Famous Relish Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Psalm 16 part 1

by Isaac Watts
 Confession of our poverty.

Preserve me, Lord, in time of need,
For succor to thy throne I flee,
But have no merits there to plead:
My goodness cannot reach to thee.

Oft have my heart and tongue confessed
How empty and how poor I am;
My praise can never make thee blessed,
Nor add new glories to thy name.

Yet, Lord, thy saints on earth may reap
Some profit...Read more of this...

The Habit Of Perfection

by Gerard Manley Hopkins
 Elected Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorlèd ear,
Pipe me to pastures still and be
The music that I care to hear. 

Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb:
It is the shut, the curfew sent
From there where all surrenders come
Which only makes you eloquent. 

Be shellèd, eyes, with double dark
And find the uncreated light:
This ruck and reel which you remark
Coils, keeps,...Read more of this...

Sonnet XLII: Some Men There Be

by Michael Drayton
 Some men there be which like my method well 
And much commend the strangeness of my vein; 
Some say I have a passing pleasing strain; 
Some say that im my humor I excel; 
Some, who not kindly relish my conceit, 
They say, as poets do, I use to feign, 
And in bare words paint out my passion's pain. 
Thus...Read more of this...

La Belle Dame sans Merci

by John Keats
'O WHAT can ail thee knight-at-arms  
Alone and palely loitering? 
The sedge is wither'd from the lake  
And no birds sing. 

'O what can ail thee knight-at-arms 5 
So haggard and so woe-begone? 
The squirrel's granary is full  
And the harvest 's done. 

'I see a lily on thy brow 
With anguish moist and fever dew; 10...Read more of this...

When I have Fears that I may cease to be

by John Keats
WHEN I have fears that I may cease to be 
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain  
Before high pil`d books in charact'ry  
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain; 
When I behold upon the night's starr'd face 5 
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance  
And feel that I may never live to trace 
Their...Read more of this...

The Wounded Bird

by Katherine Mansfield
 In the wide bed
Under the freen embroidered quilt
With flowers and leaves always in soft motion
She is like a wounded bird resting on a pool.

The hunter threw his dart
And hit her breast,--
Hit her but did not kill.
"O my wings, lift me--lift me!
I am not dreadfully hurt!"
Down she dropped and was still.

Kind people come to the edge of the pool with...Read more of this...

The Legend Of The One-Eyed Man

by Anne Sexton
 Like Oedipus I am losing my sight.
LIke Judas I have done my wrong.
Their punishment is over;
the shame and disgrace of it
are all used up.
But as for me,
look into my face
and you will know that crimes dropped upon me
as from a high building
and although I cannot speak of them
or explain the degrading details
I have remembered much
about Judas -
about Judas, the...Read more of this...

Mental Cases

by Wilfred Owen
 Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?
Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,
Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish,
Baring teeth that leer like skulls' tongues wicked?
Stroke on stroke of pain, -- but what slow panic,
Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets?
Ever from their hair and through their hand palms
Misery swelters. Surely we have perished
Sleeping, and walk hell; but...Read more of this...

Ode to Himself upon the Censure of his New Inn

by Ben Jonson
 Come, leave the loathed stage,
And the more loathsome age;
Where pride and impudence, in faction knit,
Usurp the chair of wit!
Indicting and arraigning every day
Something they call a play.
Let their fastidious, vain
Commission of the brain
Run on and rage, sweat, censure, and condemn;
They were not made for thee, less thou for them.

Say that thou pour'st them wheat,
And they will acorns eat;
'Twere simple...Read more of this...

The Unfortunate Lover

by Andrew Marvell
 Alas, how pleasant are their dayes
With whom the Infant Love yet playes!
Sorted by pairs, they still are seen
By Fountains cool, and Shadows green.
But soon these Flames do lose their light,
Like Meteors of a Summers night:
Nor can they to that Region climb,
To make impression upon Time.

'Twas in a Shipwrack, when the Seas
Rul'd, and the Winds did what they please,
That my...Read more of this...

Rise O Days

by Walt Whitman
 1
RISE, O days, from your fathomless deeps, till you loftier, fiercer sweep! 
Long for my soul, hungering gymnastic, I devour’d what the earth gave me; 
Long I roam’d the woods of the north—long I watch’d Niagara pouring; 
I travel’d the prairies over, and slept on their breast—I cross’d the
 Nevadas, I
 cross’d the plateaus; 
I ascended the towering rocks...Read more of this...

