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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Sonnet CXLVI

by Francesco Petrarch
SONNET CXLVI. Geri, quando talor meco s' adira. HE APPEASES HER BY HUMILITY, AND EXHORTS A FRIEND TO DO LIKEWISE.  When my sweet foe, so haughty oft and high,Moved my brief ire no more my sight can thole,One comfort is vouchsafed me lest I die,Through whose sole strength survives my harass'd soul;Read more of this...

Genius

by Lucy Maud Montgomery
 A hundred generations have gone into its making,
With all their love and tenderness, with all their dreams and tears;
Their vanished joy and pleasure, their pain and their heart-breaking,
Have colored this rare blossom of the long-unfruitful years. 

Their victory and their laughter for this have strong men given,
For this have sweet, dead women paid in patience which survives­
That a great...Read more of this...

Benjamin Painter

by Edgar Lee Masters
 Together in this grave lie Benjamin Painter, attorney at law, 
And Nig, his dog, constant companion, solace and friend. 
Down the grey road, friends, children, men and women, 
Passing one by one out of life, left me till I was alone 
With Nig for partner, bed fellow, comrade in drink. 
In the morning of life I knew aspiration and...Read more of this...

The Abortion

by Anne Sexton
 Somebody who should have been born 
is gone. 

Just as the earth puckered its mouth, 
each bud puffing out from its knot,
I changed my shoes, and then drove south. 

Up past the Blue Mountains, where 
Pennsylvania humps on endlessly,
wearing, like a crayoned cat, its green hair, 

its roads sunken in like a gray washboard; 
where, in truth, the ground...Read more of this...

Theophilus

by Edwin Arlington Robinson
 By what serene malevolence of names 
Had you the gift of yours, Theophilus? 
Not even a smeared young Cyclops at his games 
Would have you long,—and you are one of us. 

Told of your deeds I shudder for your dream
And they, no doubt, are few and innocent. 
Meanwhile, I marvel; for in you, it seems, 
Heredity outshines environment. 

What...Read more of this...

Woolworths

by Mark Hillringhouse
 for Greg Fallon

A kid yells "*************" out the school bus window.
I don't think anyone notices the afternoon clouds turning pink along the horizon,
sunlight dripping down the stone facades,
the ancient names of old stores fading like the last century
above the street, above the Spandex women who adjust their prize buttocks,
sweating in the sun as I wonder how this city...Read more of this...

A Creature Catechism

by Bliss Carman
 I
Soul, what art thou in the tribes of the sea?


LORD, said a flying fish, 
Below the foundations of storm 
We feel the primal wish 
Of the earth take form. 

Through the dim green water-fire 
We see the red sun loom, 
And the quake of a new desire 
Takes hold on us down in the gloom. 

No more can the...Read more of this...

The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket

by Robert Lowell
 (For Warren Winslow, Dead At Sea)
 Let man have dominion over the fishes of the sea and
 the fowls of the air and the beasts and the whole earth,
 and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth.

 I
A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket--
The sea was still breaking violently and night
Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet,
When the...Read more of this...

The Task: Book I The Sofa (excerpts)

by William Cowper
 Thou know'st my praise of nature most sincere,
And that my raptures are not conjur'd up
To serve occasions of poetic pomp,
But genuine, and art partner of them all.
How oft upon yon eminence our pace
Has slacken'd to a pause, and we have borne
The ruffling wind, scarce conscious that it blew,
While admiration, feeding at the eye,
And still unsated, dwelt upon the scene.
Thence...Read more of this...

Abt Vogler

by Robert Browning
 Would that the structure brave, the manifold music I build,
Bidding my organ obey, calling its keys to their work,
Claiming each slave of the sound, at a touch, as when Solomon willed
Armies of angels that soar, legions of demons that lurk,
Man, brute, reptile, fly,--alien of end and of aim,
Adverse, each from the other heaven-high, hell-deep removed,--
Should rush into sight at...Read more of this...

Sonnet LI

by Francesco Petrarch
[Pg 274] SONNET LI. I dì miei più leggier che nessun cervo. HIS PASSION FINDS ITS ONLY CONSOLATION IN CONTEMPLATING HER IN HEAVEN.  My days more swiftly than the forest hindHave fled like shadows, and no pleasure seenSave for a moment, and few hours serene,Whose bitter-sweet I treasure in...Read more of this...

The Expatriates

by Anne Sexton
 My dear, it was a moment
to clutch for a moment
so that you may believe in it
and believing is the act of love, I think,
even in the telling, wherever it went.

In the false New England forest
where the misplanted Norwegian trees
refused to root, their thick synthetic
roots barging out of the dirt to work on the air,
we held hands and walked on...Read more of this...

