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Famous Sphere Poems by Famous Poets

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

Monolog From A Mattress

by Louis Untermeyer

Can that be you, la mouche? Wait till I lift
This palsied eye-lid and make sure... Ah, true.
Come in, dear fly, and pardon my delay
In thus existing; I can promise you
Next time you come you'll find no dying poet—
Without sufficient spleen to see me through,
The joke becomes too tedious a jest.
I am afraid my mind is dull to-day;
I have that—something—heavier on...Read more of this...

Form: Dramatic Monologue

I Saw Thy Form in Youthful Prime

by Thomas Moore

 I saw thy form in youthful prime, 
Nor thought that pale decay 
Would steal before the steps of Time, 
And waste its bloom away, Mary! 
Yet still thy features wore that light, 
Which fleets not with the breath; 
And life ne'er look'd more truly bright 
Than in thy smile of death, Mary! 

As streams that run o'er golden mines,...Read more of this...

On A Watch Made By A Blacksmith

by William Strode

 A Vulcan and a Venus seldom part.
A blacksmith never us'd to filinge art
Beyond a lock and key, for Venus' sake
Hath cut a watch soe small that sence will ake
In searching every wire, and subtile sphere
Which his industrious skill hath order'd theire:
It scarce outswells a nut, and is soe light
A Ladies eare might well indure the weight.
Twas for a Mistrisse:...Read more of this...

You know all secrets of this earthly sphere,

by Omar Khayyam

You know all secrets of this earthly sphere,
Why then remain a prey to empty fear?
You cannot bend things to your will, but yet
Cheer up for the few moments you are here!...Read more of this...

The Roundel

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

 A roundel is wrought as a ring or a starbright sphere,
With craft of delight and with cunning of sound unsought,
That the heart of the hearer may smile if to pleasure his ear
A roundel is wrought.
Its jewel of music is carven of all or of aught--
Love, laughter, or mourning--remembrance of rapture or fear--
That fancy may fashion to hang in the...Read more of this...

Form: Roundel

No Coward Soul Is Mine

by Emily Brontë

 No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heaven's glories shine,
And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.

O God within my breast,
Almighty, ever-present Deity!
Life—that in me has rest,
As I—undying Life—have power in Thee!

Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men's hearts: unutterably vain;
Worthless as withered weeds,
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main,

To waken doubt in one
Holding...Read more of this...

While Gazing on the Moons Light

by Thomas Moore

 While gazing on the moon's light, 
A moment from her smile I turn'd, 
To look at orbs that, more bright, 
In lone and distant glory burn'd. 
But too far 
Each proud star, 
For me to feel its warming flame; 
Much more dear 
That mild sphere, 
Which near our planet smiling came;
Thus, Mary, be but thou my own, 
While brighter...Read more of this...

God-Forgotten

by Thomas Hardy

 I towered far, and lo! I stood within 
 The presence of the Lord Most High, 
Sent thither by the sons of earth, to win 
 Some answer to their cry. 

 --"The Earth, say'st thou? The Human race? 
 By Me created? Sad its lot? 
Nay: I have no remembrance of such place: 
 Such world I fashioned...Read more of this...

The Living Temple

by Oliver Wendell Holmes

 NOT in the world of light alone, 
Where God has built his blazing throne, 
Nor yet alone in earth below, 
With belted seas that come and go, 
And endless isles of sunlit green, 
Is all thy Maker's glory seen: 
Look in upon thy wondrous frame,--
Eternal wisdom still the same!

The smooth, soft air with pulse-like waves 
Flows murmuring through its...Read more of this...

Sonnet XXXIV

by Francesco Petrarch

SONNET XXXIV. Levommi il mio pensier in parte ov' era. SOARING IN IMAGINATION TO HEAVEN, HE MEETS LAURA, AND IS HAPPY.  Fond fancy raised me to the spot, where straysShe, whom I seek but find on earth no more:There, fairer still and humbler than before,I saw her, in the third heaven's blessèd...Read more of this...

The Grass so little has to do

by Emily Dickinson

 The Grass so little has to do --
A Sphere of simple Green --
With only Butterflies to brood
And Bees to entertain --

And stir all day to pretty Tunes
The Breezes fetch along --
And hold the Sunshine in its lap
And bow to everything --

And thread the Dews, all night, like Pearls --
And make itself so fine
A Duchess were too common
For such a...Read more of this...

Seven Strophes

by Joseph Brodsky

I was but what you'd brush
with your palm what your leaning
brow would hunch to in evening's
raven-black hush.

I was but what your gaze
in that dark could distinguish:
a dim shape to begin with 
later - features a face.