Hymn 77

by Isaac Watts
 The love of Christ to the church, in his language to her, 
and provisions for her.

SS 7:5-13. 

Now in the galleries of his grace
Appears the King, and thus he says,
"How fair my saints are in my sight!
My love how pleasant for delight!"

Kind is thy language, sovereign Lord,
There's heav'nly grace in every word;
From that dear mouth a stream divine
Flows sweeter...Read more of this...

The Song Of The Mouth-Organ

by Robert William Service
 (With apologies to the singer of the "Song of the Banjo".)


I'm a homely little bit of tin and bone;
 I'm beloved by the Legion of the Lost;
I haven't got a "vox humana" tone,
 And a dime or two will satisfy my cost.
I don't attempt your high-falutin' flights;
 I am more or less uncertain on the key;
But I tell you,...Read more of this...

The Flower

by George Herbert
 How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean
Are thy returns! ev'n as the flowers in spring;
To which, besides their own demean,
The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.
Grief melts away
Like snows in May,
As if there were no such cold thing.

Who would have thought my shrivelled heart
Could have recovered greenness? It was gone
Quite under ground; as flowers depart
To see their mother-root,...Read more of this...

sea horn

by Rg Gregory
 within the shell swim all the sea's fish
our ears too are compendiums of sound
the big bang exploded - such a long wish
waves and warps towards the present ground

shell to ear - each breeds the other's cry
infinity in slices sluiced in words
haunting the future in us till we die
and what we cannot bring to reason birds

mock in us - lift...Read more of this...

When your hand, on an evening

by Emile Verhaeren
When your hand, on an evening of the sluggish months, commits to the odorous cupboards the fruits of your orchard, I seem to see you calmly arranging our old perfumed and sweet-tasting memories.
And my relish for them returns, as it was in former years in the gold and the sun and with the wind on my lips; and then I...Read more of this...

On Fayrford Windowes

by William Strode
 I know no paynt of poetry
Can mend such colourd Imag'ry
In sullen inke: yet Fayrford, I
May relish thy fayre memory.


Such is the Ecchoes faynter sound,
Such is the light when sunne is drownd;
So did the fancy looke upon
The worke before it was begunne:
Yet when those shewes are out of sight
My weaker colours may delight.


Those Images so faythfully
Report true feature to the...Read more of this...

154. Lines Inscribed under Fergusson's Portrait

by Robert Burns
 CURSE on ungrateful man, that can be pleased,
And yet can starve the author of the pleasure.
O thou, my elder brother in misfortune,
By far my elder brother in the Muses,
With tears I pity thy unhappy fate!
Why is the Bard unpitied by the world,
Yet has so keen a relish of its pleasures?...Read more of this...

Sonnet XXV: O Why Should Nature

by Michael Drayton
 O why should Nature niggardly restrain 
That foreign nations relish not our tongue? 
Else should my lines glide on the waves of Rhene 
And crown the Pyrens with my living song. 
But, bounded thus, to Scotland get you forth, 
Thence take you wing unto the Orcades; 
There let my verse get glory in the North, 
Making my sighs to...Read more of this...

A Lesson In Vengeance

by Sylvia Plath
 In the dour ages
Of drafty cells and draftier castles,
Of dragons breathing without the frame of fables,
Saint and king unfisted obstruction's knuckles
By no miracle or majestic means,

But by such abuses
As smack of spite and the overscrupulous
Twisting of thumbscrews: one soul tied in sinews,
One white horse drowned, and all the unconquered pinnacles
Of God's city and Babylon's

Must wait, while here Suso's
Hand hones...Read more of this...

The Bride Of Corinth

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 [First published in Schiller's Horen, in connection 
with a
friendly contest in the art of ballad-writing between the two
great poets, to which many of their finest works are owing.]

ONCE a stranger youth to Corinth came,

Who in Athens lived, but hoped that he
From a certain townsman there might claim,

As his father's friend, kind courtesy.

Son and daughter, they

Had been wont to say

Should...Read more of this...

The Grocery

by Amy Lowell
 "Hullo, Alice!"
"Hullo, Leon!"
"Say, Alice, gi' me a couple
O' them two for five cigars,
Will yer?"
"Where's your nickel?"
"My! Ain't you close!
Can't trust a feller, can yer."
"Trust you! Why
What you owe this store
Would set you up in business.
I can't think why Father 'lows it."
"Yer Father's a sight more neighbourly
Than you be. That's a fact.
Besides, he knows I got a vote."
"A vote! Oh,...Read more of this...

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