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Famous Survives Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Byron, George (Lord)
...an God? Is man more pure
Than He who deems even Seraphs insecure?
Creatures of clay—vain dwellers in the dust!
The moth survives you, and are ye more just?
Things of a day! you wither ere the night,
Heedless and blind to Wisdom's wasted light!"...Read more of this...



by Browning, Robert
...of good shall exist;
Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist
When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by and by.

And what is our failure here but a triumph's...Read more of this...

by Browning, Robert
...ife, 
Complete and whole now in its power and joy, 
Dies altogether with my brain and arm, 
Is lost indeed; since, what survives myself? 
The brazen statue to o'erlook my grave, 
Set on the promontory which I named. 
And that--some supple courtier of my heir 
Shall use its robed and sceptred arm, perhaps, 
To fix the rope to, which best drags it down. 
I go then: triumph thou, who dost not go!" 

Nay, thou art worthy of hearing my whole mind. 
Is this apparent, wh...Read more of this...

by Larkin, Philip
...but some stay stiff, twitching and loud
With deep hoarse tears, as if a kind of dumb
And idiot child within them still survives
To re-awake at kindness, thinking a voice
At last calls them alone, that hands have come
To lift and lighten; and such joy arrives
Their thick tongues blort, their eyes squeeze grief, a crowd
Of huge unheard answers jam and rejoice -

What's wrong! Moustached in flowered frocks they shake:
By now, all's wrong. In everyone there sleeps
A sense of...Read more of this...

by Belieu, Erin
...tell her story,
it's only when guessing
what she loved, what she dreamed
about, the lost details of a life
that barely survives history.

God and Latin, I suppose, what she loved.
And dreams of mice pouring out
from a hole. The Duenna, in spite
of her black, widow's veil, leaning
to kiss her, saying Juana, don't listen......Read more of this...



by Auden, Wystan Hugh (W H)
...land hurt you into poetry.Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,For poetry makes nothing happen: it survivesIn the valley of its making where executivesWould never want to tamper, flows on southFrom ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,A way of happening, a mouth.
 Earth, receive an honoured guest:William Yeats is laid to rest.Let the Irish vessel lieE...Read more of this...

by Byron, George (Lord)
...ty band: 
Desperate, though few, the last and best remain'd 
To mourn the discipline they late disdain'd. 
One hope survives, the frontier is not far, 
And thence they may escape from native war; 
And bear within them to the neighbouring state 
An exile's sorrows, or an outlaw's hate: 
Hard is the task their fatherland to quit, 
But harder still to perish or submit. 

XII. 

It is resolved — they march — consenting Night 
Guides with her star their dim and torchle...Read more of this...

by Berry, Wendell
...>
We did not make it.
Though we drink till we burst,
we cannot have it all,
or want it all.
In its abundance
it survives our thirst.

In the evening we come down to the shore
to drink our fill,
and sleep,
while it flows
through the regions of the dark.
It does not hold us,
except we keep returning to its rich waters
thirsty.

We enter,
willing to die,
into the commonwealth of its joy....Read more of this...

by Finch, Anne Kingsmill
...ts do scarce advance, 
When on their following Limbs th' extending Ruins light. 
One half's interr'd, the other yet survives, 
And for Release with fainting Vigour strives; 
Implores the Aid of absent Friends in vain; 
With fault'ring Speech, and dying Wishes calls 
Those, whom perhaps, their own Domestick Walls 
By parallel Distress, or swifter Death retains. 


O Wells! thy Bishop's Mansion we lament, 
So tragical the Fall, so dire th'Event! 
But let no daring Thoug...Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...ss as bristly and stout as chives,
and me wondering when the ground would break, 
and me wondering how anything fragile survives; 

up in Pennsylvania, I met a little man,
not Rumpelstiltskin, at all, at all... 
he took the fullness that love began. 

Returning north, even the sky grew thin
like a high window looking nowhere.
The road was as flat as a sheet of tin. 

Somebody who should have been born 
is gone. 

Yes, woman, such logic will lead
to...Read more of this...

by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...leness and love and trust 
Prevail o'er angry wave and gust; 
And in the wreck of noble lives 
Something immortal still survives! 
Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State! 
Sail on, O Union, strong and great! 
Humanity with all its fears, 
With all the hopes of future years, 
Is hanging breathless on thy fate! 
We know what Master laid thy keel, 
What Workmen wrought thy ribs of steel, 
Who made each mast, and sail, and rope, 
What anvils rang, what hammers beat, 
In what a forge...Read more of this...

by Cowper, William
...in such a sea,
Alone could rescue them;
Yet bitter felt it still to die
Deserted, and his friends so nigh.

