Famous Reaching Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The Last Supper

by Rainer Maria Rilke
 They are assembled, astonished and disturbed
round him, who like a sage resolved his fate,
and now leaves those to whom he most belonged,
leaving and passing by them like a stranger.
The loneliness of old comes over him
which helped mature him for his deepest acts;
now will he once again walk through the olive grove,
and those who love him still will flee before...Read more of this...

To The Countess Granville

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 MY DEAR LADY GRANVILLE,--

THE reluctance which must naturally be felt by any one in
venturing to give to the world a book such as the present, where
the beauties of the great original must inevitably be diminished,
if not destroyed, in the process of passing through the
translator's hands, cannot but be felt in all its force when that
translator has not penetrated beyond...Read more of this...

Singer in the Prison The

by Walt Whitman
 1
 O sight of shame, and pain, and dole! 
 O fearful thought—a convict Soul! 
RANG the refrain along the hall, the prison, 
Rose to the roof, the vaults of heaven above, 
Pouring in floods of melody, in tones so pensive, sweet and strong, the like whereof was
 never
 heard,
Reaching the far-off sentry, and the armed guards, who ceas’d...Read more of this...

Poem Reaching For Something

by Quincy Troupe
 we walk through a calligraphy of hats slicing off foreheads
ace-deuce cocked, they slant, razor sharp, clean through imagination, our
spirits knee-deep in what we have forgotten entrancing our bodies now to
dance, like enraptured water lilies
the rhythm in liquid strides of certain looks
eyeballs rippling through breezes
riffing choirs of trees, where a trillion slivers of sunlight prance across
filigreeing leaves, a zillion voices...Read more of this...

Adoration

by Adela Florence Cory Nicolson
   Oh, straight, white road that runs to meet,
            Across green fields, the blue green sea,
   You knew the little weary feet
            Of my child bride that was to be!

   Her people...Read more of this...

The Nowhere Man

by Pritish Nandy
1
Come, let us pretend this is a ritual.  This hand
in your hair, your tongue seeking mine: this
cataclysmic despair.  Let us pretend tonight that
you are mine.  Forever.  For when daybreak returns, we
shall realise once more that forever means an
empty room, a tired night swirling into nowhere,
when I shore up to your tattered skyline.

2
At midnight I move in...Read more of this...

As a World Would Have It

by Edwin Arlington Robinson
 Shall I never make him look at me again? 
I look at him, I look my life at him, 
I tell him all I know the way to tell, 
But there he stays the same. 

Shall I never make him speak one word to me?
Shall I never make him say enough to show 
My heart if he be glad?...Read more of this...

Come slowly -- Eden!

by Emily Dickinson
 Come slowly -- Eden!
Lips unused to Thee --
Bashful -- sip thy Jessamines --
As the fainting Bee --

Reaching late his flower,
Round her chamber hums --
Counts his nectars --
Enters -- and is lost in Balms....Read more of this...

Bacchus

by Ralph Waldo Emerson
BRING me wine but wine which never grew 
In the belly of the grape  
Or grew on vine whose tap-roots reaching through 
Under the Andes to the Cape  
Suffer'd no savour of the earth to 'scape. 5 

Let its grapes the morn salute 
From a nocturnal root  
Which feels the acrid juice 
Of Styx and Erebus; 
And...Read more of this...

The straw parlor

by Eugene Field
 Way up at the top of a big stack of straw
Was the cunningest parlor that ever you saw!
And there could you lie when aweary of play
And gossip or laze in the coziest way;
No matter how careworn or sorry one's mood
No worldly distraction presumed to intrude.
As a refuge from onerous mundane ado
I think I approve of straw parlors, don't you?

A...Read more of this...

The Gum-Gatherer

by Robert Frost
 There overtook me and drew me in
To his down-hill, early-morning stride,
And set me five miles on my road
Better than if he had had me ride,
A man with a swinging bag for'load
And half the bag wound round his hand.
We talked like barking above the din
Of water we walked along beside.
And for my telling him where I'd been
And where I lived...Read more of this...

Independence Ode

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
 Columbia, fair queen in your glory! 
Columbia, the pride of the earth! 
We crown you with song- wreath and story; 
We honour the day of your birth! 

The wrath of a king and his minions
You braved, to be free, on that day; 
And the eagle sailed up on strong pinions, 
And frightened the lion at bay.

Since the chains and...Read more of this...

O Thou, the quest of whom holds all in dizziness and

by Omar Khayyam
O Thou, the quest of whom holds all in dizziness and
distress, the dervish and the rich are equally void of
means of reaching Thee. Thy name is in the speech
of all, but all are deaf; Thou art present to the eyes of
all, but all are blind.
330...Read more of this...

