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Famous Shards Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry
...fine a term
for the indeterminable,
the human aspect, here
in the West Village, spindles
to a mutilated dazzle—

niched shards of solitude
embedded in these brownstone
walkups such that the Hudson
at the foot of Twelfth Street
might be a thing that's 
done with mirrors: definition

by deracination—grunge,
hip-hop, Chinese takeout,
co-ops—while the globe's
elixir caters, year by year,
to the resurgence of this
climbing tentpole, frilled and stippled

yet again with bloom
to gr...Read more of this...
by Clampitt, Amy



...s.

We blew them into fucking ****.
They are eating it.

Praise the Lord for all good things.

We blew their balls into shards of dust,
Into shards of fucking dust.

We did it.

Now I want you to come over here and kiss me on the mouth....Read more of this...
by Pinter, Harold
...hispered, "Despair not?"
Thus did that poor soul wander in want and cheerless discomfort
Bleeding, barefooted, over the shards and thorns of existence.
Let me essay, O Muse! to follow the wanderer's footsteps;--
Not through each devious path, each changeful year of existence;
But as a traveller follows a streamlet's course through the valley:
Far from its margin at times, and seeing the gleam of its water
Here and there, in some open space, and at intervals only;
Then drawing...Read more of this...
by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...ne battle, but a weary life's campaign.
Yet meaner lot being sent
Should more than me content;
Yea, if I lie
Among vile shards, though born for silver wings,
In the strong flight and feathers gold
Of whatsoever heavenward mounts and sings
I must by admiration so comply
That there I should my own delight behold.
Yea, though I sin each day times seven,
And dare not lift the fearfullest eyes to Heaven,
Thanks must I give
Because that seven times are not eight or nine,
And that m...Read more of this...
by Patmore, Coventry
...r have the time, Jane Wayland; 
And I dare say all this moonlight lying round us might as well 
Fall for nothing on the shards of broken urns that are forgotten, 
As on two that have no longer much of anything to tell.”...Read more of this...
by Robinson, Edwin Arlington



...body feels angry,
short-changed, cheated,
everybody is despondent,
dissillusioned)

I welcomed shots of
peace, tattered shards of
happiness.

I embraced that stuff
like the hottest number,
like high heels,breasts,
singing,the
works.

(dont get me wrong,
there is such a thing as cockeyed optimism
that overlooks all
basic problems justr for
the sake of
itself-
this is a sheild and a 
sickness.)

The knife got near my
throat again,
I almost turned on the
gas
again
but when the g...Read more of this...
by Bukowski, Charles
...ay down
and all the way down. And you,
in your sinking isolation
booth, you go down, too,
through this food-snow, these shards,
bits of planet, its flora
and flesh, you
slip straight down, unreeled,
until the bottom's oozy silt, the sucking
baby-soft muck,
welcomes you
to the deep sea's bed,
a million anvils per square inch
pressing on your skull.
How silent here, how much life,
few places deeper on earth,
none with more width....Read more of this...
by Lux, Thomas
...
But there are demons that are longer-lived 
Than doubts that have a brief and evil term
To congregate among the futile shards 
And architraves of eminent collapse. 
They are a many-favored family, 
All told, with not a misbegotten dwarf 
Among the rest that I can love so little
As one occult abortion in especial 
Who perches on a picture (when it’s done) 
And says, “What of it, Rembrandt, if you do?” 
This incubus would seem to be a sort 
Of chorus, indicating, for our good,...Read more of this...
by Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...ills
Where vapors breed?

"And -- if needs must --
Advance, O Summer-heats! upon the land,
And bake the bloody mould to shards and sand
And dust.

"Before your birth,
Burn up, O Roses! with your dainty flame.
Good Violets, sweet Violets, hide shame
Below the earth.

"Ye silent Mills,
Reject the bitter kindness of the moss.
O Farms! protest if any tree emboss
The barren hills.

