Famous Prophecy Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Prophecy poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous prophecy poems. These examples illustrate what a famous prophecy poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...me mystic sound,
And hollow murmer from the dark recess.
No more of Lybian Jove; Dodona's oaks,
In sacred grove give prophecy no more.
Th' infernal deities retire abash'd,
Our God himself on earth begins his reign;
Pure revelation beams on ev'ry land,
On ev'ry heart exerts a sov'reign sway,
And makes the human nature grow divine.
Now hideous war forgets one half her rage,
And smoothes her visage horible to view.
Celestial graces better sooth the soul,
Than vocal...Read more of this...
by
Brackenridge, Hugh Henry
...adowing, as if the entire globe;
But I do not undertake to define thee—hardly to comprehend thee;
I but thee name—thee prophecy—as now!
I merely thee ejaculate!
Thee in thy future;
Thee in thy only permanent life, career—thy own unloosen’d mind—thy soaring
spirit;
Thee as another equally needed sun, America—radiant, ablaze, swift-moving,
fructifying
all;
Thee! risen in thy potent cheerfulness and joy—thy endless, great hilarity!
(Scattering for good the cloud that h...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...turns to his forecast. Things might well go somewhat as follows, he says; sketches a little tragic story; and with this prophecy by illustration returns to the tale of his adventure.
{28f} Not an actual glove, but a sort of bag.
{29a} Hygelac.
{29b} This is generally assumed to mean hides, though the text simply says “seven thousand.” A hide in England meant about 120 acres, though “the size of the acre varied.”
{29c} On the historical raid into Frankish territory...Read more of this...
by
Anonymous,
...and thing as straws,
her eyes burnt by cigarettes,
her uterus an empty teacup,
arrived with an evil gift.
She made this prophecy:
The princess shall prick herself
on a spinning wheel in her fifteenth year
and then fall down dead.
Kaputt!
The court fell silent.
The king looked like Munch's Scream
Fairies' prophecies,
in times like those,
held water.
However the twelfth fairy
had a certain kind of eraser
and thus she mitigated the curse
changing that death
into a hundred-year s...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...ing upward, till in us
Life is not life, but the desire of God,
Himself desiring and himself accepting.
Now what was prophecy in us is made
Fulfilment: we are the hour and we are the joy,
We in our marvellousness of single knowledge,
Of Spirit breaking down the room of fate
And drawing into his light the greeting fire
Of God,—God known in ecstasy of love
Wedding himself to utterance of himself ...Read more of this...
by
Abercrombie, Lascelles
...,
And, having once been wrong, will be so still.
He, who to seem more deep than you or I,
Extols old bards, or Merlin's Prophecy,
Mistake him not; he envies, not admires,
And to debase the sons, exalts the sires.
Had ancient times conspir'd to disallow
What then was new, what had been ancient now?
Or what remain'd, so worthy to be read
By learned critics, of the mighty dead?
In days of ease, when now the weary sword
Was sheath'd, and luxury with Charles restor'd;
In ev'ry t...Read more of this...
by
Pope, Alexander
...nguish'd hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? 70 ...Read more of this...
by
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...ant deeds, a promise shall receive
Irrevocable, that his regal throne
For ever shall endure; the like shall sing
All Prophecy, that of the royal stock
Of David (so I name this king) shall rise
A Son, the Woman's seed to thee foretold,
Foretold to Abraham, as in whom shall trust
All nations; and to kings foretold, of kings
The last; for of his reign shall be no end.
But first, a long succession must ensue;
And his next son, for wealth and wisdom famed,
The clouded a...Read more of this...
by
Milton, John
...won on me,
And with confusion blank his Worshippers.
Man: With cause this hope relieves thee, and these words
I as a Prophecy receive: for God,
Nothing more certain, will not long defer
To vindicate the glory of his name
Against all competition, nor will long
Endure it, doubtful whether God be Lord,
Or Dagon. But for thee what shall be done?
Thou must not in the mean while here forgot
Lie in this miserable loathsom plight
Neglected. I already have made way
To some Philist...Read more of this...
by
Milton, John
...kly circled, gave at noon
A sadder light than waning moon.
Slow tracing down the thickening sky
Its mute and ominous prophecy,
A portent seeming less than threat,
It sank from sight before it set.
A chill no coat, however stout,
Of homespun stuff could quite shut out,
A hard, dull bitterness of cold,
That checked, mid-vein, the circling race
Of life-blood in the sharpened face,
The coming of the snow-storm told.
The wind blew east; we heard the roar
Of Ocean on h...Read more of this...
by
Whittier, John Greenleaf
...1
A CALIFORNIA song!
