Famous Possibility Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Possibility poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous possibility poems. These examples illustrate what a famous possibility poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Crowley, Aleister
...rasp tore the unwilling flower
From your closed garden, mine in every mood,
In every tense, in every attitude,
In every possibility, still mine
While the sun's pomp and pageant, sign to sign,
Stately proceeded, mine not only so
In the glamour of memory and austral glow
Of ardour, but by image of my brow
Stronger than sense, you are even here and now
Miner, utterly mine, my sister and my wife,
Mother of my children, mistress of my life!
O wild swan winging through the morning...Read more of this...
by
Lehman, David
...ing plants
red brick houses where I shall give up booze
and organized religion even if it means
despair is a logical possibility that can't
be disproved I shall concentrate on the five
senses and what they half perceive and half
create, the green street signs with white
letters on them the body next to mine
asleep while I think these thoughts
that I want to eliminate like nostalgia
0 was there ever a man who felt as I do
like a pronoun out of step with all the other...Read more of this...
by
Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...ll time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-le...Read more of this...
by
von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang
...ibes to be 'a
beautiful piece (a very Hans Sacks beatified, both in character
and style), which we wish there was any possibility of translating.'
The reader will be aware that Hans Sachs was the celebrated Minstrel-
Cobbler of Nuremberg, who Wrote 208 plays, 1700 comic tales, and
between 4000 and 5000 lyric poems. He flourished throughout almost
the whole of the 16th century.]
EARLY within his workshop here,
On Sundays stands our master dear;
His dirty apr...Read more of this...
by
Dickinson, Emily
...I dwell in Possibility --
A fairer House than Prose --
More numerous of Windows --
Superior -- for Doors --
Of Chambers as the Cedars --
Impregnable of Eye --
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky --
Of Visitors -- the fairest --
For Occupation -- This --
The spreading wide of narrow Hands
To gather Paradise --...Read more of this...
by
Ammons, A R
...vidual spider web
identifies a species:
an order of instinct prevails
through all accidents of circumstance,
though possibility is
high along the peripheries of
spider
webs:
you can go all
around the fringing attachments
and find
disorder ripe,
entropy rich, high levels of random,
numerous occasions of accident:
2) the possible settings
of a web are infinite:
how does
the spider keep
identity
while creating the web
in a particular place?
how and to wh...Read more of this...
by
Berry, Wendell
...and the vivid air.
II.
The poem is important,
as the want of it
proves. It is the stewardship
of its own possibility,
the past remembering itself
in the presence of
the present, the power learned
and handed down to see
what is present
and what is not: the pavement
laid down and walked over
regardlessly--by exiles, here
only because they are passing.
Oh, remember the oaks that were
here, the leaves, purple and brown,
falling, the nuthatches walking
headf...Read more of this...
by
Shakur, Tupac
...use I feel the shadow's Depth
so much I wanted 2 accomplish
before I reached my Death
I have come 2 grips with the possibility
and wiped the last tear from My eyes
I Loved All who were Positive
In the event of my Demise...Read more of this...
by
Moore, Marianne
..."
the central flaw
in that first crystal-fine experiment,
this amalgamation which can never be more
than an interesting possibility,
describing it
as "that strange paradise
unlike flesh, gold, or stately buildings,
the choicest piece of my life:
the heart rising
in its estate of peace
as a boat rises
with the rising of the water;"
constrained in speaking of the serpent --
that shed snakeskin in the history of politeness
not to be returned to again --
that invaluable accident
...Read more of this...
by
Hacker, Marilyn
...tell which one was
dropped by a child beneath the bloodied branches.
The uncontrolled and multifurcate branches
of possibility infiltrate houses'
walls, windowframes, ceilings. Where there was
a tower, a town: ash and burnt wires, a graph
on a distant computer screen. Elsewhere, a kitchen
table's setting gapes, where children bred
to branch into new lives were culled for war.