"Young Trade is dead,
And swart Work sullen sits in the hillside fern
And folds his arms that find n...Read more of this...
by Lanier, Sidney
...That others cannot see his shows.
To them his smoke is sightless, black,
His votive vessels but a pack
Of old discarded shards, his fire
A peddler's; still to him the pyre
Is incensed, an enduring goal!
He sighs and grubs another coal....Read more of this...
by Lowell, Amy
...ing his head of might;
Here was the archer, swift Apollo, lamed;
The shapely limbs of Venus hid from sight
By weeds and shards; Diana's ankles light
Bound with the cable of some coasting ship;
And rusty nails through Helen's maddening lip.

Therefrom unto the chambers did he pass,
And found them fair still, midst of their decay,
Though in them now no sign of man there was,
And everything but stone had passed away
That made them lovely in that vanished day;
Nay, the mere walls...Read more of this...
by Morris, William
...signs are sweetly manifold
 Of plenty, praise and peace.
Yet see! The sky is like a cowl
 Where grimy toilers bore
The shards of steel that feed the foul
 Red maw of War.

Instead of butter give us guns;
 Instead of sugur, shells.
Devoted mothers, bear your sons
 To glut still hotter hells.
Alas! When will mad mankind wake
 To banish evermore,
And damn for God in Heaven's sake
 Mass Murder--WAR?...Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William
...e is this knot, 
By gentleness than war. I want her love. 
What were I nigher this although we dashed 
Your cities into shards with catapults, 
She would not love;--or brought her chained, a slave, 
The lifting of whose eyelash is my lord, 
Not ever would she love; but brooding turn 
The book of scorn, till all my flitting chance 
Were caught within the record of her wrongs, 
And crushed to death: and rather, Sire, than this 
I would the old God of war himself were dead, 
For...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...e wings

Of passing butterflies. We watched the white-glazed inner walls

Sink in shame to shattered heaps of stone and shards of nothingness.



I never thought it would be the experience it was-

How could anything be more banal than a visit to Oakes?

Twenty two Georgian semis from the sixties, brass coach-lamps

By glass front doors, irreproachable gardens,

The estate lodge’s great oak doors opening to vistas

Of street on street, the fields and cows gone.

We peered thr...Read more of this...
by Tebb, Barry
...lver!
And the roof-poles of the wigwam
Were as glittering rods of silver,
And the roof of bark upon them
As the shining shards of beetles.
"Then Osseo gazed around him,
And he saw the nine fair sisters,
All the sisters and their husbands,
Changed to birds of various plumage.
Some were jays and some were magpies,
Others thrushes, others blackbirds;
And they hopped, and sang, and twittered,
Perked and fluttered all their feathers,
Strutted in their shining plumage,
And their ta...Read more of this...
by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...There were still shards of an ancient pastoral 
in those shires of the island where the cattle drank 
their pools of shadow from an older sky, 
surviving from when the landscape copied such objects as 
"Herefords at Sunset in the valley of the Wye." 
The mountain water that fell white from the mill wheel 
sprinkling like petals from the star-apple trees, 
and all of the wind...Read more of this...
by Walcott, Derek
...e tower, the fortress;
Referred to that one may live anything;
The temple and the tower: poor dancer on the flints
 and shards in the temple porches, turn home....Read more of this...
by Jeffers, Robinson
...?n;
And harmless townsfolk fell to die
Each hour at Valencie?n!

And, sweat?n wi' the bombardiers,
A shell was slent to shards anighst my ears:
--'Twas night the end of hopes and fears
For me at Valencie?n!

They bore my wownded frame to camp,
And shut my gap?n skull, and washed en cle?n,
And jined en wi' a zilver clamp
Thik night at Valencie?n.

"We've fetched en back to quick from dead;
But never more on earth while rose is red
Will drum rouse Corpel!" Doctor said
O' me at ...Read more of this...
by Hardy, Thomas

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry