Famous Rebuff Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Rebuff poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous rebuff poems. These examples illustrate what a famous rebuff poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
St Vincent Millay, Edna
...insist,
Having stealth and tact, thought not enough,
What hour your eye is on your wrist.
No wild appeal, no mild rebuff
Deflates the hour, leaves the wine flat—
Yet if YOU drop the picked-up book
To intercept my clockward look—
Tell me, can love go on like that?
Even the bored, insulted heart,
That signed so long and tight a lease,
Can BREAK it CONTRACT, slump in peace....Read more of this...
by
Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...time had I been on the edge,
And off again, of a foremeasured fall
Into the darkness and discomfiture
Of his oblique rebuff, that finally
My silence honored his, holding itself
Away from a gratuitous intrusion
That likely would have widened a new distance
Already wide enough, if not so new.
But there are seeming parallels in space
That may converge in time; and so it was
I walked with Avon, fought and pondered with him,
While he made out a case for So-and-so,
O...Read more of this...
by
Creeley, Robert
...fit that she
should quickly come right back to me.
Ah no, she says, and she is tough,
and smacks me down with her rebuff.
Ah no, she says, I will not come
after the bloody things you've done.
Oh wife, oh wife -- I tell you true,
I never loved no one but you.
I never will, it cannot be
another woman is for me.
That may be right, she will say then,
but as for me, there's other men.
And I will tell you I propose
to catch them firmly by the nose.
...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Robert
...ow---
XXIV.
When, if I think but deep enough,
You are wont to answer, prompt as rhyme;
And you, too, find without rebuff
Response your soul seeks many a time
Piercing its fine flesh-stuff.
XXV.
My own, confirm me! If I tread
This path back, is it not in pride
To think how little I dreamed it led
To an age so blest that, by its side,
Youth seems the waste instead?
XXVI.
My own, see where the years conduct!
At first, 'twas something our two souls
Should mi...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...e's nothing gained by whining, and you're not that kind of stuff;
You're a fighter from away back, and you WON'T take a rebuff;
Your trouble is that you don't know when you have had enough --
Don't give in.
If Fate should down you, just get up and take another cuff;
You may bank on it that there is no philosophy like bluff,
And grin....Read more of this...
by
Byron, George (Lord)
...she listened - 'tis enough -
Who listens once will listen twice;
Her heart, be sure, is not of ice,
And one refusal no rebuff.
VII
I loved, and was beloved again -
They tell me, Sire, you never knew
Those gentle frailties; if 'tis true,
I shorten all my joy or pain;
To you 'twould seem absurd as vain
But all men are not born to reign,
Or o'er their passions, or as you
Thus o'er themselves and nations too.
I am - or rather was - a prince,
A chief of thousands, and ...Read more of this...
by
Milton, John
...b-down he drops
Ten thousand fathom deep, and to this hour
Down had been falling, had not, by ill chance,
The strong rebuff of some tumultuous cloud,
Instinct with fire and nitre, hurried him
As many miles aloft. That fury stayed--
Quenched in a boggy Syrtis, neither sea,
Nor good dry land--nigh foundered, on he fares,
Treading the crude consistence, half on foot,
Half flying; behoves him now both oar and sail.
As when a gryphon through the wilderness
With ...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Robert
...sturbs our clod;
Nearer we hold of God
Who gives, than of His tribes that take, I must believe.
Then, welcome each rebuff
That turns earth's smoothness rough,
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go!
Be our joys three-parts pain!
Strive, and hold cheap the strain;
Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!
For thence,--a paradox
Which comforts while it mocks,--
Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail:
What I aspired to be,
And was not, comforts...Read more of this...
by
Dove, Rita
...'d like to come by
the studio," I ventured, "and see the new stuff."
"Yes, if you wish . . ."A delicate rebuff
before the warning: "He dresses all
in black now.Me, he drapes in blues and carmine--
and even though I think it's kinda cute,
in company I tend toward more muted shades."
She paused and had the grace
to drop her eyes.She did look ravishing,
spookily insubstantial, a lipstick ghost on tissue,
or as if one stood on a fifth-floor terrace
...Read more of this...
by
Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...life done for them; but something else
There was that foundered reason, overwhelmed it,
And with a chilled, intuitive rebuff
Beat back the self-cajoling sophistries
That his half-tutored thought would half-project.
What was it, then? Had he become transformed
And hardened through long watches and long grief
Into a loveless, feelingless dead thing
That brooded like a man, breathed like a man,—
Did everything but ache? And was a day
To come some time when feeling s...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Robert
...ould find with delight it could motion to strike him!
So found the Duke, and his mother like him:
The lady hardly got a rebuff---
That had not been contemptuous enough,
With his cursed smirk, as he nodded applause,
And kept off the old mother-cat's claws.
IX.
So, the little lady grew silent and thin,
Paling and ever paling,
As the way is with a hid chagrin;
And the Duke perceived that she was ailing,
And said in his heart, ``'Tis done to spite me,
``But I shall find...Read more of this...
by
Larkin, Philip
...Lonely in Ireland, since it was not home,
Strangeness made sense. The salt rebuff of speech,
Insisting so on difference, made me welcome:
Once that was recognised, we were in touch
Their draughty streets, end-on to hills, the faint
Archaic smell of dockland, like a stable,
The herring-hawker's cry, dwindling, went
To prove me separate, not unworkable.
Living in England has no such excuse:
These are my customs and esta...Read more of this...
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