Famous Ruining Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Study Of Reading Habits

...When getting my nose in a book
Cured most things short of school,
It was worth ruining my eyes
To know I could still keep cool,
And deal out the old right hook
To dirty dogs twice my size.

Later, with inch-thick specs,
Evil was just my lark:
Me and my coat and fangs
Had ripping times in the dark.
The women I clubbed with sex!
I broke them up like meringues.

Don't read much now: the dude
Who lets the girl down before
The hero arrives,...Read more of this...
by Larkin, Philip


Alastor: or the Spirit of Solitude

...eath the tempest's scourge
Like serpents struggling in a vulture's grasp.
Calm and rejoicing in the fearful war
Of wave ruining on wave, and blast on blast
Descending, and black flood on whirlpool driven
With dark obliterating course, he sate:
As if their genii were the ministers 
Appointed to conduct him to the light
Of those belovèd eyes, the Poet sate,
Holding the steady helm. Evening came on;
The beams of sunset hung their rainbow hues
High 'mid the shifting domes of shee...Read more of this...
by Shelley, Percy Bysshe

Epilogue

...e his father dead:

Sees death made drunk with war, sees time
Weave many-coloured crime with crime,
State overthrown on ruining state,
And dares not be disconsolate.
Only the soul hath feet to climb,
Only the soul hath room to wait,
Hath brows and eyes to hold sublime
Above all evil and all good,
All strength and all decrepitude.

She only, she since earth began,
The many-minded soul of man,
From one incognizable root
That bears such divers-coloured fruit,
Hath ruled for bles...Read more of this...
by Swinburne, Algernon Charles

Guinevere

...t arm, 
The mightiest of my knights, abode with me, 
Have everywhere about this land of Christ 
In twelve great battles ruining overthrown. 
And knowest thou now from whence I come--from him 
From waging bitter war with him: and he, 
That did not shun to smite me in worse way, 
Had yet that grace of courtesy in him left, 
He spared to lift his hand against the King 
Who made him knight: but many a knight was slain; 
And many more, and all his kith and kin 
Clave to him, and a...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord

Iceland First Seen

...l with grinding of ice, and record of scarce hidden fire,
But that there 'mid the grey grassy dales sore scarred by the ruining streams
Lives the tale of the Northland of old and the undying glory of dreams?

O land, as some cave by the sea where the treasures of old have been laid,
The sword it may be of a king whose name was the turning of fight;
Or the staff of some wise of the world that many things made and unmade,
Or the ring of a woman maybe whose woe is grown wealth a...Read more of this...
by Morris, William


Lucretius

...void was made in Nature, all her bonds
Crack'd; and I saw the flaring atom-streams
And torrents of her myriad universe,
Ruining along the illimitable inane,
Fly on to clash together again, and make
Another and another frame of things
For ever. That was mine, my dream, I knew it -- 
Of and belonging to me, as the dog
With inward yelp and restless forefoot plies
His function of the woodland; but the next! 
I thought that all the blood by Sylla shed 
Came driving rainlike down a...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord

Paradise Lost: Book 06

...of Heaven; eternal wrath 
Burnt after them to the bottomless pit. 
Hell heard the unsufferable noise, Hell saw 
Heaven ruining from Heaven, and would have fled 
Affrighted; but strict Fate had cast too deep 
Her dark foundations, and too fast had bound. 
Nine days they fell: Confounded Chaos roared, 
And felt tenfold confusion in their fall 
Through his wild anarchy, so huge a rout 
Incumbered him with ruin: Hell at last 
Yawning received them whole, and on them closed; 
Hel...Read more of this...
by Milton, John

Sonnet 125: Weret aught to me I bore the canopy

...e canopy,
With my extern the outward honouring,
Or laid great bases for eternity,
Which proves more short than waste or ruining?
Have I not seen dwellers on form and favour
Lose all, and more, by paying too much rent
For compound sweet forgoing simple savour,
Pitiful thrivers in their gazing spent?
No, let me be obsequious in thy heart,
And take thou my oblation, poor but free,
Which is not mixed with seconds, knows no art
But mutual render, only me for thee.
Hence, thou subo...Read more of this...
by Shakespeare, William

Sonnet CXXV

...he canopy,
With my extern the outward honouring,
Or laid great bases for eternity,
Which prove more short than waste or ruining?
Have I not seen dwellers on form and favour
Lose all, and more, by paying too much rent,
For compound sweet forgoing simple savour,
Pitiful thrivers, in their gazing spent?
No, let me be obsequious in thy heart,
And take thou my oblation, poor but free,
Which is not mix'd with seconds, knows no art,
But mutual render, only me for thee.
Hence, thou s...Read more of this...
by Shakespeare, William

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

...terans,
among helms, and shields, and chariots horses, elephants:
banners, castles, slings and rocks,
Falling, rushing, ruining! buried in the ruins, on Urthona's
dens.
All night beneath the ruins, then their sullen flames faded
emerge round the gloomy king,
With thunder and fire: leading his starry hosts thro' the
waste wilderness [PL 27]he promulgates his ten commands, 
glancing his beamy eyelids over the deep in dark dismay,
Where the son of fire in his eastern cloud, whil...Read more of this...
by Blake, William

The Rain and the Wind

...trees.

What does it profit a man to know
These tattered and tumbling skies
A million stately stars will show,
And the ruining grace of the after-glow
And the rush of the wild sunrise?

Ever the rain -- the rain and the wind!
Come, hunch with me over the fire,
Dream of the dreams that leered and grinned,
Ere the blood of the Year got chilled and thinned,
And the death came on desire!...Read more of this...
by Henley, William Ernest

The Witch Of Atlas

...ng bower
Lit by the gems of many a starry flower.

For, on the night when they were buried, she
Restored the embalmer's ruining, and shook
The light out of the funeral-lamps, to be
A mimic day within that deathy nook;
And she unwound the woven imagery
Of second childhood's swaddling-bands, and took
The coffin, its last cradle, from its niche,
And threw it with contempt into a ditch,

And there the body lay, age after age,
Mute, breathing, beating, warm, and undecaying,
Like o...Read more of this...
by Shelley, Percy Bysshe

To Walt Whitman In America

...of all things free,

With the sea-steeds footless and frantic,
White myriads for death to bestride
In the charge of the ruining Atlantic
Where deaths by regiments ride,
With clouds and clamours of waters,
With a long note shriller than slaughter's
On the furrowless fields world-wide,

With terror, with ardour and wonder,
With the soul of the season that wakes
When the weight of a whole year's thunder
In the tidestream of autumn breaks,
Let the flight of the wide-winged word
C...Read more of this...
by Swinburne, Algernon Charles

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