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Famous Pulsing Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry
...s illumined by the burning coal. 

Lovely the suns were in those twilights warm, 
And space profound, and strong life's pulsing flood, 
In bending o'er you, queen of every charm, 
I thought I breathed the perfume in your blood. 
The suns were beauteous in those twilights warm. 

The film of night flowed round and over us, 
And my eyes in the dark did your eyes meet; 
I drank your breath, ah! sweet and poisonous, 
And in my hands fraternal slept your feet-- 
Night, like a film...Read more of this...
by Baudelaire, Charles



...to her godmother, "Men!" 
And, later, looking down to see her flesh 
Look back up from under lace, the ashy gauze 
And pulsing marble of a bridal veil, 
She wished it all a widow's coal-black weeds. 

A sullen wife and a reluctant mother, 
She sat all day in silence by the fire. 
Better, later, to stare past her sons' sons, 
Her daughters' daughter, and tell stories to the fire. 
But best, dead, damned, to rock forever 
Beside Hell's fireside-- to see within the flames 

The...Read more of this...
by Jarrell, Randall
...te knowing,
and then knowing-
something sending it down its string,
the wet web,
toward the weak shield of buzzing,
the pulsing;
a last desperate moving hair-leg
there against the glass
there alive in the sun,
spun in white;
and almost like love:
the closing over,
the first hushed spider-sucking:
filling its sack 
upon this thing that lived;
crouching there upon its back
drawing its certain blood
as the world goes by outside
and my temples scream
and I hurl the broom against ...Read more of this...
by Bukowski, Charles
...
 Hereat Peona, in their silver source,
Shut her pure sorrow drops with glad exclaim,
And took a lute, from which there pulsing came
A lively prelude, fashioning the way
In which her voice should wander. 'Twas a lay
More subtle cadenced, more forest wild
Than Dryope's lone lulling of her child;
And nothing since has floated in the air
So mournful strange. Surely some influence rare
Went, spiritual, through the damsel's hand;
For still, with Delphic emphasis, she spann'd
The q...Read more of this...
by Keats, John
...hat blows;

Who, blowing up these sparks
For their meagre heat, have missed
The once-in-a-lifetime portent,
The comet's pulsing rose....Read more of this...
by Heaney, Seamus



...ount of pride,
Dear distress, and joy allied,
Is my somber flesh and skin,
With the dark blood dammed within
Like great pulsing tides of wine
That, I fear, must burst the fine
Channels of the chafing net
Where they surge and foam and fret.

Africa?A book one thumbs
Listlessly, till slumber comes.
Unremembered are her bats
Circling through the night, her cats
Crouching in the river reeds,
Stalking gentle flesh that feeds
By the river brink; no more
Does the bugle-throated roar...Read more of this...
by Cullen, Countee
...th massacre:
Then, echoing yell with yell, they fired the tower,
Which half that autumn night, like the live North,
Red-pulsing up thro' Alioth and Alcor,
Made all above it, and a hundred meres
About it, as the water Moab saw
Come round by the East, and out beyond them flush'd
The long low dune, and lazy-plunging sea.


So all the ways were safe from shore to shore,
But in the heart of Arthur pain was lord.


Then, out of Tristram waking, the red dream
Fled with a shout, and ...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
..., that fiery red 
 As heated metal extend, and crowd the plain." 
 He answered, "These the eternal fire contain, 
 That pulsing through them sets their domes aglow." 
 At this we came those joyless walls below, 
 - Of iron I thought them, - with a circling moat; 
 But saw no entrance, and the burdened boat 
 Traced the deep fosse for half its girth, before 
 The steersman warned us. "Get ye forth. The shore 
 Is here, - and there the Entrance." 
 There,
 indeed, 
 The entranc...Read more of this...
by Alighieri, Dante
...ild has drawn there. 

God, what a shining handful of happiness, 
Made out of days and out of eternities, 
Were now the pulsing end of patience—
Could he but have what a ghost had stolen! 

What was a man before him, or ten of them, 
While he was here alive who could answer them, 
And in their teeth fling confirmations 
Harder than agates against an egg-shell?

But now the man was dead, and would come again 
Never, though she might honor ineffably 
The flimsy wraith of him sh...Read more of this...
by Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...answer to the call
Of her old House of Burgesses, spoke out from Faneuil Hall?
When, echoing back her Henry's cry, came pulsing on each breath
Of Northern winds the thrilling sounds of 'Liberty or Death!'

What asks the Old Dominion? If now her sons have proved
False to their fathers' memory, false to the faith they loved;
If she can scoff at Freedom, and its great charter spurn,
Must we of Massachusetts from truth and duty turn?

