Famous Recede Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Sonnet V

by Alan Seeger
 A tide of beauty with returning May 
Floods the fair city; from warm pavements fume 
Odors endeared; down avenues in bloom 
The chestnut-trees with phallic spires are gay. 
Over the terrace flows the thronged cafe; 
The boulevards are streams of hurrying sound; 
And through the streets, like veins when they abound, 
The lust for pleasure throbs itself away. 
Here...Read more of this...

Sleep In The Mojave Desert

by Sylvia Plath
 Out here there are no hearthstones,
Hot grains, simply. It is dry, dry.
And the air dangerous. Noonday acts queerly
On the mind's eye erecting a line
Of poplars in the middle distance, the only
Object beside the mad, straight road
One can remember men and houses by.
A cool wind should inhabit these leaves
And a dew collect on them, dearer than money,
In the blue hour...Read more of this...

Ambulances

by Philip Larkin
Closed like confessionals, they thread
Loud noons of cities, giving back
None of the glances they absorb.
Light glossy grey, arms on a plaque,
They come to rest at any kerb:
All streets in time are visited.

Then children strewn on steps or road,
Or women coming from the shops
Past smells of different dinners, see
A wild white face that overtops
Red stretcher-blankets momently
As it is carried in and...Read more of this...

In Guernsey - To Theodore Watts

by Algernon Charles Swinburne
 The heavenly bay, ringed round with cliffs and moors,
Storm-stained ravines, and crags that lawns inlay,
Soothes as with love the rocks whose guard secures
The heavenly bay.

O friend, shall time take ever this away,
This blessing given of beauty that endures,
This glory shown us, not to pass but stay?

Though sight be changed for memory, love ensures
What memory, changed by love to sight,...Read more of this...

City of Ships

by Walt Whitman
 CITY of ships! 
(O the black ships! O the fierce ships! 
O the beautiful, sharp-bow’d steam-ships and sail-ships!) 
City of the world! (for all races are here; 
All the lands of the earth make contributions here;)
City of the sea! city of hurried and glittering tides! 
City whose gleeful tides continually rush or recede, whirling in and out, with eddies...Read more of this...

In the Home Stretch

by Robert Frost
 SHE stood against the kitchen sink, and looked
Over the sink out through a dusty window
At weeds the water from the sink made tall.
She wore her cape; her hat was in her hand.
Behind her was confusion in the room,
Of chairs turned upside down to sit like people
In other chairs, and something, come to look,
For every room a house has—parlor, bed-room,
And...Read more of this...

Clenched Soul

by Pablo Neruda
 We have lost even this twilight.
No one saw us this evening hand in hand
while the blue night dropped on the world.

I have seen from my window
the fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops.

Sometimes a piece of sun
burned like a coin in my hand.

I remembered you with my soul clenched
in that sadness of mine that you know.

Where were you...Read more of this...

Antimatter

by Russell Edson
 On the other side of a mirror there's an inverse world, 
where the insane go sane; where bones climb out of the 
earth and recede to the first slime of love.

 And in the evening the sun is just rising.

 Lovers cry because they are a day younger, and soon 
childhood robs them of their pleasure.

 In such a...Read more of this...

Byzantium

by William Butler Yeats
 The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night walkers' song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.

Before me floats an image, man or shade,
Shade more than man, more image than a shade;
For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth
May unwind the...Read more of this...

Dream Song 130: When I saw my friend covered with blood I thought

by John Berryman
 When I saw my friend covered with blood, I thought
This is the end of the dream, now I'll wake up.
That was more years ago
than I care to reckon, and my friend is not 
dying but adhering to an élite group
in California O.

Why did I never wake, when covered with blood
I saw my fearful friend, his nerves are bad
with the...Read more of this...

Just lost when I was saved!

by Emily Dickinson
 Just lost, when I was saved!
Just felt the world go by!
Just girt me for the onset with Eternity,
When breath blew back,
And on the other side
I heard recede the disappointed tide!

Therefore, as One returned, I feel
Odd secrets of the line to tell!
Some Sailor, skirting foreign shores --
Some pale Reporter, from the awful doors
Before the Seal!

Next time, to stay!
Next time, the...Read more of this...

A Fine Madness

by Barry Tebb
 Any poets about or bored muses fancying a day out?

Rainy, windy, cold Leeds City Station

Half-way through its slow chaotic transformation

Contractors’ morning break, overalls, hard hats and harness

Flood McDonalds where I sip my tea and try to translate Val?ry.



London has everything except my bardic inspiration

I’ve only to step off the coach in Leeds and it whistles

Its bravuras down every wind,...Read more of this...

Centenarian's Story The

by Walt Whitman
 GIVE me your hand, old Revolutionary; 
The hill-top is nigh—but a few steps, (make room, gentlemen;) 
Up the path you have follow’d me well, spite of your hundred and extra years; 
You can walk, old man, though your eyes are almost done; 
Your faculties serve you, and presently I must have them serve me.

Rest, while I tell what the...Read more of this...

Roast Leviathan

by Louis Untermeyer
"Old Jews!" Well, David, aren't we?
What news is that to make you see so red,
To swear and almost tear your beard in half?
Jeered at? Well, let them laugh.
You can laugh longer when you're dead.
What? Are you still too blind to see?
Have you forgot your Midrash!... They were right,
The little goyim, with their angry stones.
You should be buried in the desert...Read more of this...

Divided

by Jean Ingelow
.

An empty sky, a world of heather,
  Purple of foxglove, yellow of broom;
We two among them wading together,
  Shaking out honey, treading perfume.
Crowds of bees are giddy with clover,
  Crowds of grasshoppers skip at our feet,
Crowds of larks at their matins hang over,
  Thanking the Lord for a life so sweet.
Flusheth the rise with her purple...Read more of this...

At the Window

by D. H. Lawrence
 The pine-trees bend to listen to the autumn wind as it mutters 
Something which sets the black poplars ashake with hysterical laughter; 
While slowly the house of day is closing its eastern shutters. 

Further down the valley the clustered tombstones recede, 
Winding about their dimness the mist’s grey cerements, after
The street lamps in the darkness have suddenly started to...Read more of this...

Sonnet XLVIII

by Francesco Petrarch
SONNET XLVIII. Tempo era omai da trovar pace o tregua. HE CONSOLES HIMSELF WITH THE BELIEF THAT SHE NOW AT LAST SYMPATHISES WITH HIM.  'Twas time at last from so long war to findSome peace or truce, and, haply, both were nigh,But Death their welcome feet has turn'd behind,Who levels all distinctions,...Read more of this...

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