Famous Sluggish Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Sluggish poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous sluggish poems. These examples illustrate what a famous sluggish poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Jorge Luis Borges
Oh destiny of Borges
to have sailed across the diverse seas of the world
or across that single and solitary sea of diverse
names,
to have been a part of Edinburgh, of Zurich, of the
two Cordobas,
of Colombia and of Texas,
to have returned at the end of changing generations
to the ancient lands of his forebears,
to Andalucia, to Portugal and to those counties
where the Saxon...Read more of this...
by
William Carlos (WCW) Williams
By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen
patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees
All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed...Read more of this...
by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
WHEN by the broad stream thou dost dwell,
Oft shallow is its sluggish flood;
Then, when thy fields thou tendest well,
It o'er them spreads its slime and mud.
The ships descend ere daylight wanes,
The prudent fisher upward goes;
Round reef and rock ice casts its chains,
And boys at will the pathway close.
To this attend, then, carefully,
And what thou wouldst, that execute!
Ne'er linger, ne'er...Read more of this...
by
Ben Jonson
LVI. ? ON POET-APE. Poor POET-APE, that would be thought our chief, Whose works are e'en the frippery of wit, From brokage is become so bold a thief, As we, the robb'd, leave rage, and pity it. At first he made low shifts, would pick and glean, Buy the reversion of...Read more of this...
by
Emile Verhaeren
When your hand, on an evening of the sluggish months, commits to the odorous cupboards the fruits of your orchard, I seem to see you calmly arranging our old perfumed and sweet-tasting memories.
And my relish for them returns, as it was in former years in the gold and the sun and with the wind on my lips; and then I...Read more of this...
by
Ralph Waldo Emerson
On Being Asked, Whence Is The Flower?
In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals, fallen in the pool,
Made the black water with their beauty gay;
Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
And court the flower that...Read more of this...
by
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Far and wide among the nations
Spread the name and fame of Kwasind;
No man dared to strive with Kwasind,
No man could compete with Kwasind.
But the mischievous Puk-Wudjies,
They the envious Little People,
They the fairies and the pygmies,
Plotted and conspired against him.
"If this hateful Kwasind," said they,
"If this great, outrageous fellow
Goes on thus a little longer,
Tearing everything he touches,
Rending everything to pieces,
Filling...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
THE world below the brine;
Forests at the bottom of the sea—the branches and leaves,
Sea-lettuce, vast lichens, strange flowers and seeds—the thick tangle, the openings,
and
the pink turf,
Different colors, pale gray and green, purple, white, and gold—the play of light
through
the water,
Dumb swimmers there among the rocks—coral, gluten, grass, rushes—and the aliment
of
the...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
Er-Heb beyond the Hills of Ao-Safai
Bears witness to the truth, and Ao-Safai
Hath told the men of Gorukh. Thence the tale
Comes westward o'er the peaks to India.
The story of Bisesa, Armod's child, --
A maiden plighted to the Chief in War,
The Man of Sixty Spears, who held the Pass
That leads to Thibet, but to-day is gone
To seek his comfort of the...Read more of this...
by
Robert Browning
My first thought was, he lied in every word,
That hoary cripple, with malicious eye
Askance to watch the working of his lie
On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford
Suppression of the glee, that pursed and scored
Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby.
What else should he be set for, with his staff?
What, save to waylay with his lies, ensnare
All travellers who...Read more of this...
by
William Butler Yeats
I
Now that we're almost settled in our house
I'll name the friends that cannot sup with us
Beside a fire of turf in th' ancient tower,
And having talked to some late hour
Climb up the narrow winding stair to bed:
Discoverers of forgotten truth
Or mere companions of my youth,
All, all are in my thoughts to-night being dead.
II
Always we'd have the new friend...Read more of this...
by
William Vaughn Moody
After seeing at Boston the statue of Robert Gould Shaw, killed while storming Fort Wagner, July 18, 1863, at the head of the first enlisted ***** regiment, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts.
I
Before the solemn bronze Saint Gaudens made
To thrill the heedless passer's heart with awe,
And set here in the city's talk and trade
To the good memory of...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
O MAGNET-SOUTH! O glistening, perfumed South! My South!
O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse, and love! Good and evil! O all dear to me!
O dear to me my birth-things—All moving things, and the trees where I was
born—the
grains,
plants, rivers;
Dear to me my own slow sluggish rivers where they flow, distant, over flats of silvery
sands,
...Read more of this...
by
Adam Lindsay Gordon
Hold hard, Ned! Lift me down once more, and lay me in the shade.
