Famous Platonic Poems by Famous Poets

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

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To E

by Amy Levy
 The mountains in fantastic lines
Sweep, blue-white, to the sky, which shines
Blue as blue gems; athwart the pines
The lake gleams blue.

We three were here, three years gone by;
Our Poet, with fine-frenzied eye,
You, stepped in learned lore, and I,
A poet too.

Our Poet brought us books and flowers,
He read us Faust; he talked for hours
Philosophy (sad Schopenhauer's),
Beneath the trees:

And do you mind...Read more of this...

The Gift

by Barry Tebb
 We were three weeks

Into term, Sheila,

When you came

Through the classroom door;

Forty-four children

Bent over books,

Copying Roethke’s

‘The Lost Son’.

You wrote your

First poem on the ‘Moses’

Of Michelangelo.

Words cut like stone.

I taught you Greek

But your painting of

‘The Essence of the Rose’

Was pure Platonic form.

You drew the masks

Of Comedy and Tragedy

In perfect harmony.

Having seen neither;

So Socrates was right.

Those who have the Spirit’s gift

Will one...Read more of this...

Painted Head

by John Crowe Ransom
 By dark severance the apparition head 
Smiles from the air a capital on no 
Column or a Platonic perhaps head 
On a canvas sky depending from nothing; 

Stirs up an old illusion of grandeur 
By tickling the instinct of heads to be 
Absolute and to try decapitation 
And to play truant from the body bush; 

But too happy and...Read more of this...

The Platonic Lady

by John Wilmot
 I could love thee till I die,
Would'st thou love me modestly,
And ne'er press, whilst I live,
For more than willingly I would give:
Which should sufficient be to prove
I'd understand the art of love.

I hate the thing is called enjoyment:
Besides it is a dull employment,
It cuts off all that's life and fire
From that which may be termed desire;
Just like the bee...Read more of this...

All Souls Night

by William Butler Yeats
 Epilogue to "A Vision'

MIDNIGHT has come, and the great Christ Church Bell
And may a lesser bell sound through the room;
And it is All Souls' Night,
And two long glasses brimmed with muscatel
Bubble upon the table. A ghost may come;
For it is a ghost's right,
His element is so fine
Being sharpened by his death,
To drink from the wine-breath
While our gross palates drink...Read more of this...

Platonic

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
 I knew it the first of the summer, 
I knew it the same at the end, 
That you and your love were plighted, 
But couldn’t you be my friend? 
Couldn’t we sit in the twilight, 
Couldn’t we walk on the shore
With only a pleasant friendship
To bind us, and nothing more? 

There was not a word of folly
Spoken between us...Read more of this...

Things I Didnt Know I Loved

by Nazim Hikmet
 it's 1962 March 28th
I'm sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train 
night is falling
I never knew I liked
night descending like a tired bird on a smoky wet plain 
I don't like
comparing nightfall to a tired bird

I didn't know I loved the earth
can someone who hasn't worked the earth love it 
I've never worked the earth
it must be my...Read more of this...

His Winding-sheet

by Robert Herrick
 Come thou, who art the wine and wit
Of all I've writ;
The grace, the glory, and the best
Piece of the rest;
Thou art of what I did intend
The All, and End;
And what was made, was made to meet.
Thee, thee my sheet.
Come then, and be to my chaste side
Both bed and bride.
We two, as reliques left, will have
One rest, one grave;
And, hugging...Read more of this...

Two Songs From A Play

by William Butler Yeats
 I

I saw a staring virgin stand
Where holy Dionysus died,
And tear the heart out of his side.
And lay the heart upon her hand
And bear that beating heart away;
Of Magnus Annus at the spring,
As though God's death were but a play.

Another Troy must rise and set,
Another lineage feed the crow,
Another Argo's painted prow
Drive to a flashier bauble yet.
The Roman Empire stood...Read more of this...

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