Famous Plato Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Evening Hawk

by Robert Penn Warren
 From plane of light to plane, wings dipping through
Geometries and orchids that the sunset builds,
Out of the peak's black angularity of shadow, riding
The last tumultuous avalanche of
Light above pines and the guttural gorge,
The hawk comes.
His wing
Scythes down another day, his motion 
Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear
The crashless fall of stalks of Time.

The head of each stalk...Read more of this...

The Naming Of Cats

by T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
 The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
First of all, there's the name that the family use daily,
Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James,
Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey--
All...Read more of this...

Judson Stoddard

by Edgar Lee Masters
 On a mountain top above the clouds
That streamed like a sea below me
I said that peak is the thought of Budda,
And that one is the prayer of Jesus,
And this one is the dream of Plato,
And that one there the song of Dante,
And this is Kant and this is Newton,
And this is Milton and this is Shakespeare,
And this the hope...Read more of this...

Ode To The Johns Hopkins University

by Sidney Lanier
 How tall among her sisters, and how fair, --
How grave beyond her youth, yet debonair
As dawn, 'mid wrinkled Matres of old lands
Our youngest Alma Mater modest stands!
In four brief cycles round the punctual sun
Has she, old Learning's latest daughter, won
This grace, this stature, and this fruitful fame.
Howbeit she was born
Unnoised as any stealing summer morn.
From far the sages saw,...Read more of this...

Variations of Greek Themes

by Edwin Arlington Robinson
 I
A HAPPY MAN
(Carphyllides)

When these graven lines you see, 
Traveler, do not pity me; 
Though I be among the dead, 
Let no mournful word be said. 

Children that I leave behind,
And their children, all were kind; 
Near to them and to my wife, 
I was happy all my life. 

My three sons I married right, 
And their sons I rocked...Read more of this...

Base of all Metaphysics The

by Walt Whitman
 AND now, gentlemen, 
A word I give to remain in your memories and minds, 
As base, and finale too, for all metaphysics. 

(So, to the students, the old professor, 
At the close of his crowded course.)

Having studied the new and antique, the Greek and Germanic systems, 
Kant having studied and stated—Fichte and Schelling and Hegel, 
Stated the lore of...Read more of this...

Answered

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
 Good-bye – Yes, I am going,
Sudden? Well, you are right.
But a startling truth came home to me
With sudden force last night.
What is it? shall I tell you? –
Nay, that is why I go.
I am running away from the battlefield,
Turning my back on the foe.
Riddles? You think me cruel!
Have you not been most kind?
Why, when you question me like that,
What...Read more of this...

The Song of Los

by William Blake
 AFRICA 

I will sing you a song of Los. the Eternal Prophet: 
He sung it to four harps at the tables of Eternity. 
In heart-formed Africa. 
Urizen faded! Ariston shudderd! 
And thus the Song began 

Adam stood in the garden of Eden: 
And Noah on the mountains of Ararat; 
They saw Urizen give his Laws to the Nations 
By...Read more of this...

Shakespeare And Cervantes

by Robert William Service
 Obit 23rd April 1616

Is it not strange that on this common date,
Two titans of their age, aye of all Time,
Together should renounce this mortal state,
And rise like gods, unsullied and sublime?
Should mutually render up the ghost,
And hand n hand join Jove's celestial host?

What wondrous welcome from the scribes on high!
Homer and Virgil would be waiting there;
Plato and Aristotle standing...Read more of this...

304. Song—I Murder hate

by Robert Burns
 I MURDER hate by flood or field,
 Tho’ glory’s name may screen us;
In wars at home I’ll spend my blood—
 Life-giving wars of Venus.
The deities that I adore
 Are social Peace and Plenty;
I’m better pleas’d to make one more,
 Than be the death of twenty.


I would not die like Socrates,
 For all the fuss of Plato;
Nor would I with...Read more of this...

Echoes From the Greek Mythology

by Henry Van Dyke
 I - STARLIGHT 

With two bright eyes, my star, my love, 
Thou lookest on the stars above: 
Ah, would that I the heaven might be
With a million eyes to look on thee. 

Plato. 


II - ROSELEAF 

A little while the rose, 
And after that the thorn; 
An hour of dewy morn, 
And then the glamour goes. 
Ah, love in...Read more of this...

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...

Evolutionary Hymn

by C S Lewis
 Lead us, Evolution, lead us
Up the future's endless stair;
Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us.
For stagnation is despair:
Groping, guessing, yet progressing,
Lead us nobody knows where.

Wrong or justice, joy or sorrow,
In the present what are they
while there's always jam-tomorrow,
While we tread the onward way?
Never knowing where we're going,
We can never go astray.

To whatever variation
Our posterity may turn
Hairy, squashy, or...Read more of this...

Entanglements

by Barry Tebb
 Why is it that in dreams I have visited -

As teacher or pupil - almost every college and school

In our once so green and pleasant land?