Bobs Lane

by Edward Thomas
 Women he liked, did shovel-bearded Bob,
Old Farmer Hayward of the Heath, but he
Loved horses. He himself was like a cob
And leather-coloured. Also he loved a tree.

For the life in them he loved most living things,
But a tree chiefly. All along the lane
He planted elms where now the stormcock sings
That travellers hear from the slow-climbing train.

Till then the track had...Read more of this...

The Triumph Of Achilles

by Paul Celan
 In the story of Patroclus
no one survives, not even Achilles
who was nearly a god.
Patroclus resembled him; they wore
the same armor.

Always in these friendships
one serves the other, one is less than the other:
the hierarchy
is always apparant, though the legends
cannot be trusted--
their source is the survivor,
the one who has been abandoned.

What were the Greek ships on fire
compared to this loss?

In his...Read more of this...

The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man

by Wallace Stevens
One's grand flights, one's Sunday baths,
One's tootings at the weddings of the soul
Occur as they occur. So bluish clouds
Occurred above the empty house and the leaves
Of the rhododendrons rattled their gold,
As if someone lived there. Such floods of white
Came bursting from the clouds. So the wind
Threw its contorted strength around the sky.

Could you have said the bluejay suddenly
Would swoop to...Read more of this...

Like The Water

by Wendell Berry
 Like the water
of a deep stream,
love is always too much.
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...Read more of this...

What Survives

by Rainer Maria Rilke
 Who says that all must vanish?
Who knows, perhaps the flight
of the bird you wound remains,
and perhaps flowers survive
caresses in us, in their ground.

It isn't the gesture that lasts,
but it dresses you again in gold
armor --from breast to knees--
and the battle was so pure
an Angel wears it after you....Read more of this...

The Lost Dancer

by Jean Toomer
 Spatial depths of being survive
The birth to death recurrences
Of feet dancing on earth of sand;
Vibrations of the dance survive
The sand; the sand, elect, survives
The dancer. He can find no source
Of magic adequate to bind
The sand upon his feet, his feet
Upon his dance, his dance upon
The diamond body of his being....Read more of this...

Calverlys

by Edwin Arlington Robinson
 We go no more to Calverly's,
For there the lights are few and low;
And who are there to see by them,
Or what they see, we do not know.
Poor strangers of another tongue
May now creep in from anywhere,
And we, forgotten, be no more
Than twilight on a ruin there.

We two, the remnant. All the rest
Are cold and quiet. You nor I,
Nor fiddle...Read more of this...

Alone

by Siegfried Sassoon
 I’ve listened: and all the sounds I heard 
Were music,—wind, and stream, and bird. 
With youth who sang from hill to hill 
I’ve listened: my heart is hungry still. 

I’ve looked: the morning world was green;
Bright roofs and towers of town I’ve seen; 
And stars, wheeling through wingless night. 
I’ve looked: and my soul yet longs for light. 

I’ve...Read more of this...

A Singer of the Bush

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 There is waving of grass in the breeze
And a song in the air,
And a murmur of myriad bees
That toil everywhere.
There is scent in the blossom and bough,
And the breath of the Spring
Is as soft as a kiss on a brow --
And Spring-time I sing.

There is drought on the land, and the stock
Tumble down in their tracks
Or follow -- a...Read more of this...

A Spirit Passed Before Me

by George (Lord) Byron
 From Job

A spirit passed before me: I beheld
The face of immortality unveiled— 
Deep sleep came down on every eye save mine— 
And there it stood,—all formless—but divine:
Along my bones the creeping flesh did quake;
And as my damp hair stiffened, thus it spake:

"Is man more just than God? Is man more pure
Than He who deems even Seraphs insecure?
Creatures of clay—vain...Read more of this...

In Memory of W. B. Yeats

by Wystan Hugh (W H) Auden
IHe disappeared in the dead of winter:The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,And snow disfigured the public statues;The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.What instruments we have agreeThe day of his death was a dark cold day. Far from his illnessThe wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;By...Read more of this...

that precise moment

by Rg Gregory
 however foul the times or difficult the ways are
through those personal morasses this change of age
won’t let a single being (rich or poor) be free from
come spring the trees get on with their blossoming
you’d think they didn’t read the newspapers

you’d think the media hadn’t yet found a way
of getting to them conveying the miserable truths
this creaking into a new...Read more of this...

"Golden Eyes"

by Adela Florence Cory Nicolson
   Oh Amber Eyes, oh Golden Eyes!
     Oh Eyes so softly gay!
   Wherein swift fancies fall and rise,
     Grow dark and fade away.
   Eyes like a little limpid pool
     That holds a sunset sky,
   While on its surface, calm and...Read more of this...

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