Famous Sunder Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Marching Song

...nsumes,
Or cold-lipped peace bids wait,
All tombs and bars shall open, every grave and grate.

The locks shall burst in sunder,
The hinges shrieking spin,
When time, whose hand is thunder,
Lays hand upon the pin,
And shoots the bolts reluctant, bidding all men in.

These eyeless times and earless,
Shall these not see and hear,
And all their hearts burn fearless
That were afrost for fear?
Is day not hard upon us, yea, not our day near?

France! from its grey dejection
Make man...Read more of this...
by Swinburne, Algernon Charles


An Ode to Antares

...joys a summer can bring forth ---- 


Be thou my star, for I have made my aim 
To follow loveliness till autumn-strown 
Sunder the sinews of this flower-like frame 
As rose-leaves sunder when the bud is blown. 
Ay, sooner spirit and sense disintegrate 
Than reconcilement to a common fate 
Strip the enchantment from a world so dressed 
In hues of high romance. I cannot rest 
While aught of beauty in any path untrod 
Swells into bloom and spreads sweet charms abroad 
Unworshipp...Read more of this...
by Seeger, Alan

Astrophel and Stella

...d ended talking.

But when their tongues could not speake,
Loue it selfe did silence breake;
Loue did set his lips asunder,
Thus to speake in loue and wonder.

Stella, Soueraigne of my ioy,
Faire triumpher of annoy;
Stella, Starre of heauenly fier,
Stella, loadstar of desier;

Stella, in whose shining eyes
Are the lights of Cupids skies,
Whose beames, where they once are darted,
Loue therewith is streight imparted;

Stella, whose voice when it speakes
Senses...Read more of this...
by Sidney, Sir Philip

Beowulf (Old English)

...Astride his steed, the strand-ward answered,
clansman unquailing: “The keen-souled thane
must be skilled to sever and sunder duly
words and works, if he well intends.
I gather, this band is graciously bent
to the Scyldings’ master. March, then, bearing
weapons and weeds the way I show you.
I will bid my men your boat meanwhile
to guard for fear lest foemen come, --
your new-tarred ship by shore of ocean
faithfully watching till once again
it waft o’er the waters th...Read more of this...
by Anonymous,

Four Songs Of Four Seasons

...ugh fell and moorland,
And salt-sea foreland,
Our noisy norland
Resounds and rings;
Waste waves thereunder
Are blown in sunder,
And winds make thunder
With cloudwide wings;
Sea-drift makes dimmer
The beacon's glimmer;
Nor sail nor swimmer
Can try the tides;
And snowdrifts thicken
Where, when leaves quicken,
Under the heather the sundew hides.

Green land and red land,
Moorside and headland,
Are white as dead land,
Are all as one;
Nor honied heather,
Nor bells to gather,
Fair ...Read more of this...
by Swinburne, Algernon Charles


Gareth And Lynette

...the three were silent seeing, pitched 
Beside the Castle Perilous on flat field, 
A huge pavilion like a mountain peak 
Sunder the glooming crimson on the marge, 
Black, with black banner, and a long black horn 
Beside it hanging; which Sir Gareth graspt, 
And so, before the two could hinder him, 
Sent all his heart and breath through all the horn. 
Echoed the walls; a light twinkled; anon 
Came lights and lights, and once again he blew; 
Whereon were hollow tramplings up and...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord

Gawain and the Green Knight

...hewe hit in two thay hyyghes,
Bi the bakbon to vnbynde.
Bothe the hede and the hals thay hwen of thenne,
And sythen sunder thay the sydez swyft fro the chyne,

And the corbeles fee thay kest in a greue;
Thenn thurled thay ayther thik side thurygh bi the rybbe,
And henged thenne ayther bi hoyghez of the fourchez,
Vche freke for his fee, as fallez for to haue.
Vpon a felle of the fayre best fede thay thayr houndes
Wyth the lyuer and the lyyghtez, the lether of the pa...Read more of this...
by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)

Hymn Of Man

...things are the wind-shaken souls.
Spirit by spirit goes under, a foam-bell's bubble of breath,
That blows and opens in sunder and blurs not the mirror of death.
For a worm or a thorn in his path is a man's soul quenched as a flame;
For his lust of an hour or his wrath shall the worm and the man be the same.
O God sore stricken of things! they have wrought him a raiment of pain;
Can a God shut eyelids and wings at a touch on the nerves of the brain?
O shamed and sorrowful God...Read more of this...
by Swinburne, Algernon Charles

Hymn to Proserpine (After the Proclamation of the Christian

...and serpentine-curled,
Rolls, under the whitening wind of the future, the wave of the world.
The depths stand naked in sunder behind it, the storms flee away;
In the hollow before it the thunder is taken and snared as a prey;
In its sides is the north-wind bound; and its salt is of all men's tears;
With light of ruin, and sound of changes, and pulse of years:
With travail of day after day, and with trouble of hour upon hour;
And bitter as blood is the spray; and the crests a...Read more of this...
by Swinburne, Algernon Charles

Inferno (English)

...s light, 
 Will-borne, so downward through the murky air 
 Came those sad spirits, that not deep Hell's despair 
 Could sunder, parting from the faithless band 
 That Dido led, and with one voice, as though 
 One soul controlled them, spake, 

 "O Animate! 
 Who comest through the black malignant air, 
 Benign among us who this exile bear 
 For earth ensanguined, if the King of All 
 Heard those who from the outer darkness call 
 Entreat him would we for thy peace, that thou ...Read more of this...
by Alighieri, Dante

Low Tide on Grand Pré

...sk
We lifted dripping blade to drift,
Through twilight scented fine like musk,
Where night and gloom awhile uplift,
Nor sunder soul and soul adrift.