Sonnet XIV

by Francesco Petrarch
SONNET XIV. Movesi 'l vecchierel canuto e bianco. HE COMPARES HIMSELF TO A PILGRIM.  The palmer bent, with locks of silver gray,Quits the sweet spot where he has pass'd his years,Quits his poor family, whose anxious fearsPaint the loved father fainting on his way;And trembling, on his aged limbs slow borne,Read more of this...

Aunt Imogen

by Edwin Arlington Robinson
 Aunt Imogen was coming, and therefore 
The children—Jane, Sylvester, and Young George— 
Were eyes and ears; for there was only one 
Aunt Imogen to them in the whole world, 
And she was in it only for four weeks
In fifty-two. But those great bites of time 
Made all September a Queen’s Festival; 
And they would strive, informally, to make 
The...Read more of this...

The Glove

by Robert Browning
 (PETER RONSARD _loquitur_.)

``Heigho!'' yawned one day King Francis,
``Distance all value enhances!
``When a man's busy, why, leisure
``Strikes him as wonderful pleasure:
`` 'Faith, and at leisure once is he?
``Straightway he wants to be busy.
``Here we've got peace; and aghast I'm
``Caught thinking war the true pastime.
``Is there a reason in metre?
``Give us your speech, master Peter!''
I who, if mortal dare say so,
Ne'er...Read more of this...

Shells

by Kathleen Raine
 Reaching down arm-deep into bright water 
I gathered on white sand under waves 
Shells, drifted up on beaches where I alone 
Inhabit a finite world of years and days. 
I reached my arm down a myriad years 
To gather treasure from the yester-milliennial sea-floor, 
Held in my fingers forms shaped on the day of creation. 

Building their beauty in...Read more of this...

A View of the Han River

by Wang Wei
 With its three southern branches reaching the Chu border, 
And its nine streams touching the gateway of Jing, 
This river runs beyond heaven and earth, 
Where the colour of mountains both is and is not. 
The dwellings of men seem floating along 
On ripples of the distant sky -- 
These beautiful days here in Xiangyang 
Make drunken my old...Read more of this...

Travel

by Edna St. Vincent Millay
 I should like to rise and go 
Where the golden apples grow;-- 
Where below another sky 
Parrot islands anchored lie, 
And, watched by cockatoos and goats, 
Lonely Crusoes building boats;-- 
Where in sunshine reaching out 
Eastern cities, miles about, 
Are with mosque and minaret 
Among sandy gardens set, 
And the rich goods from near and far 
Hang for sale...Read more of this...

The House Of Dust: Part 02: 07: Two Lovers: Overtones

by Conrad Aiken
 Two lovers, here at the corner, by the steeple,
Two lovers blow together like music blowing:
And the crowd dissolves about them like a sea.
Recurring waves of sound break vaguely about them,
They drift from wall to wall, from tree to tree.
'Well, am I late?' Upward they look and laugh,
They look at the great clock's golden hands,
They laugh and talk, not knowing...Read more of this...

An April Day

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 When the warm sun, that brings
Seed-time and harvest, has returned again,
'T is sweet to visit the still wood, where springs
The first flower of the plain.

I love the season well,
When forest glades are teeming with bright forms,
Nor dark and many-folded clouds foretell
The coming-on of storms.

From the earth's loosened mould
The sapling draws its sustenance, and thrives;
Though stricken to the heart with...Read more of this...

Sad Steps

by Philip Larkin
 Groping back to bed after a piss
I part the thick curtains, and am startled by
The rapid clouds, the moon's cleanliness.

Four o'clock: wedge-shaped gardens lie
Under a cavernous, a wind-pierced sky.
There's something laughable about this,

The way the moon dashes through the clouds that blow
Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart
(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)

High and preposterous and separate--
Lozenge of love! Medallion...Read more of this...

His Wife The Painter

by Charles Bukowski
 There are sketches on the walls of men and women and ducks,
and outside a large green bus swerves through traffic like
insanity sprung from a waving line; Turgenev, Turgenev,
says the radio, and Jane Austin, Jane Austin, too.
"I am going to do her portrait on the 28th, while you are
at work."
He is just this edge of fat and he walks constantly,...Read more of this...

Love Lies Sleeping

by Elizabeth Bishop
 Earliest morning, switching all the tracks
that cross the sky from cinder star to star,
 coupling the ends of streets 
 to trains of light.

now draw us into daylight in our beds;
and clear away what presses on the brain:
 put out the neon shapes 
 that float and swell and glare

down the gray avenue between the eyes
in pinks and yellows,...Read more of this...

Endimion and Phoebe (excerpts)

by Michael Drayton
 In Ionia whence sprang old poets' fame,
From whom that sea did first derive her name,
The blessed bed whereon the Muses lay,
Beauty of Greece, the pride of Asia,
Whence Archelaus, whom times historify,
First unto Athens brought philosophy:
In this fair region on a goodly plain,
Stretching her bounds unto the bord'ring main,
The mountain Latmus overlooks the sea,
Smiling to see the ocean billows play:
Latmus,...Read more of this...

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