Famous Steeled Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Steeled poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous steeled poems. These examples illustrate what a famous steeled poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Plath, Sylvia
...This is winter, this is night, small love --
A sort of black horsehair,
A rough, dumb country stuff
Steeled with the sheen
Of what green stars can make it to our gate.
I hold you on my arm.
It is very late.
The dull bells tongue the hour.
The mirror floats us at one candle power.
This is the fluid in which we meet each other,
This haloey radiance that seems to breathe
And lets our shadows wither
Only to blow
Them huge again, violent gi...Read more of this...
by
Wilde, Oscar
...aunt Griffin glared
From the huge helm, and the long lance of wreck and ruin flared
Like a red rod of flame, stony and steeled
The Gorgon's head its leaden eyeballs rolled,
And writhed its snaky horrors through the shield,
And gaped aghast with bloodless lips and cold
In passion impotent, while with blind gaze
The blinking owl between the feet hooted in shrill amaze.
The lonely fisher as he trimmed his lamp
Far out at sea off Sunium, or cast
The net for tunnies, heard a...Read more of this...
by
Kipling, Rudyard
...- O the burning black disgrace! --
By a brutal Saxon paper in an Irish shooting-case;
They sat upon it for a year, then steeled their heart to brave it,
And "coruscating innocence" the learned Judges gave it.
Bear witness, Heaven, of that grim crime beneath the surgeon's knife,
The honourable gentlemen deplored the loss of life!
Bear witness of those chanting choirs that burk and shirk and snigger,
No man laid hand upon the knife or finger to the trigger!
Cleared in the...Read more of this...
by
Keats, John
...ty Mars
Has legion'd all his battle; and behold
How every soldier, with firm foot, doth hold
His even breast: see, many steeled squares,
And rigid ranks of iron--whence who dares
One step? Imagine further, line by line,
These warrior thousands on the field supine:--
So in that crystal place, in silent rows,
Poor lovers lay at rest from joys and woes.--
The stranger from the mountains, breathless, trac'd
Such thousands of shut eyes in order plac'd;
Such ranges of white fee...Read more of this...
by
McKay, Claude
...No servile little fear shall daunt my will
This morning. I have courage steeled to say
I will be lazy, conqueringly still,
I will not lose the hours in toil this day.
The roaring world without, careless of souls,
Shall leave me to my placid dream of rest,
My four walls shield me from its shouting ghouls,
And all its hates have fled my quiet breast.
And I will loll here resting, wide awake,
Dead to the world of ...Read more of this...
by
Hardy, Thomas
...sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!"
Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.
But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
—Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . .
These purblind Doomsters ha...Read more of this...
by
Hopkins, Gerard Manley
...n Christ they do and on the martyr may;
But be the war within, the brand we wield
Unseen, the heroic breast not outward-steeled,
Earth hears no hurtle then from fiercest fray.
Yet God (that hews mountain and continent,
Earth, all, out; who, with trickling increment,
Veins violets and tall trees makes more and more)
Could crowd career with conquest while there went
Those years and years by of world without event
That in Majorca Alfonso watched the door....Read more of this...
by
Marvell, Andrew
...ons, last, all these did reinforce:
Cornb'ry before them managed hobby-horse.
Never before nor since, an host so steeled
Trooped on to muster in the Tothill Field:
Not the first cock-horse that with cork were shod
To rescue Albemarle from the sea-cod,
Nor the late feather-men, whom Tomkins fierce
Shall with one breath, like thistledown disperse.
All the two Coventrys their generals chose
For one had much, the other nought to lose;
Nor better choice all acci...Read more of this...
by
Swinburne, Algernon Charles
...ine ears fast sealed,
Death.
As a voice in a vision that vanisheth,
Through the grave's gate barred and the portal steeled
The sound of the wail of it travelleth.
Wailing aloud from a heart unhealed,
It woke response of melodious breath
From lips now too by thy kiss congealed,
Death
II.
Ages ago, from the lips of a sad glad poet
Whose soul was a wild dove lost in the whirling snow,
The soft keen plaint of his pain took voice to show it
Ages ago.
So clear,...Read more of this...
by
Bronte, Anne
...banished long from thee)
Life's rugged path, and boldly face
The storms that threaten me.
