Famous Silence Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Silence poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous silence poems. These examples illustrate what a famous silence poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
George William Russell
I COULD praise you once with beautiful words ere you came
And entered my life with love in a wind of flame.
I could lure with a song from afar my bird to its nest,
But with pinions drooping together silence is best.
In the land of beautiful silence the winds are laid,
And life grows quietly one in the cloudy shade.
I will not...Read more of this...
by
Wendell Berry
Though the air is full of singing
my head is loud
with the labor of words.
Though the season is rich
with fruit, my tongue
hungers for the sweet of speech.
Though the beech is golden
I cannot stand beside it
mute, but must say
"It is golden," while the leaves
stir and fall with a sound
that is not a name.
It is in the silence
that my hope is, and...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
Silence is all we dread.
There's Ransom in a Voice --
But Silence is Infinity.
Himself have not a face....Read more of this...
by
Marianne Moore
My father used to say,
"Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow's grave
nor the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self reliant like the cat --
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse's limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth --
they sometimes enjoy solitude,
and can be robbed of speech
by speech which has delighted them.
The deepest feeling always shows itself...Read more of this...
by
D. H. Lawrence
Since I lost you I am silence-haunted,
Sounds wave their little wings
A moment, then in weariness settle
On the flood that soundless swings.
Whether the people in the street
Like pattering ripples go by,
Or whether the theatre sighs and sighs
With a loud, hoarse sigh:
Or the wind shakes a ravel of light
Over the dead-black river,
Or night’s last echoing
Makes the daybreak...Read more of this...
by
Adrienne Rich
1.
A conversation begins
with a lie. and each
speaker of the so-called common language feels
the ice-floe split, the drift apart
as if powerless, as if up against
a force of nature
A poem can being
with a lie. And be torn up.
A conversation has other laws
recharges itself with its own
false energy, Cannot be torn
up. Infiltrates our blood. Repeats itself.
Inscribes...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Allan Poe
There are some qualities- some incorporate things,
That have a double life, which thus is made
A type of that twin entity which springs
From matter and light, evinced in solid and shade.
There is a two-fold Silence- sea and shore-
Body and soul. One dwells in lonely places,
Newly with grass o'ergrown; some solemn graces,
Some human memories and tearful lore,
Render him terrorless: his name's...Read more of this...
by
Ellis Parker Butler
I told her I loved her and begged but a word,
One dear little word, that would be
For me by all odds the most sweet ever heard,
But never a word said she!
I raged at her then, and I said she was cold;
I swore she was nothing to me;
I prayed her the cause of her silence unfold,
But never a word said...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
There is no Silence in the Earth -- so silent
As that endured
Which uttered, would discourage Nature
And haunt the World....Read more of this...
by
Edward Estlin (E E) Cummings
enter no(silence is the blood whose flesh
is singing)silence:but unsinging. In
spectral such hugest how hush,one
dead leaf stirring makes a crash
-far away(as far as alive)lies
april;and i breathe-move-and-seem some
perpetually roaming whylessness-
autumn has gone:will winter never come?
o come,terrible anonymity;enfold
phantom me with the murdering minus of cold
-open this ghost with millionary knives of wind-
scatter his nothing all over what angry skies and
gently
(very whiteness:absolute peace,
never imaginable...Read more of this...
by
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Aye, but she?
Your other sister and my other soul
Grave Silence, lovelier
Than the three loveliest maidens, what of her?
Clio, not you,
Not you, Calliope,
Nor all your wanton line,
Not Beauty's perfect self shall comfort me
For Silence once departed,
For her the cool-tongued, her the tranquil-hearted,
Whom evermore I follow wistfully,
Wandering Heaven and Earth and Hell and the four seasons through;
Thalia, not you,
Not you, Melpomene,
Not...Read more of this...
by
Amy Clampitt
past parentage or gender
beyond sung vocables
the slipped-between
the so infinitesimal
fault line
a limitless
interiority
beyond the woven
unicorn the maiden
(man-carved worm-eaten)
God at her hip
incipient
the untransfigured
cottontail
bluebell and primrose
growing wild a strawberry
chagrin night terrors
past the earthlit
unearthly masquerade
(we shall be changed)
a silence opens
*
the larval feeder
naked hairy ravenous
inventing from within
itself its own
raw stuffs'
hooked silk-hung
relinquishment
behind the mask
the milkfat shivering
sinew isinglass
uncrumpling transient
greed to reinvest
*
names have been
given (revelation
kif nirvana
syncope)...Read more of this...
by
Philip Levine
The winter sun, golden and tired,
settles on the irregular army
of bottles. Outside the trucks
jostle toward the open road,
outside it's Saturday afternoon,
and young women in black pass by
arm in arm. This bar
is the house of silence, and we drink
to silence without raising our voices
in the old way. We drink to doors...Read more of this...
by
Paul Laurence Dunbar
'T is better to sit here beside the sea,
Here on the spray-kissed beach,
In silence, that between such friends as we
Is full of deepest speech.
