Famous Sink Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Sonnet LVIII

by Francesco Petrarch
SONNET LVIII. O giorno, o ora, o ultimo momento. HE MOURNS HIS WANT OF PERCEPTION AT THAT MEETING.  O Day, O hour, O moment sweetest, last,O stars conspired to make me poor indeed!O look too true, in which I seem'd to read.At parting, that my happiness was past;Now my full loss...Read more of this...

The First Extra

by Amy Levy
 A Waltz Song.


O sway, and swing, and sway,
And swing, and sway, and swing!
Ah me, what bliss like unto this,
Can days and daylight bring?

A rose beneath your feet
Has fallen from my head;
Its odour rises sweet,
All crushed it lies, and dead.

O Love is like a rose,
Fair-hued, of fragrant breath;
A tender flow'r that lives an hour,
And is most sweet in death.

O swing,...Read more of this...

A Watch In The Night

by Algernon Charles Swinburne
 Watchman, what of the night? - 
Storm and thunder and rain, 
Lights that waver and wane,
Leaving the watchfires unlit. 
Only the balefires are bright, 
And the flash of the lamps now and then 
From a palace where spoilers sit, 
Trampling the children of men.

Prophet, what of the night? - 
I stand by the verge of the sea, 
Banished, uncomforted,...Read more of this...

The Human Face

by Paul Eluard
 I. Soon 

Of all the springtimes of the world 
This one is the ugliest 
Of all of my ways of being 
To be trusting is the best 

Grass pushes up snow 
Like the stone of a tomb 
But I sleep within the storm 
And awaken eyes bright 

Slowness, brief time ends 
Where all streets must pass 
Through my innermost...Read more of this...

Nineteen Hundred And Nineteen

by William Butler Yeats
 I

Many ingenious lovely things are gone
That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude,
protected from the circle of the moon
That pitches common things about. There stood
Amid the ornamental bronze and stone
An ancient image made of olive wood -
And gone are phidias' famous ivories
And all the golden grasshoppers and bees.

We too had many pretty toys when young:
A law indifferent to blame or...Read more of this...

At the Cedars

by Duncan Campbell Scott
 You had two girls -- Baptiste -- 
One is Virginie --
Hold hard -- Baptiste!
Listen to me.

The whole drive was jammed
In that bend at the Cedars,
The rapids were dammed
With the logs tight rammed
And crammed; you might know
The Devil had clinched them below.

We worked three days -- not a budge,
'She's as tight as a wedge, on the ledge,'
Says our foreman;
'Mon Dieu!...Read more of this...

Please Master

by Allen Ginsberg
 Please master can I touch your cheeck
please master can I kneel at your feet
please master can I loosen your blue pants
please master can I gaze at your golden haired belly
please master can I have your thighs bare to my eyes
please master can I take off my clothes below your chair
please master can I can I kiss your ankles and...Read more of this...

Sonnet 07 - The face of all the world is changed I think

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
 The face of all the world is changed, I think,
Since first I heard the footsteps of thy soul
Move still, oh, still, beside me, as they stole
Betwixt me and the dreadful outer brink
Of obvious death, where I, who thought to sink,
Was caught up into love, and taught the whole
Of life in a new rhythm. The cup of dole
God gave for...Read more of this...

If any sink assure that this now standing

by Emily Dickinson
 If any sink, assure that this, now standing --
Failed like Themselves -- and conscious that it rose --
Grew by the Fact, and not the Understanding
How Weakness passed -- or Force -- arose --

Tell that the Worst, is easy in a Moment --
Dread, but the Whizzing, before the Ball --
When the Ball enters, enters Silence --
Dying -- annuls the power...Read more of this...

Psalm 107 part 4

by Isaac Watts
 Deliverance from storms and shipwreck; or, The seaman's song.

Would you behold the works of God,
His wonders in the world abroad,
Go with the mariners, and trace
The unknown regions of the seas.

They leave their native shores behind,
And seize the favor of the wind;
Till God command, and tempests rise
That heave the ocean to the skies.

Now to the heav'ns they mount amain,
Now sink...Read more of this...

Ryton Firs

by Lascelles Abercrombie
The Dream
All round the knoll, on days of quietest air,
Secrets are being told; and if the trees
Speak out — let them make uproar loud as drums — 
'Tis secrets still, shouted instead of whisper'd.

There must have been a warning given once:
No tree, on pain of withering and sawfly,
To reach the slimmest of his snaky toes
Into this mounded sward and rumple...Read more of this...

Air And Angels

by John Donne
 Twice or thrice had I loved thee,
Before I knew thy face or name,
So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame,
Angels affect us oft, and worship'd be;
Still when, to where thou wert, I came,
Some lovely glorious nothing I did see.
But since my soul, whose child love is,
Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,
More subtile than the parent...Read more of this...

The Twins Of Lucky Strike

by Robert William Service
 I've sung of Violet de Vere, that slinky, minky dame,
Of Gertie of the Diamond Tooth, and Touch-the-Button Nell,
And Maye Lamore,--at eighty-four I oughta blush wi' shame
That in my wild and wooly youth I knew them ladies well.
And Klondike Kit, and Gumboot Sue, and many I've forgot;
They had their faults, as I recall, the same as you and me;
But come...Read more of this...

The Song of Right and Wrong

by G K Chesterton
 Feast on wine or fast on water 
And your honour shall stand sure, 
God Almighty's son and daughter 
He the valiant, she the pure; 
If an angel out of heaven 
Brings you other things to drink, 
Thank him for his kind attentions, 
Go and pour them down the sink. 

Tea is like the East he grows in, 
A great...Read more of this...

Psalm 69 part 2

by Isaac Watts
 v.14-21,26,29,32 
C. M.
The passion and exaltation of Christ.

Now let our lips with holy fear
And mournful pleasure sing
The suff'rings of our great High Priest,
The sorrows of our King.

He sinks in floods of deep distress;
How high the waters rise!
While to his heav'nly Father's ear
He sends perpetual cries.

"Hear me, O Lord, and save thy Son,
Nor hide thy shining face;
Why should thy fav'rite...Read more of this...

Finnigans Finish

by Robert William Service
 They thought I'd be a champion;
 They boasted loud of me.
A dozen victories I'd won,
 The Press was proud of me.
I saw myself with glory crowned,
 And would, beyond a doubt,
Till last night in the second round
 A Dago knocked me out.

It must have been an accident;
 I cannot understand.
For I was so damn confident
 I'd lick him with...Read more of this...

A Word To The Calvinists

by Anne Bronte
 You may rejoice to think yourselves secure,
You may be grateful for the gift divine,
That grace unsought which made your black hearts pure
And fits your earthborn souls in Heaven to shine. 
But is it sweet to look around and view
Thousands excluded from that happiness,
Which they deserve at least as much as you,
Their faults not greater nor their virtues less? 

And...Read more of this...

Resurrection

by Sidney Lanier
 Sometimes in morning sunlights by the river
Where in the early fall long grasses wave,
Light winds from over the moorland sink and shiver
And sigh as if just blown across a grave.

And then I pause and listen to this sighing.
I look with strange eyes on the well-known stream.
I hear wild birth-cries uttered by the dying.
I know men waking who appear to...Read more of this...

The Bride Of Corinth

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 [First published in Schiller's Horen, in connection 
with a
friendly contest in the art of ballad-writing between the two
great poets, to which many of their finest works are owing.]

ONCE a stranger youth to Corinth came,

Who in Athens lived, but hoped that he
From a certain townsman there might claim,

As his father's friend, kind courtesy.

Son and daughter, they

Had been wont to say

Should...Read more of this...

Double Ballade on the Nothingness of Things

by William Ernest Henley
 The big teetotum twirls,
And epochs wax and wane
As chance subsides or swirls;
But of the loss and gain
The sum is always plain.
Read on the mighty pall,
The weed of funeral
That covers praise and blame,
The -isms and the -anities,
Magnificence and shame:--
"O Vanity of Vanities!"

The Fates are subtle girls!
They give us chaff for grain.
And Time, the Thunderer, hurls,
Like bolted death, disdain
At all that...Read more of this...

If my Bark sink

by Emily Dickinson
 If my Bark sink
'Tis to another sea --
Mortality's Ground Floor
Is Immortality --...Read more of this...

Non-Stop

by James Tate
 It seemed as if the enormous journey 
was finally approaching its conclusion.
From the window of the train
the last trees were dissipating,
a child-like sailor waved once,
a seal-like dog barked and died.
The conductor entered the lavatory 
and was not seen again, although 
his harmonica-playing was appreciated. 
He was not without talent, some said.
A botanist with whom I had become acquainted
actually suggested...Read more of this...

The God And The Bayadere

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 AN INDIAN LEGEND.

[This very fine Ballad was also first given in the Horen.]
(MAHADEVA is one of the numerous names of Seeva, the destroyer,--
the great god of the Brahmins.)


MAHADEVA,* Lord of earth

For the sixth time comes below,

As a man of mortal birth,--

Like him, feeling joy and woe.

Hither loves he to repair,

And his power behind to leave;

If to punish or to...Read more of this...

The Demon Drink

by William Topaz McGonagall
 Oh, thou demon Drink, thou fell destroyer;
Thou curse of society, and its greatest annoyer.
What hast thou done to society, let me think?
I answer thou hast caused the most of ills, thou demon Drink. 

Thou causeth the mother to neglect her child,
Also the father to act as he were wild,
So that he neglects his loving wife and family dear,
By spending...Read more of this...

Alzheimer's

by Chris Tusa
 My grandmother’s teeth stare at her
from a mason jar on the nightstand.

The radio turns itself on, 
sunlight crawls through the window,

and she thinks she feels her bright blue eyes 
rolling out her head.

She’s certain her blood has turned to dirt,
that beetles haunt the dark hollow of her bones.

The clock on the kitchen wall is missing its big hand. 
The...Read more of this...

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