Fear not for me - I've steeled my mind
Sorrow and strife to greet,
Joy with my love I leave behind,
Care with my friends I meet.
A mother's sad reproachful eye,
A father's scowling brow -
But he may frown, and she may sigh;
I will not break my vow!
I love my mother, I revere
My sire, but doubt not me.
Believe that Death alone can tear
This faithful heart from thee.Read more of this...
by
Shakespeare, William
...world, and I must strive
To know my shames and praises from your tongue;
None else to me, nor I to none alive,
That my steeled sense or changes, right or wrong.
In so profound abysm I throw all care
Of others' voices that my adder's sense
To critic and to flatterer stoppèd are.
Mark how with my neglect I do dispense.
You are so strongly in my purpose bred,
That all the world besides, methinks, are dead....Read more of this...
by
Hopkins, Gerard Manley
...Christ they do and on the martyr may;
But be the war within, the brand we wield
Unseen, the heroic breast not outward-steeled,
Earth hears no hurtle then from fiercest fray.
Yet God (that hews mountain and continent,
Earth, all, out; who, with trickling increment,
Veins violets and tall trees makes more and more)
Could crowd career with conquest while there went
Those years and years by of world without event
That in Majorca Alfonso watched the door....Read more of this...
by
Bronte, Anne
...anished long from thee,)
Life's rugged path, and boldly face
The storms that threaten me.
Fear not for me - I've steeled my mind
Sorrow and strife to greet;
Joy with my love I leave behind,
Care with my friends I meet.
A mother's sad reproachful eye,
A father's scowling brow -
But he may frown and she may sigh:
I will not break my vow!
I love my mother, I revere
My sire, but fear not me
Believe that Death alone can tear
This faithful heart from thee....Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...men who are grit to the core;
Swift as the panther in triumph, fierce as the bear in defeat,
Sired of a bulldog parent, steeled in the furnace heat.
Send me the best of your breeding, lend me your chosen ones;
Them will I take to my bosom, them will I call my sons;
Them will I gild with my treasure, them will I glut with my meat;
But the others -- the misfits, the failures -- I trample under my feet.
Dissolute, damned and despairful, crippled and palsied and slain,
Ye...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Robert
...h-shaker, green, unwearied, chaste
In his steel scales: ask for no Orphean lute
To pluck life back. The guns of the steeled fleet
Recoil and then repeat
The hoarse salute.
II
Whenever winds are moving and their breath
Heaves at the roped-in bulwarks of this pier,
The terns and sea-gulls tremble at your death
In these home waters. Sailor, can you hear
The Pequod's sea wings, beating landward, fall
Headlong and break on our Atlantic wall
Off 'Sconset, where the y...Read more of this...
by
Miller, Alice Duer
...t to face the day
When he, my son— would tread the very same
Path that his father trod. When the day came
I was not steeled— not ready. Foolish, wild
Words issued from my lips— 'My child, my child,
Why should you die for England too?' He smiled:
'Is she not worth it, if I must?' he said.
John would have answered yes— but John was dead.
L
Is she worth dying for? My love, my one
And only love had died, and now his son
Asks me, his alien mother, to assay
The...Read more of this...
by
Stevenson, Robert Louis
...the brae
Where a' maun gang -
There's still an hoor in ilka day
For luve and sang.
And canty hearts are strangely steeled.
By some dikeside they'll find a bield,
Some couthy neuk by muir or field
They're sure to hit,
Where, frae the blatherin' wind concealed,
They'll rest a bit.
An' weel for them if kindly fate
Send ower the hills to them a mate;
They'll crack a while o' kirk an' State,
O' yowes an' rain:
An' when it's time to take the gate,
Tak' ilk his ain.Read more of this...
by
Stevenson, Robert Louis
...ock the uneven modern flight,
But in the stream
Of daily sorrow and delight
To seek a theme.
I too, O friend, have steeled my heart
Boldly to choose the better part,
To leave the beaten ways of art,
And wholly free
To dare, beyond the scanty chart,
The deeper sea.
All vain restrictions left behind,
Frail bark! I loose my anchored mind
And large, before the prosperous wind
Desert the strand -
A new Columbus sworn to find
The morning land.
Nor too ambitious, frie...Read more of this...
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