,
I am the light of the good sun,
I am the heat that warms the earth,
Which else were colder than a stone.

At me the children warm their hands;
I am their light...Read more of this...

Cities

by Hilda Doolittle
 Can we believe -- by an effort 
comfort our hearts: 
it is not waste all this, 
not placed here in disgust, 
street after street, 
each patterned alike, 
no grace to lighten 
a single house of the hundred 
crowded into one garden-space. 

Crowded -- can we believe, 
not in utter disgust, 
in ironical play -- 
but the maker of cities...Read more of this...

Inside Ayers Rock

by Les Murray
 Inside Ayers Rock is lit
with paired fluorescent lights
on steel pillars supporting the ceiling
of haze-blue marquee cloth
high above the non-slip pavers.
Curving around the cafeteria
throughout vast inner space
is a Milky way of plastic chairs
in foursomes around tables
all the way to the truck drivers' enclave.
Dusted coolabah trees grow to the ceiling,
TVs talk in gassy colours, and
round the walls are Outback shop fronts:
the...Read more of this...

Fragment

by Edwin Arlington Robinson
 Faint white pillars that seem to fade 
As you look from here are the first one sees 
Of his house where it hides and dies in a shade 
Of beeches and oaks and hickory trees. 
Now many a man, given woods like these, 
And a house like that, and the Briony gold, 
Would have said, "There are still some...Read more of this...

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