Famous Rigorous Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Orchard Trees January

by Richard Wilbur
 It's not the case, though some might wish it so
Who from a window watch the blizzard blow

White riot through their branches vague and stark,
That they keep snug beneath their pelted bark.

They take affliction in until it jells
To crystal ice between their frozen cells,

And each of them is inwardly a vault
Of jewels rigorous and free of fault,

Unglimpsed until in May...Read more of this...

To The God of Pain

by Sarojini Naidu
 UNWILLING priestess in thy cruel fane, 
Long hast thou held me, pitiless god of Pain, 
Bound to thy worship by reluctant vows, 
My tired breast girt with suffering, and my brows 
Anointed with perpetual weariness. 
Long have I borne thy service, through the stress 
Of rigorous years, sad days and slumberless nights, 
Performing thine inexorable rites. 


For thy dark...Read more of this...

Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse

by Matthew Arnold
 Through Alpine meadows soft-suffused
With rain, where thick the crocus blows,
Past the dark forges long disused,
The mule-track from Saint Laurent goes.
The bridge is cross'd, and slow we ride,
Through forest, up the mountain-side. 

The autumnal evening darkens round,
The wind is up, and drives the rain;
While, hark! far down, with strangled sound
Doth the Dead Guier's stream complain,
Where that wet smoke, among the...Read more of this...

Philosophy

by Amy Levy
 Ere all the world had grown so drear,
When I was young and you were here,
'Mid summer roses in summer weather,
What pleasant times we've had together!

We were not Phyllis, simple-sweet,
And Corydon; we did not meet
By brook or meadow, but among
A Philistine and flippant throng

Which much we scorned; (less rigorous
It had no scorn at all for us!)
How many an eve of...Read more of this...

Sonnet XII

by Edmund Spenser
 ONe day I sought with her hart-thrilling eies,
to make a truce and termes to entertaine:
all fearlesse then of so false enimies,
which sought me to entrap in treasons traine.
So as I then disarmed did remaine,
a wicked ambush which lay hidden long
in the close couert of her guilefull eyen,
thence breaking forth did thick about me throng,
Too feeble I t'abide the brunt...Read more of this...

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