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Famous Reaches Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Hugo, Victor
...eir ray with golden fulgence leavens, 
In numerous leafage bosomed close; 
Whether the mist in reefs of fire extend its reaches sheer, 
Or a hundred sunbeams splinter in an azure atmosphere 
On cloudy archipelagos. 

Oh, gaze ye on the firmament! a hundred clouds in motion, 
Up-piled in the immense sublime beneath the winds' commotion, 
Their unimagined shapes accord: 
Under their waves at intervals flame a pale levin through, 
As if some giant of the air amid the vapors ...Read more of this...



by Dunn, Stephen
...ce of history, encumbered
by knowledge. Only a hero

would dare return with the truth.
So from the cave's upper reaches,
removed from harm, he called out

the disturbing news.
What lovely echoes, the prisoners said,
what a fine musical place to live.

He spelled it out, then, in clear prose
on paper scraps, which he floated down.
But in the semi-dark they read his words

with the indulgence of those who seldom read:
It's about my father's death, one of the...Read more of this...

by Mayakovsky, Vladimir
...ds
 of governments and poets.

My verse 
 will reach you
not as an arrow
 in a cupid-lyred chase,
not as worn penny
Reaches a numismatist,
not as the light of dead stars reaches you.

My verse
 by labor
 will break the mountain chain of years,
and will present itself
 ponderous, 
 crude,
 tangible,
as an aqueduct,
 by slaves of Rome
constructed,
 enters into our days.

When in mounds of books,
 where verse lies buried,
you discover by chance the iron filings of li...Read more of this...

by Dunn, Stephen
...This is not the way I am.
Really, I am much taller in person,
the hairline I conceal reaches back
to my grandfather, and the shyness my wife
will not believe in has always been why
I was bold on first dates. My father a crack salesman.
I've saved his pines, the small acclamations
I used to show my friends. And the billyclub
I keep by my bed was his, too; an heirloom.
I am somewhat older than you can tell.
The early deaths...Read more of this...

by Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
...n he has crossed the Irthing flood,
My merry bard! he hastes, he hastes
Up Knorren Moor, through Halegarth Wood,
And reaches soon that castle good
Which stands and threatens Scotland's wastes.

'Bard Bracy! bard Bracy! your horses are fleet,
Ye must ride up the hall, your music so sweet,
More loud than your horses' echoing feet!
And loud and loud to Lord Roland call,
Thy daughter is safe in Langdale hall!
Thy beautiful daughter is safe and free-
Sir Leoline gr...Read more of this...



by Pushkin, Alexander
...e clear, from owning,
My angel, all my care for you!
When off the stairs your weightless footfall,
Your dress's rustle, reaches me,
Your voice, as maidenly, as youthful -
I lose my senses instantly.
You smile at me - I'm glad, immensely;
Ignore me - and I'm sad, again;
Your pallid hand will recompense me
For the whole day of utter pain.
When you're embroidering, or setting
Your eye on something fair, or letting
Your hair amuse you - I'm beguiled;
In silence, reddening...Read more of this...

by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...conceal it,
Though he behold it not, he can hear its continuous murmur;
Happy, at length, if he find the spot where it reaches an outlet.



II

It was the month of May. Far down the Beautiful River,
Past the Ohio shore and past the mouth of the Wabash,
Into the golden stream of the broad and swift Mississippi,
Floated a cumbrous boat, that was rowed by Acadian boatmen.
It was a band of exiles: a raft, as it were, from the shipwrecked
Nation, scattered along the ...Read more of this...

by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...ight.

 The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
The sea is the land's edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation:
The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale's backbone;
The pools where it offers to our curiosity
The more delicate algae and the sea anemone.
It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,
The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar
And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has ma...Read more of this...

by Levine, Philip
...e 
the burning of all the small pockets 
of fat and oil that are the soul, 
I am the soul stretching into 
the furthest reaches of my fingers 
and beyond, glowing like ten candles 
in the vault of night for anyone 
who could see, even though it is 
12:40 in the afternoon and I 
have passed from darkness into sunlight 
so fierce the sweat streams down 
into my eyes. I did not rise. 
A wind or a stray animal or a group 
of kids dragged me to the side 
of the road and tu...Read more of this...