Old man, you've had your work cut out to guide
Both horses, and to hold me in the saddle when I swayed,
All through the hot, slow, sleepy, silent ride.
The dawn at "Moorabinda" was a mist rack dull and dense,
The sun-rise was a...Read more of this...
by
Louise Bogan
I have a dream
to fill the golden sheath
of a remembered day....
(Air
heavy and massed and blue
as the vapor of opium...
domes
fired in sulphurous mist...
sea
quiescent as a gray seal...
and the emerging sun
spurting up gold
over Sydney, smoke-pale, rising out of the bay....)
But the day is an up-turned cup
and its sun a junk of red iron
guttering in sluggish-green water--
where shall I pour my dream?...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Hood
'Twas in the prime of summer-time
An evening calm and cool,
And four-and-twenty happy boys
Came bounding out of school:
There were some that ran and some that leapt,
Like troutlets in a pool.
Away they sped with gamesome minds,
And souls untouched by sin;
To a level mead they came, and there
They drave the wickets in:
Pleasantly shone...Read more of this...
by
Robert Louis Stevenson
THOUGH deep indifference should drowse
The sluggish life beneath my brows,
And all the external things I see
Grow snow-showers in the street to me,
Yet inmost in my stormy sense
Thy looks shall be an influence.
Though other loves may come and go
And long years sever us below,
Shall the thin ice that grows above
Freeze the deep centre-well of love?
No, still below light amours, thou
Shalt...Read more of this...
by
Francesco Petrarch
SONNET XXVII. Apollo, s' ancor vive il bel desio. HE COMPARES HER TO A LAUREL, WHICH HE SUPPLICATES APOLLO TO DEFEND. O Phœbus, if that fond desire remains,Which fired thy breast near the Thessalian wave;If those bright tresses, which such pleasure gave,Through lapse of years thy memory not disdains;From sluggish frosts,...Read more of this...
by
Ralph Waldo Emerson
On being asked, Whence is the flower?
In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals, fallen in the pool,
Made the black water with their beauty gay;
Here might the red-bird come his plumes...Read more of this...
by
Paul Laurence Dunbar
By Mystic's banks I held my dream.
(I held my fishing rod as well,)
The vision was of dace and bream,
A fruitless vision, sooth to tell.
But round about the sylvan dell
Were other sweet Arcadian shrines,
Gone now, is all the rural spell,
Arcadia has trolley lines.
Oh, once loved, sluggish, darkling stream,
For me no more, thy waters swell,
Thy music now the engines' scream,
Thy fragrance now...Read more of this...
by
Andrew Barton Paterson
Out where the grey streams glide,
Sullen and deep and slow,
And the alligators slide
From the mud to the depths below
Or drift on the stream like a floating death,
Where the fever comes on the south wind's breath,
There is the buffalo.
Out of the big lagoons,
Where the Regia lilies float,
And the Nankin heron croons...Read more of this...
by
Elizabeth Bishop
Half squatter, half tenant (no rent)—
a sort of inheritance; white,
in your thirties now, and supposed
to supply me with vegetables,
but you don't; or you won't; or you can't
get the idea through your brain—
the world's worst gardener since Cain.
Titled above me, your gardens
ravish my eyes. You edge
the beds of silver cabbages
with red carnations, and lettuces
mix with alyssum. And then
umbrella ants arrive,
or...Read more of this...
by
Robert Burns
STILL anxious to secure your partial favour,
And not less anxious, sure, this night, than ever,
A Prologue, Epilogue, or some such matter,
’Twould vamp my bill, said I, if nothing better;
So sought a poet, roosted near the skies,
Told him I came to feast my curious eyes;
Said, nothing like his works was ever printed;
And last, my prologue-business slily hinted.
“Ma’am, let me tell...Read more of this...
by
Paul Laurence Dunbar
The gray dawn on the mountain top
Is slow to pass away.
Still lays him by in sluggish dreams,
The golden God of day.
And then a light along the hills,
Your laughter silvery gay;
The Sun God wakes, a bluebird trills,
You come and it is day.
...Read more of this...
by
Robert Browning
Si credere dignum est.--Virgil, Georgics, III, 390
Oh, worthy of belief I hold it was,
Virgil, your legend in those strange three lines!
No question, that adventure came to pass
One black night in Arcadia: yes, the pines,
Mountains and valleys mingling made one mass
Of black with void black heaven: the earth's confines,
The sky's embrace,--below, above, around,
All...Read more of this...
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