And that we took into our hands
Spirit of life or subtler thing--
Breathed on us there, and loosed the bands
Of death, and taught us, whispering,
The secret of some wonder-thing.

Then all your face grew light, and seemed
To hold the shadow of the sun;
The evening faltered, and I deemed
That time was ripe, and years had done
The...Read more of this...
by Carman, Bliss

Mater Triumphalis

...ove all Gods worshipped of all nations,
Light above light, law beyond law, thou art.

Thy face is as a sword smiting in sunder
Shadows and chains and dreams and iron things;
The sea is dumb before thy face, the thunder
Silent, the skies are narrower than thy wings.

Angels and Gods, spirit and sense, thou takest
In thy right hand as drops of dust or dew;
The temples and the towers of time thou breakest,
His thoughts and words and works, to make them new.

All we have wandered...Read more of this...
by Swinburne, Algernon Charles

The Beautiful Changes

...old roses always in a way that 
 says
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes
In such kind ways,
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things' selves for a second finding,
 to lose
For a moment all that it touches back to 
 wonder....Read more of this...
by Wilbur, Richard

The Eve Of Revolution

...despair;
Earth, skies, and waters, smitten into soul,
Feel the hard veil that iron centuries wear
Rent as with hands in sunder,
Such hands as make the thunder
And clothe with form all substance and strip bare;
Shapes, shadows, sounds and lights
Of their dead days and nights
Take soul of life too keen for death to bear;
Life, conscience, forethought, will, desire,
Flood men's inanimate eyes and dry-drawn hearts with fire.



Light, light, and light! to break and melt in sunder...Read more of this...
by Swinburne, Algernon Charles

The Garden of Janus

...e, as I must make - Men spin 
The webs that snare them - while the knee
Bend to the tyrant God - or unto Sin
The lecher sunder!
Ah! came that undulant light from over or from under?

XIII

It matters not. Come, change! come, Woe! Come, mask!
Drive Light, Life, Love into the deep!
In vain we labour at the loathsome task
Not knowing if we wake or sleep;
But in the end we lift the plumed casque
Of the dead warrior;
Find no chaste corpse therein, but a soft-smiling whore.

XIV

T...Read more of this...
by Crowley, Aleister

The Halt Before Rome--September 1867

...the calling of sea unto sea
Is the noise of her years yet to be;
For this ye knew not is she,
Whose bonds are broken in sunder;
This is she at the last.

So spake we aloud, high-minded,
Full of our will; and behold,
The speech that was halfway spoken
Breaks, as a pledge that is broken,
As a king's pledge, leaving in token
Grief only for high hopes blinded,
New grief grafted on old.

We halt by the walls of the city,
Within sound of the clash of her chain.
Hearing, we know tha...Read more of this...
by Swinburne, Algernon Charles

The Last Hero

...the trees I saw, after, no eye shall see
Tonight I die the death of God - the stars shall die with me!
One sound shall sunder all the spears, and break the trumpet's breath -
You never laughed in all your life, as I shall laugh in death!...Read more of this...
by Chesterton, G K

The Story of Sigurd the Volsung (excerpt)

...tten the Ancient Gold;
And great were the gain of thy love, and the gift of mine earthly days,
If we twain should never sunder as we wend on the changing ways.
O who art thou that lovest, thou fairest of all things born?
And what meanest thy sleep and thy slumber in the wilderness forlorn?"

She said: "I am one that loveth: I was born of the earthly folk,
But of old Allfather took me from the Kings and their wedding yoke:
And he called me the Victory-Wafter, and I went and ca...Read more of this...
by Morris, William

The Swimmer

...tempest and wing'd with thunder,
And clad with lightning and shod with sleet,
The strong winds treading the swift waves sunder
The flying rollers with frothy feet.
One gleam like a bloodshot swordblade swims on
The skyline, staining the green gulf crimson
A death stroke fiercely dealt by a dim sun
That strikes through his stormy winding sheet.

Oh, brave white horses! you gather and gallop,
The storm sprite loosens the gusty reins;
Now the stoutest ship were the frailest shal...Read more of this...
by Gordon, Adam Lindsay

Thoughts On Jesus Christs Descent Into Hell

...ke,

When Christ to the dread judgment goes.

Now speaks He, and His voice is thunder,
He speaks, the rocks are rent in sunder,

His breath is like devouring flames.
Thus speaks He: "Tremble, ye accurs'd!
He who from Eden hurl'd you erst,

Your kingdom's overthrow proclaims.
Look up! My children once were ye,

Your arms against Me then ye turn'd,
Ye fell, that ye might sinners be,

Ye've now the wages that ye earn'd.

"My greatest foeman from that day,
Ye led my dearest frien...Read more of this...
by von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang

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