A prophecy and indirection—a thought impalpable, to breathe, as air;
A chorus of dryads, fading, departing—or hamadryads departing;
A murmuring, fateful, giant voice, out of the earth and sky,
Voice of a mighty dying tree in the Redwood forest dense.
Farewell, my brethren,
Farewell, O earth and sky—farewell, ye neighboring waters;
My time has ended, my t...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...t when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?"
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote as heaven's hill, that has endured
As April's green endures; or will endure
Like her rememberance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of...Read more of this...
by
Stevens, Wallace
...Sir Bors, who else? But when ye reached
The city, found ye all your knights returned,
Or was there sooth in Arthur's prophecy,
Tell me, and what said each, and what the King?'
Then answered Percivale: `And that can I,
Brother, and truly; since the living words
Of so great men as Lancelot and our King
Pass not from door to door and out again,
But sit within the house. O, when we reached
The city, our horses stumbling as they trode
On heaps of ruin, hornless unicorn...Read more of this...
by
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...nt?
Do me this grace, mine Idiot."
"Please thy Wisdom
An thou dost ride through this same gang of boors,
'Tis my fool's-prophecy, some ill shall fall.
Lord Raoul, yon mass of various flesh is fused
And melted quite in one by white-hot words
The friar speaks. Sir, sawest thou ne'er, sometimes,
Thine armorer spit on iron when 'twas hot,
And how the iron flung the insult back,
Hissing? So this contempt now in thine eye,
If it shall fall on yonder heated surface
May bounce back u...Read more of this...
by
Lanier, Sidney
...dark and grim.
He bade that all should ready be
To grace a guest of fair degree;
But light I held his prophecy,
And deemed it was my father's horn
Whose echoes o'er the lake were borne.'
XXIV.
The stranger smiled:—'Since to your home
A destined errant-knight I come,
Announced by prophet sooth and old,
Doomed, doubtless, for achievement bold,
I 'll lightly front each high emprise
For one kind glance of t...Read more of this...
by
Scott, Sir Walter
...l the others merely derivative, which was the
cause of our despising the Priests & Philosophers of other
countries, and prophecying that all Gods [PL 13] would at last be
proved. to originate in ours & to be the tributaries of the
Poetic Genius, it was this. that our great poet King David
desired so fervently & invokes so patheticly, saying by this he
conquers enemies & governs kingdoms; and we so loved our God.
that we cursed in his name all the deities of surrounding
nation...Read more of this...
by
Blake, William
...,
They make it speak whatever sense they please!
'Twas framed at first our oracle to inquire;
But since our sects in prophecy grow higher,
The text inspires not them, but they the text inspire.
London, thou great emporium of our isle,
O thou too bounteous, thou too fruitful Nile!
How shall I praise or curse to thy desert,
Or separate thy sound from thy corrupted part?
I called thee Nile; the parallel will stand:
Thy tides of wealth o'erflow the fattened land;
Yet ...Read more of this...
by
Dryden, John
...chatter'd Hudibrastic;
Each Cur, endued with yelping nature,
Could outbark Churchill's[2] self in satire;
Each Crow in prophecy delighted,
Each Owl, you saw, was second-sighted,
Each Goose a skilful politician,
Each Ass a gifted met'physician,
Could preach in wrath 'gainst laughing rogues,
Write Halfway-covenant Dialogues,[3]
And wisely judge of all disputes
In commonwealths of men or brutes.
'Twas then, in spring a youthful Sparrow
Felt the keen force of Cupid's arrow:
Fo...Read more of this...
by
Trumbull, John
...lapt
In the arms of leisure, sacred from the blight
Of ancient influence and scorn.
At last
She rose upon a wind of prophecy
Dilating on the future; 'everywhere
Who heads in council, two beside the hearth,
Two in the tangled business of the world,
Two in the liberal offices of life,
Two plummets dropt for one to sound the abyss
Of science, and the secrets of the mind:
Musician, painter, sculptor, critic, more:
And everywhere the broad and bounteous Earth
Should b...Read more of this...
by
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...booklet with a cyclop's eye
center, from the Dominican Republic.
Its coarse pages were black with the usual
symbols of prophecy, in excited Spanish:
an open palm upright, sectioned and numbered
like a butcher chart, delivered the future.
One night, in a fever, radiantly ill,
she say, "Bring me the book, the end has come."
She said, "I dreamt of whales and a storm,"
but for that dream, the book had no answer.
A next night I dreamed of three old women
featureless as silkworms,...Read more of this...
by
Walcott, Derek
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