Famous Ranging Poems by Famous Poets

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

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To the True Romance

by Rudyard Kipling
 Thy face is far from this our war,
 Our call and counter-cry,
I shall not find Thee quick and kind,
 Nor know Thee till I die,
Enough for me in dreams to see
 And touch Thy garments' hem:
Thy feet have trod so near to God
 I may not follow them.

Through wantonness if men profess
 They weary of Thy parts,
E'en let them...Read more of this...

Love's Humility

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
As some rapt gazer on the lowly earth,
Looks up to radiant planets, ranging far,
So I, whose soul doth know thy wondrous worth
Look longing up to thee as to a star.
...Read more of this...

In Memoriam A. H. H.

by Alfred Lord Tennyson
Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
   Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
   By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove;
 
Thine are these orbs of light and shade;
   Thou madest Life in man and brute;
   Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot
Is on the skull which thou hast...Read more of this...

Mind Games

by Dimitris Varos
 I am a waterfall in the desert.
A rain from a cloudless sky. 
A well known but unborn child. 
An insistence experience 
that you never had. 

I play mind games with your brain. 
When you strike the keys and remember the sea 
I come as indefinable memory. 
When you look at your watch 
and the time has passed
you feel me...Read more of this...

341. Song—My Bonie Bell

by Robert Burns
 THE SMILING Spring comes in rejoicing,
 And surly Winter grimly flies;
Now crystal clear are the falling waters,
 And bonie blue are the sunny skies.
Fresh o’er the mountains breaks forth the morning,
 The ev’ning gilds the ocean’s swell;
All creatures joy in the sun’s returning,
 And I rejoice in my bonie Bell.


The flowery Spring leads sunny Summer,
 The yellow Autumn presses...Read more of this...

Freedom And Love

by Thomas Campbell
 How delicious is the winning
Of a kiss at love's beginning,
When two mutual hearts are sighing
For the knot there's no untying!
Yet remember, 'Midst our wooing,
Love has bliss, but Love has ruing;
Other smiles may make you fickle,
Tears for other charms may trickle.
Love he comes, and Love he tarries,
Just as fate or fancy carries;
Longest stays, when sorest chidden;
Laughs and flies, when press'd...Read more of this...

A Translation Of The Nightingale Out Of Strada

by William Strode
 Now the declining sun 'gan downwards bend
From higher heavens, and from his locks did send
A milder flame, when near to Tiber's flow
A lutinist allay'd his careful woe
With sounding charms, and in a greeny seat
Of shady oake took shelter from the heat.
A Nightingale oreheard him, that did use
To sojourn in the neighbour groves, the muse
That fill'd the place, the Syren...Read more of this...

Memoriam A. H. H.: 44. How fares it with the happy dead?

by Alfred Lord Tennyson
 How fares it with the happy dead?
For here the man is more and more;
But he forgets the days before
God shut the doorways of his head.
The days have vanish'd, tone and tint,
And yet perhaps the hoarding sense
Gives out at times (he knows not whence)
A little flash, a mystic hint;
And in the long harmonious years
(If Death so taste Lethean springs),
May some...Read more of this...

At Pleasure Bay

by Robert Pinsky
 In the willows along the river at Pleasure Bay
A catbird singing, never the same phrase twice.
Here under the pines a little off the road
In 1927 the Chief of Police
And Mrs. W. killed themselves together,
Sitting in a roadster. Ancient unshaken pilings
And underwater chunks of still-mortared brick
In shapes like bits of puzzle strew the bottom
Where the landing was for Price's Hotel...Read more of this...

Leather Leggings

by Carl Sandburg
 THEY have taken the ball of earth
 and made it a little thing.

They were held to the land and horses;
 they were held to the little seas.
They have changed and shaped and welded;
 they have broken the old tools and made
 new ones; they are ranging the white
 scarves of cloudland; they are bumping
 the sunken bells of the...Read more of this...

The Morrow Of Grandeur

by Victor Hugo
 ("Non, l'avenir n'est à personne!") 
 
 {V. ii., August, 1832.} 


 Sire, beware, the future's range 
 Is of God alone the power, 
 Naught below but augurs change, 
 E'en with ev'ry passing hour. 
 Future! mighty mystery! 
 All the earthly goods that be, 
 Fortune, glory, war's renown, 
 King or kaiser's sparkling crown, 
...Read more of this...

William Street

by Kenneth Slessor
 The red globe of light, the liquor green, 
the pulsing arrows and the running fire 
spilt on the stones, go deeper than a stream; 
You find this ugly, I find it lovely 

Ghosts' trousers, like the dangle of hung men, 
in pawn-shop windows, bumping knee by knee, 
but none inside to suffer or condemn; 
You find this ugly, I...Read more of this...