He long survives, who lives an hour
In ocean, self-upheld;
And so long he, with unspent pow'r,
His destiny repell'd;
And ever, as the minutes flew,
Entreated help, or cried--Adieu!

At length, his transient respite past,
His comrades, who before
Had heard his voice in ev'ry blast,
Could catch the sound no more.
For then, by toil subdued, he drank
The stifling wa...Read more of this...

by Stevens, Wallace
...plum 
407 And be content and still be realist. 
408 The words of things entangle and confuse. 
409 The plum survives its poems. It may hang 
410 In the sunshine placidly, colored by ground 
411 Obliquities of those who pass beneath, 
412 Harlequined and mazily dewed and mauved 
413 In bloom. Yet it survives in its own form, 
414 Beyond these changes, good, fat, guzzly fruit. 
415 So Crispin hasped on the surviving form, 
416 For him, of shall or...Read more of this...

by Berry, Wendell
...r> We
did not make it. Though we drink till we burst
we cannot have it all, or want it all.
In its abundance it survives our thirst.
In the evening we come down to the shore
to drink our fill, and sleep, while it
flows through the regions of the dark.
It does not hold us, except we keep returning
to its rich waters thirsty. We enter,
willing to die, into the commonwealth of its joy.

VII.

I give you what is unbounded, passing from dark to dark,
co...Read more of this...

by Bradstreet, Anne
...s spent in curling, frisling up my hair,
3.59 Some young Adonais I do strive to be.
3.60 Sardana Pallas now survives in me.
3.61 Cards, Dice, and Oaths, concomitant, I love;
3.62 To Masques, to Plays, to Taverns still I move;
3.63 And in a word, if what I am you'd hear,
3.64 Seek out a British, bruitish Cavalier.
3.65 Such wretch, such monster am I; but yet more
3.66 I want a heart all this for to deplore.
3.67 Thus, thus al...Read more of this...

by Chaucer, Geoffrey
...e,
immediately returning to their ordinary avocations. Chaucer
uses "palmer" of all pilgrims.

3. "Hallows" survives, in the meaning here given, in All Hallows
-- All-Saints -- day. "Couth," past participle of "conne" to
know, exists in "uncouth."

4. The Tabard -- the sign of the inn -- was a sleeveless coat,
worn by heralds. The name of the inn was, some three
centuries after Chaucer, changed to the Talbot.

5. In y-fall," "y" is a corrup...Read more of this...

by Jeffers, Robinson
...e howling fireblast that we were born from.

But the whole sum of the energies
That made and contain the giant atom survives. It will 
 gather again and pile up, the power and the glory--
And no doubt it will burst again; diastole and systole: the 
 whole universe beats like a heart.
Peace in our time was never one of God's promises; but back 
 and forth, live and die, burn and be damned,
The great heart beating, pumping into our arteries His 
 terrible life.
...Read more of this...

by Thomson, James
...t? those veering Thoughts,
Flutt'ring 'twixt Good, and Ill, that shar'd thy Life?
All, now, are vanish'd! Vertue, sole, survives,
Immortal, Mankind's never-failing Friend,
His Guide to Happiness on high -- and see!
'Tis come, the Glorious Morn! the second Birth
Of Heaven, and Earth! -- awakening Nature hears
Th'Almighty Trumpet's Voice, and starts to Life,
Renew'd, unfading. Now, th'Eternal Scheme,
That Dark Perplexity, that Mystic Maze,
Which Sight cou'd never trace, nor...Read more of this...

by Trumbull, John
...ng sigh,
The labour'd smile, of force too weak,
Low dimpling in th' autumnal cheek,
The sad, funereal frown, that still
Survives its power to wound or kill;
Or from thy looks, with desperate rage,
Chafing the sallow hue of age,
And cursing dire with rueful faces,
The repartees of looking-glasses.


Now at tea-table take thy station,
Those shambles vile of reputation,
Where butcher'd characters and stale
Are day by day exposed for sale:
Then raise the floodgates of thy ton...Read more of this...

by Hillringhouse, Mark
...ize buttocks,
sweating in the sun as I wonder how this city that has no more memory of itself
than a river has of rain, survives.

Is it just a matter of time, or that peasant woman
who tugs my sleeve demanding "peseta" from every passing stranger:

I can still smell the hotdog counter and the pretzel carousel.
I loved the sound of birds as I entered, the watery bubbles
from aquarium filters over by the plants.
If I imagined like a child walking with my mother,
th...Read more of this...

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