...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Moore
Silence is in our festal halls --
Sweet son of song! thy course is o'er;
In vain on thee sad Erin calls,
Her minstrel's voice responds no more; --
All silent as the Eolian shell
Sleeps at the close of some bright day,
When the sweet breeze, that waked its swell
At sunny morn, hath died away.
Yet, at...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
Great Streets of silence led away
To Neighborhoods of Pause --
Here was no Notice -- no Dissent
No Universe -- no laws --
By Clocks, 'twas Morning, and for Night
The Bells at Distance called --
But Epoch had no basis here
For Period exhaled....Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
MANY things I might have said today.
And I kept my mouth shut.
So many times I was asked
To come and say the same things
Everybody was saying, no end
To the yes-yes, yes-yes, me-too, me-too.
The aprons of silence covered me.
A wire and hatch held my tongue.
I spit nails into an abyss and listened.
I shut off the gabble of Jones, Johnson, Smith.
All whose...Read more of this...
by
Henry Vaughan
Silence, and stealth of days! 'tis now
Since thou art gone,
Twelve hundred hours, and not a brow
But clouds hang on.
As he that in some cave's thick damp
Lockt from the light,
Fixeth a solitary lamp,
To brave the night,
And walking from his sun, when past
That glim'ring ray
Cuts through the heavy mists in haste...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
1
AS I ponder’d in silence,
Returning upon my poems, considering, lingering long,
A Phantom arose before me, with distrustful aspect,
Terrible in beauty, age, and power,
The genius of poets of old lands,
As to me directing like flame its eyes,
With finger pointing to many immortal songs,
And menacing voice, What singest thou? it said;
Know’st thou not, there...Read more of this...
by
Rg Gregory
i like the silence of reading
flat on my stomach on the woollen floor
my legs waving upwards like the fronds of ferns
and in my mind
gigantic screaming monsters
or the mystery ship
scuttling crablike to the shore
i am lost to the spell of words
the enchantment of sea in the silent shell
i hear nothing apart from that racing world
alive in this room through my...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
When I was cub reporter I
Would interview the Great,
And sometimes they would make reply,
And sometimes hesitate;
But often they would sharply say,
With bushy eyebrows bent:
"Young man, your answer for to-day
Is - No Comment."
Nigh sixty years have called the tune,
And silver is my pate;
No longer do I importune
Important men of state;
But time has made me wise, and so
When button-holed I...Read more of this...
by
Dejan Stojanovic
Is there ever a true moment of silence?
There can be no such moment
Unless we should move
To the world before the world.
Since nothing is absolute
There is no absolute silence,
Only an appearance
Of temporary peace.
Since there is no real silence,
Silence will contain all the sounds,
All the words, all the languages,
All knowledge, all...Read more of this...
by
W S Merwin
Moored to the same ring:
The hour, the darkness and I,
Our compasses hooded like falcons.
Now the memory of you comes aching in
With a wash of broken bits which never left port
In which once we planned voyages,
They come knocking like hearts asking:
What departures on this tide?
Breath of land, warm breath,
You tighten the cold around the navel,
Though all shores but the first...Read more of this...
by
Emile Verhaeren
Ever since ending of the summer weather.
When last the thunder and the lightning broke,
Shatt'ring themselves upon it at one stroke,
The Silence has not stirred, there in the heather.
All round about stand steeples straight as stakes,
And each its bell between its fingers shakes;
All round about, with their three-storied loads,
The teams prowl down the roads;
All round about, where'er the pine woods end,
The...Read more of this...
by
Edward Estlin (E E) Cummings
up into the silence the green
silence with a white earth in it
you will(kiss me)go
out into the morning the young
morning with a warm world in it
(kiss me)you will go
on into the sunlight the fine
sunlight with a firm day in it
you will go(kiss me
down into your memory and
a memory and memory
i)kiss me,(will go)
...Read more of this...
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