Hardly a subject from art to anthropology I have not

In dream seminar or floating spinning classroom

Studied or tried my prentice hand at, or learned

At the sandalled feet of some guru; as this minute

I returned...Read more of this...

An Invitation

by Thomas Blackburn
 Holding with shaking hands a letter from some
Official – high up he says in the Ministry,
I note that I am invited to Birmingham,
There pedagogues to address for a decent fee.
'We like to meet,' he goes on, 'men eminent
In the field of letters each year,' and that's well put,
Though I find his words not wholly relevant
To this red-eyed fellow whose...Read more of this...

An Ancient To Ancients

by Thomas Hardy
 Where once we danced, where once we sang, 
Gentlemen, 
The floors are sunken, cobwebs hang, 
And cracks creep; worms have fed upon 
The doors. Yea, sprightlier times were then 
Than now, with harps and tabrets gone, 
Gentlemen! 

Where once we rowed, where once we sailed, 
Gentlemen, 
And damsels took the tiller, veiled 
Against too strong a stare (God wot...Read more of this...

Maidenhair

by Michael Field
Plato of the clear, dreaming eye and brave
Imaginings, conceived, withdrawn from light,
The hollow of man's heart even as a cave.
With century-slow dropping stalactite
My heart was a dripping tedious in despair.
But yesterday, awhile before I slept:
I wake to find it live with maidenhair
And mosses to the spiky pendants crept.
Great prodigies there are--Johovah's flood
Widening the margin of the Red Sea shore,--
Great marvel...Read more of this...

A precious -- mouldering pleasure -- tis

by Emily Dickinson
 A precious -- mouldering pleasure -- 'tis --
To meet an Antique Book --
In just the Dress his Century wore --
A privilege -- I think --

His venerable Hand to take --
And warming in our own --
A passage back -- or two -- to make --
To Times when he -- was young --

His quaint opinions -- to inspect --
His thought to...Read more of this...

De Amicitiis

by Eugene Field
 Though care and strife
Elsewhere be rife,
Upon my word I do not heed 'em;
In bed I lie
With books hard by,
And with increasing zest I read 'em.

Propped up in bed,
So much I've read
Of musty tomes that I've a headful
Of tales and rhymes
Of ancient times,
Which, wife declares, are "simply dreadful!"

They give me joy
Without alloy;
And isn't that what books are made for?
And yet--and...Read more of this...

Fuck Me

by Maggie Estep
 **** ME
I'm all screwed up so
**** ME.

**** ME
and take out the garbage
feed the cat and **** ME
you can do it, I know you can.

**** ME
and theorize about
Sado Masochism's relationship
to classical philosophy
tell me how this stimulates
the fabric of most human relationships,
I love that kind of pointless intellectualism
so do it again and
**** ME.

Stop being logical
stop contemplating
the origins of evil
and the beauty...Read more of this...

The Delphic Oracle Upon Plotinus

by William Butler Yeats
 Behold that great Plotinus swim,
Buffeted by such seas;
Bland Rhadamanthus beckons him,
But the Golden Race looks dim,
Salt blood blocks his eyes.
Scattered on the level grass
Or winding through the grove
plato there and Minos pass,
There stately Pythagoras
And all the choir of Love....Read more of this...

To Baynard Taylor

by Sidney Lanier
 To range, deep-wrapt, along a heavenly height,
O'erseeing all that man but undersees;
To loiter down lone alleys of delight,
And hear the beating of the hearts of trees,
And think the thoughts that lilies speak in white
By greenwood pools and pleasant passages;

With healthy dreams a-dream in flesh and soul,
To pace, in mighty meditations drawn,
From out the forest to the open knoll
Where much...Read more of this...

Huddersfield - The Second Poetry Capital Of England

by Barry Tebb
 It brings to mind Swift leaving a fortune to Dublin

‘For the founding of a lunatic asylum - no place needs it more’.

The breathing beauty of the moors and cheap accommodation

Drew me but the total barbarity of the town stopped me from

Writing a single line: from the hideous facade of its railway

Station - Betjeman must have been drunk or mad...Read more of this...

They Should Have Provided

by Constantine P Cavafy
 I have almost been reduced to a homeless pauper.
This fatal city, Antioch,
has consumed all my money;
this fatal city with its expensive life.

But I am young and in excellent health.
My command of Greek is superb
(I know all there is about Aristotle, Plato;
orators, poets, you name it.)
I have an idea of military affairs,
and have friends among the mercenary chiefs.
I am on...Read more of this...

The Man With The Hoe

by Edwin Markham
 BOWED by the weight of centuries he leans 
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, 
The emptiness of ages in his face, 
And on his back the burden of the world. 
Who made him dead to rapture and despair, 
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes, 
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox? 
Who loosened...Read more of this...

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