Famous Retrospect Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Retrospect poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous retrospect poems. These examples illustrate what a famous retrospect poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Dickinson, Emily
...Embryo --
The Boys that whistled are extinct --
The Cows that fed and thanked
Remanded to a Ballad's Barn
Or Clover's Retrospect --...Read more of this...
by
Murray, Les
...All the air conditioners now slacken
their hummed carrier wave. Once again
we've served our three months with remissions
in the steam and dry iron of this seaboard.
In jellied glare, through the nettle-rash season
we've watched the sky's fermenting laundry
portend downpours. Some came, and steamed away,
and we were clutched back into the rancid...Read more of this...
by
Southey, Robert
...--dreams of infancy! fit tales
For garrulous beldames to affrighten babes!
I have been guilty, yet my mind can bear
The retrospect of guilt, yet in the hour
Of deep contrition to THE ETERNAL look
For mercy! for the child of Poverty,
And "disinherited of happiness,"
What if I warr'd upon the world? the world
Had wrong'd me first: I had endur'd the ills
Of hard injustice; all this goodly earth
Was but to me one wild waste wilderness;
I had no share in Nature's patrimony,
Blast...Read more of this...
by
Campbell, Thomas
...y wo's excess,
That thou hast been to me all tenderness,
And friend no more than human friendship just.
Oh! by that retrospect of happiness,
And by the hopes of an immortal trust,
God shall assuage thy pangs--when I am laid in dust!
Go, Henry, go not back, when I depart,
The scene thy bursting tears too deep will move,
Where my dear father took thee to his heart,
And Gertrude thought it ecstacy to rove
With thee, as with an angel, through the grove
Of peace, imagining he...Read more of this...
by
Raine, Kathleen
...
Sees me; forest and flower, bird and beast
Know and hold me forever in the world's thought,
Creation's deep untroubled retrospect.
When your hand touches mine it is the earth
That takes me--the green grass,
And rocks and rivers; the green graves,
And children still unborn, and ancestors,
In love passed down from hand to hand from God.
Your love comes from the creation of the world,
From those paternal fingers, streaming through the clouds
That break with light the s...Read more of this...
by
Dickinson, Emily
...Glory
And wished myself were They.
What is to be is best descried
When it has also been --
Could Prospect taste of Retrospect
The tyrannies of Men
Were Tenderer -- diviner
The Transitive toward.
A Bayonet's contrition
Is nothing to the Dead....Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...saucer. So we got one in and we're sure it was the
right one.
A friend was sleeping in another room. In retrospect I
hope we didn't wake him up, though he has been awakened and
gone to sleep hundreds of times since then.
During the pregnancy I stared innocently at that growing
human center and had no idea the child therein contained
would ever meet Trout Fishing in America Shorty.
Saturday afternoon we went down to Washington Square.
We pu...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...res,
I sound, to commence, the cry, with thee, O soul,
The Past! the Past! the Past!
The Past! the dark, unfathom’d retrospect!
The teeming gulf! the sleepers and the shadows!
The past! the infinite greatness of the past!
For what is the present, after all, but a growth out of the past?
(As a projectile, form’d, impell’d, passing a certain line, still keeps on,
So the present, utterly form’d, impell’d by the past.)
2
Passage, O soul, to India!
Eclaircise the myt...Read more of this...
by
Brooke, Rupert
...In your arms was still delight,
Quiet as a street at night;
And thoughts of you, I do remember,
Were green leaves in a darkened chamber,
Were dark clouds in a moonless sky.
Love, in you, went passing by,
Penetrative, remote, and rare,
Like a bird in the wide air,
And, as the bird, it left no trace
In the heaven of your face.
In your stupidity I fou...Read more of this...
by
Eliot, George
...growing life of man.
So we inherit that sweet purity
For which we struggled, failed, and agonized
With widening retrospect that bred despair.
Rebellious flesh that would not be subdued,
A vicious parent shaming still its child,
Poor anxious penitence, is quick dissolved;
Its discords, quenched by meeting harmonies,
Die in the large and charitable air,
And all our rarer, better, truer self
That sobbed religiously in yearning song,
That watched to ease the b...Read more of this...
by
Dickinson, Emily
...year.
And then, that we have followed them,
We more than half suspect,
So intimate have we become
With their dear retrospect....Read more of this...
by
Turner Smith, Charlotte
...es; and those years
Have taught me so much sorrow, that my soul
Feels not the joy reviving Nature brings;
But, in dark retrospect, dejected dwells
On human follies, and on human woes.----
What is the promise of the infant year,
The lively verdure, or the bursting blooms,
To those, who shrink from horrors such as War
Spreads o'er the affrighted world? With swimming eye,
Back on the past they throw their mournful looks,
And see the Temple, which they fondly hop'd
Reason wo...Read more of this...
by
Aiken, Conrad
...> .
My peril goes out from me, is blown among you.
We loiter, dreaming together, along the street.
V. RETROSPECT
Round white clouds roll slowly above the housetops,
Over the clear red roofs they flow and pass.
A flock of pigeons rises with blue wings flashing,
Rises with whistle of wings, hovers an instant,
And settles slowly again on the tarnished grass.
And one old man looks down from a dusty window
And sees the pigeons circling about the fountai...Read more of this...
by
Aiken, Conrad
...Round white clouds roll slowly above the housetops,
Over the clear red roofs they flow and pass.
A flock of pigeons rises with blue wings flashing,
Rises with whistle of wings, hovers an instant,
And settles slowly again on the tarnished grass.
And one old man looks down from a dusty window
And sees the pigeons circling about the fountain
And desi...Read more of this...
by
Dickinson, Emily
...The last of Summer is Delight --
Deterred by Retrospect.
'Tis Ecstasy's revealed Review --
Enchantment's Syndicate.
To meet it -- nameless as it is --
Without celestial Mail --
Audacious as without a Knock
To walk within the Veil....Read more of this...
by
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...s
Above the unrisen morrow:' then to me;
'Know you no song of your own land,' she said,
'Not such as moans about the retrospect,
But deals with the other distance and the hues
Of promise; not a death's-head at the wine.'
Then I remembered one myself had made,
What time I watched the swallow winging south
From mine own land, part made long since, and part
Now while I sang, and maidenlike as far
As I could ape their treble, did I sing.
'O Swallow, Swallow,...Read more of this...
by
Dickinson, Emily
...ithdraw
And adequate, erect,
The House support itself
And cease to recollect
The Auger and the Carpenter --
Just such a retrospect
Hath the perfected Life --
A past of Plank and Nail
And slowness -- then the Scaffolds drop
Affirming it a Soul....Read more of this...
by
Skillman, Judith
...ered
a snippet from a French film in which a woman
masturbates with a fish, and thought how progressive
I had become in retrospect. There we were,
left behind by the tides, deserted by
the institution of wind on a night
so soundless it could have been our first
night together, before we became victims
of those slippery, dirty, messy words....Read more of this...
by
Dickinson, Emily
...To make Routine a Stimulus
Remember it can cease --
Capacity to Terminate
Is a Specific Grace --
Of Retrospect the Arrow
That power to repair
Departed with the Torment
Become, alas, more fair --...Read more of this...
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