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Famous Serenity Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Milosz, Czeslaw
...s language is not for people.
Blessed be jubilation.
Vintages and harvests.
Even if not everyone
Is granted serenity....Read more of this...



by Brackenridge, Hugh Henry
...wait on virtue in the realms of day. 


This is that light which from remotest times 
Shone to the just; gave sweet serenity, 
And sunshine to the soul, of each wise sage, 
Fam'd patriarch, and holy man of God, 
Who in the infancy of time did walk 
With step unerring, through those dreary shades, 
Which veil'd the world e'er yet the golden sun 
Of revelation beam'd. Seth, Enos, and 
The family of him preserv'd from death 
By flood of waters. Abram and that swain 
...Read more of this...

by Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...ok
Was there. Even on the edge of that vast mountain,
Upheld by knotty roots and fallen rocks,
It overlooked in its serenity
The dark earth and the bending vault of stars.
It was a tranquil spot that seemed to smile
Even in the lap of horror. Ivy clasped
The fissured stones with its entwining arms,
And did embower with leaves forever green 
And berries dark the smooth and even space
Of its inviolated floor; and here
The children of the autumnal whirlwind bore
In w...Read more of this...

by Hardy, Thomas
...ole to Central Sea, 
Now steals along upon the Moon's meek shine 
In even monochrome and curving line 
Of imperturbable serenity. 

How shall I link such sun-cast symmetry 
With the torn troubled form I know as thine, 
That profile, placid as a brow divine, 
With continents of moil and misery? 

And can immense Mortality but throw 
So small a shade, and Heaven's high human scheme 
Be hemmed within the coasts yon arc implies? 

Is such the stellar gauge of earthly show, 
N...Read more of this...

by Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...e shines out of him again
An aged light that has no age or station -- 
The mystery that's his -- a mischievous
Half-mad serenity that laughs at fame
For being won so easy, and at friends
Who laugh at him for what he wants the most,
And for his dukedom down in Warwickshire; -- 
By which you see we're all a little jealous ....
Poor Greene! I fear the color of his name
Was even as that of his ascending soul;
And he was one where there are many others, -- 
Some sc...Read more of this...



by Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...en more 
That I forget. I may have been disturbed, 
I do not say that I was not annoyed, 
But something of the same serenity 
That fortified me later made me feel
For their skin-pricking arrows not so much 
Of pain as of a vigorous defect 
In this world’s archery. I might have tried, 
With a flat facetiousness, to demonstrate 
What they had only snapped at and thereby
Made out of my best evidence no more 
Than comfortable food for their conceit; 
But patient wisdom fr...Read more of this...

by Rilke, Rainer Maria
.....
What could come of it? She is a Lament.

Only those who died young, in their first state of
timeless serenity, while they are being weaned,
follow her lovingly. She waits for girls
and befriends them. Gently she shows them
what she is wearing. Pearls of grief
and the fine-spun veils of patience.-
With youths she walks in silence.

But there, where they live, in the valley,
an elderly Lament responds to the youth as he asks:-
We were once...Read more of this...

by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...n) what one had expected.
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,
At best, onl...Read more of this...

by Wilde, Oscar
...r, -
Ah! somehow life is bigger after all
Than any painted angel, could we see
The God that is within us! The old Greek serenity

Which curbs the passion of that level line
Of marble youths, who with untroubled eyes
And chastened limbs ride round Athena's shrine
And mirror her divine economies,
And balanced symmetry of what in man
Would else wage ceaseless warfare, - this at least within the span

Between our mother's kisses and the grave
Might so inform our lives, that we co...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...the sublimated kind;
A man may gain it yet be on the dole.
To me it's music of the heart and sunshine of the mind,
Serenity and sweetness of the soul.
You may not have a brace of bucks to jingle in your jeans,
Far less the dough to buy a motor car;
But though the row you're hoeing
May be grim, ungodly going,
If you think the skies are glowing -
 Then they are.

