Famous Sours Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Israfel

by Edgar Allan Poe
In Heaven a spirit doth dwell
"Whose heart-strings are a lute";
None sing so wildly well
As the angel Israfel 
And the giddy stars (so legends tell) 
Ceasing their hymns attend the spell
Of his voice all mute.

Tottering above
In her highest noon 
The enamored moon
Blushes with love 
While to listen the red levin
(With the rapid Pleiads even 
Which were seven )
Pauses in Heaven.

And they...Read more of this...

Sonnet III: Taking My Pen

by Michael Drayton
 Taking my pen, with words to cast my woe, 
Duly to count the sum of all my cares, 
I find my griefs innumerable grow, 
The reckonings rise to millions of despairs; 
And thus dividing of my fatal hours, 
The payments of my love I read and cross, 
Subtracting, set my sweets unto my sours, 
My joy's arrearage leads me...Read more of this...

Virgin In A Tree

by Sylvia Plath
 How this tart fable instructs
And mocks! Here's the parody of that moral mousetrap
Set in the proverbs stitched on samplers
Approving chased girls who get them to a tree
And put on bark's nun-black

Habit which deflects
All amorous arrows. For to sheathe the virgin shape
In a scabbard of wood baffles pursuers,
Whether goat-thighed or god-haloed. Ever since that first Daphne
Switched her incomparable back

For a...Read more of this...

To Stella Who Collected and Transcribed His Poems

by Jonathan Swift
 As, when a lofty pile is raised,
We never hear the workmen praised,
Who bring the lime, or place the stones;
But all admire Inigo Jones:
So, if this pile of scattered rhymes
Should be approved in aftertimes;
If it both pleases and endures,
The merit and the praise are yours.
Thou, Stella, wert no longer young,
When first for thee my harp was strung,
Without one word of...Read more of this...

The Star of Australasia

by Henry Lawson
 We boast no more of our bloodless flag, that rose from a nation's slime; 
Better a shred of a deep-dyed rag from the storms of the olden time. 
From grander clouds in our `peaceful skies' than ever were there before 
I tell you the Star of the South shall rise -- in the lurid clouds of war. 
It ever...Read more of this...

Duns Scotuss Oxford

by Gerard Manley Hopkins
 Towery city and branchy between towers;
Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd, rook-racked, river-rounded;
The dapple-eared lily below thee; that country and town did
Once encounter in, here coped and poisèd powers; 
Thou hast a base and brickish skirt there, sours
That neighbour-nature thy grey beauty is grounded
Best in; graceless growth, thou hast confounded
Rural rural keeping—folk, flocks, and flowers. 

Yet ah! this air I gather and...Read more of this...

I Wake And Feel The Fell Of Dark Not Day

by Gerard Manley Hopkins
 I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light's delay.

With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him...Read more of this...

Meditation On Saviors

by Robinson Jeffers
 I
When I considered it too closely, when I wore it like an element
 and smelt it like water,
Life is become less lovely, the net nearer than the skin, a
 little troublesome, a little terrible.

I pledged myself awhile ago not to seek refuge, neither in death
 nor in a walled garden,
In lies nor gated loyalties, nor in the gates of...Read more of this...

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