Who wore this starched smocked cotton dress? Who wore
this jersey blazoned for the...Read more of this...
by
Guillen, Rafael
...Not fear. Maybe, out there somewhere,
the possibility of fear; the wall
that might tumble down, because it's for sure
that behind it is the sea.
Not fear. Fear has a countenance;
It's external, concrete,
like a rifle, a shot bolt,
a suffering child,
like the darkness that's hidden
in every human mouth.
Not fear. Maybe only the brand
of the offspring of fear.
It's a narrow, inter...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...nty-four years old, getting
over a bad case of hepatitis, she kids Pard about a nude pho-
tograph of her that has the possibility of appearing in Playboy
magazine.
"There's nothing to worry about, " she says. "If they use
that photograph, it only means that 12, 000, 000 men will look
at my boobs. "
This is all very funny to her. Her parents have money. As
she sits in the other room in the California bush, she's on
her father's payroll in New Yor...Read more of this...
by
Carroll, Lewis
...ed, I feel convinced, on the line
``Then the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes''
In view of this painful possibility, I will not (as I might) appeal
indignantly to my other writings as a proof that I am incapable of
such a deed: I will not (as I might) point to the strong moral
purpose of this poem itself, to the arithmetical principles so
cautiously inculcated in it, or to its noble teachings in Natural
History---I will take the more prosaic course of sim...Read more of this...
by
Byron, George (Lord)
...espont," or the "boundless Hellespont," whether it means one or the other, or what it means at all, has been beyond all possibility of detail. I have even heard it disputed on the spot; and not foreseeing a speedy conclusion to the controversy, amused myself by swimming across it in the meantime, and probably may again, before the point is settled. Indeed, the question as to the truth of "the tale of Troy divine" still continues, much of it resting upon the word {'?pe...Read more of this...
by
Levy, Amy
...ind.
More than all joys of soul or sense
Is this divine indifference;
Where grief a shadow grows to be,
And peace a possibility....Read more of this...
by
Belieu, Erin
...This hideous,
upholstered in gift-wrap fabric, chromed
in places, design possibility
for the future canned ham.
Its genius
wonderful, circa I993.
I've assumed a great many things:
the perversity of choices, affairs
I did or did not have.
But let the record show
that I was happy.
O let the hideous chair
stand! For the Chinese apothecary
with his roots and fluids;
for Paoul at the bank;
for the young woman in ...Read more of this...
by
Carroll, Lewis
...ced, on the line (in p.18)
"Then the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes."
In view of this painful possibility, I will not (as I might) appeal indignantly to my other writings as a proof that I am incapable of such a deed: I will not (as I might) point to the strong moral purpose of this poem itself, to the arithmetical principles so cautiously inculcated in it, or to its noble teachings in Natural History--I will take the more prosaic course of simply ex...Read more of this...
by
Chaucer, Geoffrey
...or some treaty,
Thou mayst have her to lady and to wife,
For whom that I must needes lose my life.
For as by way of possibility,
Since thou art at thy large, of prison free,
And art a lord, great is thine avantage,
More than is mine, that sterve here in a cage.
For I must weep and wail, while that I live,
With all the woe that prison may me give,
And eke with pain that love me gives also,
That doubles all my torment and my woe."
Therewith the fire of jealousy ups...Read more of this...
by
Murray, Les
...r> It is loose-limbed in its mind.
Reprimanded and dismissed,
it listens with a grin and one boot up on the rail
of possibility. It may have to leave the Earth.
Being roughly Christian, it scratches the other cheek
And thinks it unlikely. Though people have been shot for sprawl....Read more of this...
by
Bell, Marvin
...to flesh,
the passage of a leaf in autumn
to the passage of autumn,
branch-tip and winter spaces
to possibilities, and possibility
to God. Even on East 61st Street
in the blowzy city of New York,
someone has planted a gingko
because it has leaves like fans like hands,
hand-leaves, and sex. Those lovely
Chinese hands on the sidewalks
so far from delicacy
or even, perhaps, another gender of gingko--
do we see them?
No one ever treated us so gently
as these green-going-...Read more of this...
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