For a poor man may be wealthy and a millionaire may fail,
It all depends upon the point of view.
It...Read more of this...

by Taylor, Edward
...ng me
with weird syllogisms. Instead, these are the windless,
halcyon days. The lull dispassion is upon us.
Serenity has triumphed in its mindless, atrophied way.
A school of Stoics walks by, eager, in its phlegmatic way,
to observe human degradation, lust and debauchery
at close quarters. They are disappointed,
but it barely shows on their faces. They are late Stoa,
very late. They missed the bus. They should have
been here last night. The...Read more of this...

by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...endless strife, 
The discord in the harmonies of life! 
The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, 
And all the sweet serenity of books; 
The market-place, the eager love of gain, 
Whose aim is vanity, and whose end is pain! 


But why, you ask me, should this tale be told 
To men grown old, or who are growing old? 
It is too late! Ah, nothing is too late 
Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate. 
Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles 
Wrote his grand Oedipus, a...Read more of this...

by Collins, Billy
...ugh to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.

Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark h...Read more of this...

by Gibran, Kahlil
...nd the faith of both. 

Among the hills, when you sit in the cool shade of the white poplars, sharing the peace and serenity of distant fields and meadows - then let your heart say in silence, "God rests in reason." 

And when the storm comes, and the mighty wind shakes the forest, and thunder and lightning proclaim the majesty of the sky, - then let your heart say in awe, "God moves in passion." 

And since you are a breath In God's sphere, and a leaf in God's fo...Read more of this...

by Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...ng,
Assured and certain that if you see right 
Others will have to see—albeit their seeing 
Shall irk them out of their serenity 
For such a time as umbrage may require. 
But there are many reptiles in the night 
That now is coming on, and they are hungry; 
And there’s a Rembrandt to be satisfied 
Who never will be, howsoever much 
He be assured of an ascendency 
That has not yet a shadow’s worth of sound
Where Holland has its ears. And what of that? 
Have you the wea...Read more of this...

by Petrarch, Francesco
...y,Cheer'd by her presence and her smiles, assumeSuperior lustre and serenity. Nott....Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...ytown.
Strong, self-made men, yet seek to trace
Benignity in any face;
Grim purpose, mastery maybe,
Yet never sweet serenity;
Never contentment, thoughts that bless -
That mellow joy I deem Success.

The haply seek some humble hearth,
Quite poor in goods yet rich in mirth,
And see a man of common clay
Watching his little ones at play;
A laughing fellow full of cheer,
Health, strength and faith that mocks at fear;
Who for his happiness relies
On joys he lights in other...Read more of this...

by Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...em 
Of self, and with illusions long as life. 
You know them well, and you have smiled at them; 
And they, in their serenity, may have had 
Their time to smile at you. Blessed are they
That see themselves for what they never were 
Or were to be, and are, for their defect, 
At ease with mirrors and the dim remarks 
That pass their tranquil ears.” 

“Come, come,” said I;
“There may be names in your compendium 
That we are not yet all on fire for shouting. 
Skin ...Read more of this...

by Petrarch, Francesco
...uteous breast,In its meek virtues wrapt, and best prepared,Had with serenity the heavens imprest:No power of darkness, with ill influence, daredWithin a space so holy to intrude,Till Death his terrible triumph had declared.Then hush'd was all lament, all fear subdued;Each on those beauteous featur...Read more of this...

by Simic, Charles
...offee dregs,
Thumbing the pages of the Farmer's Almanac.
But no! You love to put on airs,
And cultivate your famous serenity
While you sit behind your big desk
With zilch in your in-tray, zilch
In your out-tray,
And all of eternity spread around you.

Doesn't it give you the creeps
To hear them begging you on their knees,
Sputtering endearments,
As if you were an inflatable, life-size doll?
Tell them to button up and go to bed.
Stop pretending you're too busy to t...Read more of this...

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Book: Shattered Sighs