by Trumbull, John
...s call
Your Gov'rnor and Vice-Admiral,
Whose power gubernatorial still
Extends as far as Bunker's hill,
Whose admiralty reaches, clever,
Near half a mile up Mistic river,
Whose naval force yet keeps the seas,
Can run away whene'er he'd please.
Nay, stern with rage grim Putnam boiling
Plunder'd both Hogg and Noddle Island;
Scared troops of Tories into town,
Burn'd all their hay and houses down,
And menaced Gage, unless he'd flee,
To drive him headlong to the sea;
As once, ...Read more of this...

by Hayden, Robert
...ve's rotten gelid eyes. But, oh, the 
living look at you with human eyes whose suffering accuses you, whose 
hatred reaches through the swill of dark to strike you like a leper's 
claw. You cannot stare that hatred down or chain the fear that stalks 
the watches and breathes on you its fetid scorching breath; cannot 
kill the deep immortal human wish, the timeless will. 

"But for the storm that flung up barriers 
of wind and wave, The Amistad, señores, 
would hav...Read more of this...

by Neruda, Pablo
...your treasure?

In chalky, barren lands
bordered
by the sea, along
the rocky Chilean coast,
at times
only your radiance
reaches the empty
table of the miner.

Your light, your cornmeal, your hope
pervades America's solitudes,
and to hunger
your lances
are enemy legions.

Within your husks,
like gentle kernels,
our sober provincial
children's hearts were nurtured,
until life began
to shuck us from the ear....Read more of this...

by Rich, Adrienne
...dark.
Night cracks up over the chimney,
pieces of time, frozen geodes
come showering down in the grate.

A man reaches behind my eyes
and finds them empty
a woman's head turns away
from my head in the mirror
children are dying my death
and eating crumbs of my life.

Pity is not your forte.
Calmly you ache up there
pinned aloft in your crow's nest,
my speechless pirate!
You take it all for granted
and when I look you back

it's with a starlike eye
shooting its...Read more of this...

by Milton, John
...thy desire, which tends to know 
The works of God, thereby to glorify 
The great Work-master, leads to no excess 
That reaches blame, but rather merits praise 
The more it seems excess, that led thee hither 
From thy empyreal mansion thus alone, 
To witness with thine eyes what some perhaps, 
Contented with report, hear only in Heaven: 
For wonderful indeed are all his works, 
Pleasant to know, and worthiest to be all 
Had in remembrance always with delight; 
But what create...Read more of this...

by McGonagall, William Topaz
...train,
And he trudges along dauntlessly on his crutches,
And tenaciously to them he clutches. 

And just in time he reaches his father's car
To save the on-coming train from afar,
So he seizes the red light, and swings it round,
And cried with all his might, 'The bridge is down! The bridge is down!' 

So forward his father's car he drives,
Determined to save the passengers' lives,
Struggling hard with might and main,
Hoping his struggle won't prove in vain. 

So on co...Read more of this...

by Rilke, Rainer Maria
...Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colors
which it passes to a row of ancient trees.
You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you
one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth.

leaving you, not really belonging to either,
not so hopelessly dark as that house that is silent,
not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing
that turns to a sta...Read more of this...

by Seeger, Alan
...s petal furled,
Then I would rise, climb the old wall again,
And pausing look forth on the sundown world,
Scan the wide reaches of the wondrous plain,
The hamlet sites where settling smoke lay curled,
The poplar-bordered roads, and far away
Fair snowpeaks colored with the sun's last ray.

Waves of faint sound would pulsate from afar
Faint song and preludes of the summer night;
Deep in the cloudless west the evening star
Hung 'twixt the orange and the emerald light;
From t...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Amy
...bs on the ways,
Tapping, tapping.
You can hear, though there's nothing where you gaze.
Through the fog down the reaches of the river,
The tapping goes on like heart-beats in a fever.
The church-bells chime
Hours and hours,
Dropping days in showers.
Bang! Rap! Tap!
Go the hammers all the time.
They have planked up her timbers
And the nails are driven to the head;
They have decked her over,
And again, and again.
The shoring-up beams shudder at the strain...Read more of this...

by Petrarch, Francesco
...who in this changing sphereAlready have begun the bright careerThat reaches to the goal which, all in vain,The Muse would blazon in her feeble strain:But blest above all other blest is heWho from the trammels of mortality,Ere half the vital thread ran out, was free,Mature for Heaven; where now the...Read more of this...

by Dyke, Henry Van
...r-r-ed:
His Tyrian robe was changed to wings of blue,
His crown became a crest, --- away he flew!

And still, along the reaches of the stream,
The vain King-fisher flits, an azure gleam, ---
You see his ruby crest, you hear his jealous scream....Read more of this...

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Book: Reflection on the Important Things