The Wargeilah Handicap

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 Wargeilah town is very small, 
There's no cathedral nor a club, 
In fact the township, all in all, 
Is just one unpretentious pub; 
And there, from all the stations round, 
The local sportsmen can be found. 

The sportsmen of Wargeilah-side 
Are very few but very fit; 
There's scarcely any sport been tried 
But they can hold their own at...Read more of this...

Thoughts

by Walt Whitman
 1
OF these years I sing, 
How they pass and have pass’d, through convuls’d pains as through parturitions; 
How America illustrates birth, muscular youth, the promise, the sure fulfillment, the
 Absolute
 Success, despite of people—Illustrates evil as well as good; 
How many hold despairingly yet to the models departed, caste, myths, obedience,
 compulsion, and
 to infidelity; 
How few see the...Read more of this...

In Memoriam A. H. H.: 6. One writes that Other Friends Rem

by Alfred Lord Tennyson
 One writes, that "Other friends remain," 
That "Loss is common to the race"--
And common is the commonplace,
And vacant chaff well meant for grain.
That loss is common would not make
My own less bitter, rather more.
Too common! Never morning wore
To evening, but some heart did break.
O father, wheresoe'er thou be,
Who pledgest now thy gallant son,
A shot, ere half thy draught be...Read more of this...

Return

by Mihai Eminescu
"Forest, trusted friend and true, 
Forest dear, how do you do? 
Since the day i saw you last 
Many, many years have passed 
And though you still steadfast stand 
I have traveled many a land." 

"Yea, and I, what have I done? 
Watched the years their seasons run; 
Heard the squalls that through me groan 
Ere my singing birds have...Read more of this...

84. Address to the Deil

by Robert Burns
 O THOU! whatever title suit thee—
Auld Hornie, Satan, Nick, or Clootie,
Wha in yon cavern grim an’ sootie,
 Clos’d under hatches,
Spairges about the brunstane cootie,
 To scaud poor wretches!


Hear me, auld Hangie, for a wee,
An’ let poor damned bodies be;
I’m sure sma’ pleasure it can gie,
 Ev’n to a deil,
To skelp an’ scaud poor dogs like me,
 An’ hear us...Read more of this...

The Irish Guards

by Rudyard Kipling
 1918

We're not so old in the Army List,
 But we're not so young at our trade,
For we had the honour at Fontenoy
 Of meeting the Guards'Brigade.
'Twas Lally, Dillon, Bulkeley, Clare,
 And Lee that led us then,
And after a hundred and seventy years
 We're fighting for France again!
Old Days! The wild geese are flighting,
 Head to fhe sform as they...Read more of this...

Life

by Charlotte Bronte
 "What is this world?­thy school, O misery!
"Our only lesson is to learn to suffer." 

- YOUNG. 


LOVE, thou sportive fickle boy, 
Source of anguish, child of joy, 
Ever wounding­ever smiling, 
Soothing still, and still beguiling; 
What are all thy boasted treasures, 
Tender sorrows, transient pleasures? 
Anxious hopes, and jealous fears, 
LAUGHING HOURS, and MOURNING YEARS. 

What is FRIENDSHIP'S soothing...Read more of this...

The Child Bearers

by Anne Sexton
 Jean, death comes close to us all,
flapping its awful wings at us
and the gluey wings crawl up our nose.
Our children tremble in their teen-age cribs,
whirling off on a thumb or a motorcycle,
mine pushed into gnawing a stilbestrol cancer
I passed on like hemophilia,
or yours in the seventh grade, with her spleen
smacked in by the balance beam.
And we, mothers, crumpled, and...Read more of this...

Britannias Pastorals

by William Browne
 Now as an angler melancholy standing
Upon a green bank yielding room for landing,
A wriggling yellow worm thrust on his hook,
Now in the midst he throws, then in a nook:
Here pulls his line, there throws it in again,
Mendeth his cork and bait, but all in vain,
He long stands viewing of the curled stream;
At last a hungry pike, or well-grown bream
Snatch...Read more of this...

Corn

by Sidney Lanier
 To-day the woods are trembling through and through
With shimmering forms, that flash before my view,
Then melt in green as dawn-stars melt in blue.
The leaves that wave against my cheek caress
Like women's hands; the embracing boughs express
A subtlety of mighty tenderness;
The copse-depths into little noises start,
That sound anon like beatings of a heart,
Anon like talk 'twixt lips not far apart.
The...Read more of this...

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