Famous Seems Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Sonnet XLIII

by Francesco Petrarch
SONNET XLIII. Quel rosignuol che sì soave piagne. THE SONG OF THE NIGHTINGALE REMINDS HIM OF HIS UNHAPPY LOT.  Yon nightingale, whose bursts of thrilling tone,Pour'd in soft sorrow from her tuneful throat,Haply her mate or infant brood bemoan,Filling the fields and skies with pity's note;Here lingering till the long long...Read more of this...

Mayakovsky In New York: A Found Poem

by Annie Dillard
 New York: You take a train that rips through versts.
It feels as if the trains were running over your ears.

For many hours the train flies along the banks
of the Hudson about two feet from the water. At the stops,
passengers run out, buy up bunches of celery,
and run back in, chewing the stalks as they go.

Bridges leap over the train...Read more of this...

The Teachers Monologue

by Charlotte Bronte
 The room is quiet, thoughts alone 
People its mute tranquillity; 
The yoke put on, the long task done,­ 
I am, as it is bliss to be, 
Still and untroubled. Now, I see, 
For the first time, how soft the day 
O'er waveless water, stirless tree, 
Silent and sunny, wings its way. 
Now, as I watch that distant hill, 
So...Read more of this...

The Centenarians

by Robert William Service
 I asked of ancient gaffers three
 The way of their ripe living,
And this is what they told to me
 Without Misgiving.

The First: 'The why I've lived so long,
 To my fond recollection
Is that for women, wine and song
 I've had a predilection.
Full many a bawdy stave I've sung
 With wenches of my choosing,
But of the joys that kept me...Read more of this...

Sonnet LXXII

by Francesco Petrarch
SONNET LXXII. Ripensando a quel ch' oggi il ciel onora. HE WOULD DIE OF GRIEF WERE SHE NOT SOMETIMES TO CONSOLE HIM BY HER PRESENCE.  To that soft look which now adorns the skies,The graceful bending of the radiant head,[Pg 299]The face, the sweet angelic accents fled,That soothed me...Read more of this...

This Life Which Seems So Fair

by William Drummond
 This Life, which seems so fair,
Is like a bubble blown up in the air
By sporting children's breath,
Who chase it everywhere
And strive who can most motion it bequeath.
And though it sometimes seem of its own might
Like to an eye of gold to be fixed there,
And firm to hover in that empty height,
That only is because it is so light.
But in...Read more of this...

To Charlotte

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 'MIDST the noise of merriment and glee,

'Midst full many a sorrow, many a care,
Charlotte, I remember, we remember thee,

How, at evening's hour so fair,
Thou a kindly hand didst reach us,

When thou, in some happy place

Where more fair is Nature s face,

Many a lightly-hidden trace
Of a spirit loved didst teach us.

Well 'tis that thy worth I rightly knew,--

That I, in...Read more of this...

The House Of Dust: Part 04: 06: Cinema

by Conrad Aiken
 As evening falls,
The walls grow luminous and warm, the walls
Tremble and glow with the lives within them moving,
Moving like music, secret and rich and warm.
How shall we live to-night, where shall we turn?
To what new light or darkness yearn?
A thousand winding stairs lead down before us;
And one by one in myriads we descend
By lamplit flowered walls, long balustrades,
Through half-lit...Read more of this...

LEnvoi

by Robert William Service
 My job is done; my rhymes are ranked and ready,
 My word-battalions marching verse by verse;
Here stanza-companies are none too steady;
 There print-platoons are weak, but might be worse.
And as in marshalled order I review them,
 My type-brigades, unfearful of the fray,
My eyes that seek their faults are seeing through them
 Immortal visions of an epic day.

It seems I'm...Read more of this...

The House Of Dust: Part 04: 04: Counterpoint: Two Rooms

by Conrad Aiken
 He, in the room above, grown old and tired,
She, in the room below—his floor her ceiling—
Pursue their separate dreams. He turns his light,
And throws himself on the bed, face down, in laughter. . . .
She, by the window, smiles at a starlight night,

His watch—the same he has heard these cycles of ages—
Wearily chimes at seconds beneath his pillow.
The clock,...Read more of this...

A Tragedy

by Edith Nesbit
 Among his books he sits all day
To think and read and write;
He does not smell the new-mown hay,
The roses red and white.

I walk among them all alone,
His silly, stupid wife;
The world seems tasteless, dead and done -
An empty thing is life.

At night his window casts a square
Of light upon the lawn;
I sometimes walk and watch it there
Until the chill...Read more of this...

My Butterfly

by Robert Frost
 Thine emulous fond flowers are dead, too,
And the daft sun-assaulter, he
That frightened thee so oft, is fled or dead:
Saave only me
(Nor is it sad to thee!)
Save only me
There is none left to mourn thee in the fields.

The gray grass is scarce dappled with the snow;
Its two banks have not shut upon the river;
But it is long ago--
It seems forever--
Since...Read more of this...