We hunt your bondmen, flying from Slavery's h...Read more of this...
by Whittier, John Greenleaf
...madder through abounding veins 
As first the fascinating strains of "El Irresistible" start. 


Caught in the spell of pulsing sound, impatient elbows lift and yield 
The scented softnesses they shield to arms that catch and close them round, 


Surrender, swift to be possessed, the silken supple forms beneath 
To all the bliss the measures breathe and all the madness they suggest. 


Crowds congregate and make a ring. Four deep they stand and strain to see 
The tango in its...Read more of this...
by Seeger, Alan
...mories.
O Winding roads that I know so well,
Every twist and turn, every hollow and hill!
They are set in my heart to a pulsing tune
Gay as a honey-bee humming in June.
'T is the rhythmic beat of a horse's feet
And the pattering paws of a sheep-dog *****;
'T is the creaking trees, and the singing breeze,
And the rustle of leaves in the road-side ditch.
A cow in a meadow shakes her bell
And the notes cut sharp through the autumn air,
Each chattering brook bears a fleet of leav...Read more of this...
by Lowell, Amy
...ng of my heart 
I hear the thrum of the evening star.

My work is uncompleted; and yet I hurry,— 
Hearing the whispered pulsing of those drums,— 
To enter the luminous walls and woods of night. 
It is the eternal mistress of the world 
Who shakes these drums for my delight. 
Listen! the drums of the leaves, the drums of the dust, 
The delicious quivering of this air!

I will leave my work unfinished, and I will go 
With ringing and certain step through the laughter of chaos 
...Read more of this...
by Aiken, Conrad
...So fair is she!
So fair her face
So fair her pulsing figure

Not so fair
The maniacal stare
Of a husband who's much bigger....Read more of this...
by Milligan, Spike
...massacre: 
Then, echoing yell with yell, they fired the tower, 
Which half that autumn night, like the live North, 
Red-pulsing up through Alioth and Alcor, 
Made all above it, and a hundred meres 
About it, as the water Moab saw 
Came round by the East, and out beyond them flushed 
The long low dune, and lazy-plunging sea. 

So all the ways were safe from shore to shore, 
But in the heart of Arthur pain was lord. 

Then, out of Tristram waking, the red dream 
Fled with a sho...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...etween the same constellations,
The night never withdrawing its dark virtue
>From the harbor shaped as a heart,
The sea pulsing as a heart,
The sky vaulted as a heart,
Where I know the light will shatter like a cry
Above a discovery:
"Emptiness.
Emptiness! Look!"
Look. This is the morning....Read more of this...
by Merwin, W S
...pty house, 
I see my trees repair their boughs; 
And he, the wondrous child, 
Whose silver warble wild 
Outvalued every pulsing sound 
Within the ear's cerulean round,-- 
The hyacinthine boy, for whom 
Morn well might break and April bloom, 
The gracious boy, who did adorn 
The world whereinto he was born, 
And by his countenance repay 
The favor of the loving Day,-- 
Has disappeared from the Day's eye; 
Far and wide she cannot find him; 
My hopes pursue, they cannot bind him...Read more of this...
by Emerson, Ralph Waldo
...empty house,
I see my trees repair their boughs,
And he, —the wondrous child,
Whose silver warble wild
Outvalued every pulsing sound
Within the air's cerulean round,
The hyacinthine boy, for whom
Morn well might break, and April bloom,
The gracious boy, who did adorn
The world whereinto he was born,
And by his countenance repay
The favor of the loving Day,
Has disappeared from the Day's eye;
Far and wide she cannot find him,
My hopes pursue, they cannot bind him.
Returned th...Read more of this...
by Emerson, Ralph Waldo
...Green Snake, when I hung you round my neck
and stroked your cold, pulsing throat
as you hissed to me, glinting
arrowy gold scales, and I felt
the weight of you on my shoulders,
and the whispering silver of your dryness
sounded close at my ears --


Green Snake--I swore to my companions that certainly
you were harmless! But truly
I had no certainty, and no hope, only desiring
to hold you, for that joy, 
which left
a long wa...Read more of this...
by Levertov, Denise
...some time
They committed themselves to me
And so, I was!
Small, but I WAS!
Tiny, in shape
Lusting to live
I hung in my pulsing cave.
Soon they knew of me
My mother --my father.
I had no say in my being
I lived on trust
And love
Tho' I couldn't think
Each part of me was saying
A silent 'Wait for me
I will bring you love!'
I was taken
Blind, naked, defenseless
By the hand of one
Whose good name
Was graven on a brass plate
in Wimpole Street,
and dropped on the sterile floor
of ...Read more of this...
by Milligan, Spike

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Book: Reflection on the Important Things