It was you on my right 
on my left with your heated
sighs who molded my helix
whispering at my side.

It was you by that black
window's trembling...Read more of this...

The Flesh and the Spirit

by Anne Bradstreet

 In secret place where once I stood
Close by the Banks of Lacrim flood,
I heard two sisters reason on
Things that are past and things to come.
One Flesh was call'd, who had her eye
On worldly wealth and vanity;
The other Spirit, who did rear
Her thoughts unto a higher sphere.
'Sister,' quoth Flesh, 'what liv'st thou on
Nothing but Meditation?
Doth Contemplation feed thee so
Regardlessly to...Read more of this...

A Reminiscence

by Anne Bronte

 YES, thou art gone ! and never more
Thy sunny smile shall gladden me ;
But I may pass the old church door,
And pace the floor that covers thee.

May stand upon the cold, damp stone,
And think that, frozen, lies below
The lightest heart that I have known,
The kindest I shall ever know.

Yet, though I cannot see thee more,
'Tis still a comfort to...Read more of this...

The Soldier

by Robert Frost

 He is that fallen lance that lies as hurled,
That lies unlifted now, come dew, come rust,
But still lies pointed as it ploughed the dust.
If we who sight along it round the world,
See nothing worthy to have been its mark,
It is because like men we look too near,
Forgetting that as fitted to the sphere,
Our missiles always make too short an...Read more of this...

Aladdin and the Jinn

by Vachel Lindsay

 "Bring me soft song," said Aladdin.
"This tailor-shop sings not at all.
Chant me a word of the twilight,
Of roses that mourn in the fall.
Bring me a song like hashish
That will comfort the stale and the sad,
For I would be mending my spirit,
Forgetting these days that are bad,
Forgetting companions too shallow,
Their quarrels and arguments thin,
Forgetting the shouting Muezzin:"-- 
"I AM YOUR...Read more of this...

Eugenia Todd

by Edgar Lee Masters

 Have any of you, passers-by,
Had an old tooth that was an unceasing discomfort?
Or a pain in the side that never quite left you?
Or a malignant growth that grew with time?
So that even in profoundest slumber
There was shadowy consciousness or the phantom of thought
Of the tooth, the side, the growth?
Even so thwarted love, or defeated ambition,
Or a blunder in life...Read more of this...

The Moon

by Henry David Thoreau

 Time wears her not; she doth his chariot guide; 
Mortality below her orb is placed.
--Raleigh

The full-orbed moon with unchanged ray 
Mounts up the eastern sky, 
Not doomed to these short nights for aye, 
But shining steadily. 

She does not wane, but my fortune, 
Which her rays do not bless, 
My wayward path declineth soon, 
But she shines not the...Read more of this...

For me heaven's sphere no music ever made,

by Omar Khayyam

For me heaven's sphere no music ever made,
Nor yet with soothing voice my fears allayed;
If e'er I found brief respite from my woes,
Back to woe's thrall I was at once betrayed....Read more of this...

Realisation

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

 Hers was a lonely, shadowed lot; 
Or so the unperceiving thought, 
Who looked no deeper than her face, 
Devoid of chiselled lines of grace –
No farther than her humble grate, 
And wondered how she bore her fate.

Yet she was neither lone nor sad; 
So much of love her spirit had, 
She found an ever-flowing spring
Of happiness in everything.

So near...Read more of this...

Plutonian Ode

by Allen Ginsberg

 I

What new element before us unborn in nature? Is there
 a new thing under the Sun?
At last inquisitive Whitman a modern epic, detonative,
 Scientific theme
First penned unmindful by Doctor Seaborg with poison-
 ous hand, named for Death's planet through the 
 sea beyond Uranus
whose chthonic ore fathers this magma-teared Lord of 
 Hades, Sire of avenging Furies, billionaire Hell-
...Read more of this...

A New World

by George William Russell

 I WHO had sought afar from earth
 The faery land to meet,
Now find content within its girth
 And wonder nigh my feet.


To-day a nearer love I choose
 And seek no distant sphere;
For aureoled by faery dews
 The dear brown breasts appear.


With rainbow radiance come and go
 The airy breaths of day;
And eve is all a pearly glow
 With moonlit...Read more of this...

Lighthouse in the Night

by Alfonsina Storni

 The sky a black sphere,
the sea a black disk.

The lighthouse opens
its solar fan on the coast.

Spinning endlessly at night,
whom is it searching for

when the mortal heart
looks for me in the chest?

Look at the black rock
where it is nailed down.

A crow digs endlessly
but no longer bleeds....Read more of this...

I see around me tombstones grey