Hymn to the Spirit of Nature

by Percy Bysshe Shelley
LIFE of Life! thy lips enkindle 
With their love the breath between them; 
And thy smiles before they dwindle 
Make the cold air fire: then screen them 
In those locks where whoso gazes 5 
Faints entangled in their mazes. 

Child of Light! thy limbs are burning 
Through the veil which seems to hide them  
As the radiant lines of...Read more of this...

The Iron Gate

by Oliver Wendell Holmes
 WHERE is this patriarch you are kindly greeting?
Not unfamiliar to my ear his name,
Nor yet unknown to many a joyous meeting
In days long vanished,-- is he still the same,

Or changed by years, forgotten and forgetting,
Dull-eared, dim-sighted, slow of speech and thought,
Still o'er the sad, degenerate present fretting,
Where all goes wrong, and nothing as it ought?

Old age, the graybeard! Well,...Read more of this...

Octaves

by Edwin Arlington Robinson
 I 

We thrill too strangely at the master's touch;
We shrink too sadly from the larger self
Which for its own completeness agitates
And undetermines us; we do not feel -- 
We dare not feel it yet -- the splendid shame
Of uncreated failure; we forget,
The while we groan, that God's accomplishment
Is always and unfailingly at hand. 

II 

Tumultuously void of a clean...Read more of this...

Senlin: His Cloudy Destiny

by Conrad Aiken
 1

Senlin sat before us and we heard him. 
He smoked his pipe before us and we saw him. 
Was he small, with reddish hair, 
Did he light his pipe with a meditative stare 
And a twinkling flame reflected in blue eyes? 
'I am alone': said Senlin; 'in a forest of leaves 
The single leaf that creeps and falls. 
The...Read more of this...

Sonnet CXVII

by Francesco Petrarch
SONNET CXVII. Che fai, alma? che pensi? avrem mai pace? DIALOGUE OF THE POET WITH HIS HEART.  P.        What actions fire thee, and what musings fill?Soul! is it peace, or truce, or war eterne? H.    Our lot I know not, but, as I discern,Her bright eyes favour not our cherish'd ill....Read more of this...

Lonesome

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Mother 's gone a-visitin' to spend a month er two,
An', oh, the house is lonesome ez a nest whose birds has flew
To other trees to build ag'in; the rooms seem jest so bare
That the echoes run like sperrits from the kitchen to the stair.
The shetters flap more lazy-like 'n what they used to do,
Sence mother 's gone a-visitin' to spend...Read more of this...

Sail On Sail On

by Thomas Moore
 Sail on, sail on, thou fearless bark -- 
Where'er blows the welcome wind, 
It cannot lead to scenes more dark, 
More sad than those we leave behind. 
Each wave that passes seems to say, 
"Though death beneath our smile may be, 
Less cold we are, less false than they, 
Whose smiling wreck'd thy hopes and thee." 

Sail on, sail...Read more of this...

Mortua Est

by Mihai Eminescu
Two candles, tall sentry, beside an earth mound, 
A dream with wings broken that trail to the ground,  
Loud flung from the belfry calamitous chime... 
'Tis thus that you passed o'er the bound'ries of time. 

Gone by are the hours when the heavens entire 
Flowed rivers of milk and grew flowers of fire, 
When the thunderous clouds were but...Read more of this...

Death And Birth

by Algernon Charles Swinburne
 Death and birth should dwell not near together:
Wealth keeps house not, even for shame, with dearth:
Fate doth ill to link in one brief tether
Death and birth.

Harsh the yoke that binds them, strange the girth
Seems that girds them each with each: yet whether
Death be best, who knows, or life on earth?

Ill the rose-red and the sable feather
Blend in one crown's...Read more of this...

Rabbi Ben Ezra

by Robert Browning
 Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in His hand
Who saith 'A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!'

Not that, amassing flowers,
Youth sighed 'Which rose make ours,
Which lily leave and then as best recall?'
Not that, admiring stars,
It yearned 'Nor...Read more of this...

Etesia Absent

by Henry Vaughan
 Love, the world's life! What a sad death
Thy absence is to lose our breath
At once and die, is but to live
Enlarged, without the scant reprieve
Of pulse and air: whose dull returns
And narrow circles the soul mourns.
But to be dead alive, and still
To wish, but never have our will:
To be possessed, and yet to miss;
To wed a true but absent...Read more of this...

Ione Dead the Long Year

by Ezra Pound
 Empty are the ways, 
Empty are the ways of this land 
And the flowers 
Bend over with heavy heads. 
They bend in vain. 
Empty are the ways of this land 
Where Ione 
Walked once, and now does not walk 
But seems like a person just gone....Read more of this...

The Garden of Proserpine

by Algernon Charles Swinburne
 Here, where the world is quiet;
Here, where all trouble seems
Dead winds' and spent waves' riot
In doubtful dreams of dreams;
I watch the green field growing
For reaping folk and sowing,
For harvest-time and mowing,
A sleepy world of streams.
I am tired of tears and laughter,
And men that laugh and weep;
Of what may come hereafter
For men that sow to reap:
I am weary of days...Read more of this...

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