Famous Tablets Poems by Famous Poets

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

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after the parties

...ways of making amends
for the mess that we're all in up to our noses
let's kick the conviction the party is moses
with tablets worth taking for any condition
while the world holds its breath for the big collision
let's kick off the hangovers all parties swear
is part of the bargain f or breathing free air
and dare to be lost and risk being found
in the springs that are cracking the crust of dead ground

and when we're all shot of the parties friends
maybe then odd beginnings...Read more of this...
by Gregory, Rg


Bacchus

...tints  
Recut the ag¨¨d prints  
And write my old adventures with the pen 
Which on the first day drew 65 
Upon the tablets blue  
The dancing Pleiads and eternal men. ...Read more of this...
by Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Bridge Over The Aire Book 1

...hysics so sadly lacking.





59



You were the only girl who

Did not insist the conditions

Of kissing be written in tablets

Of stone, that I be not affianced

Elsewhere, be scrubbed to the bone,

Certified free of STD, solvent and

Holding a current contract of

Employment.





60



Margaret, I realize you had only

Yourself to offer, not a career prospect,

Mortgage partnership or pre-nuptial

Agreement, just your ten-year old self

Wearing a washed-out flower-pattern...Read more of this...
by Tebb, Barry

Brother of All with Generous Hand

...l, 
A thought to launch in memory of thee, 
A burial verse for thee. 

What may we chant, O thou within this tomb?
What tablets, pictures, hang for thee, O millionaire? 
—The life thou lived’st we know not, 
But that thou walk’dst thy years in barter, ’mid the haunts of brokers; 
Nor heroism thine, nor war, nor glory. 

Yet lingering, yearning, joining soul with thine,
If not thy past we chant, we chant the future, 
Select, adorn the future. 

2
Lo, Soul, the graves of heroes...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt

Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie

...g, heart-broken,
Asked of the earth but a grave, and no longer a friend nor a fireside.
Written their history stands on tablets of stone in the churchyards.
Long among them was seen a maiden who waited and wandered,
Lowly and meek in spirit, and patiently suffering all things.
Fair was she and young; but, alas! before her extended,
Dreary and vast and silent, the desert of life, with its pathway
Marked by the graves of those who had sorrowed and suffered before her,
Passions ...Read more of this...
by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth


Five Bells

...er, the old man gone blind, 
With fingers always round a fiddle's neck, 
That graveyard mason whose fair monuments 
And tablets cut with dreams of piety 
Rest on the bosoms of a thousand men 
Staked bone by bone, in quiet astonishment 
At cargoes they had never thought to bear, 
These funeral-cakes of sweet and sculptured stone. 

Where have you gone? The tide is over you, 
The turn of midnight water's over you, 
As Time is over you, and mystery, 
And memory, the flood that d...Read more of this...
by Slessor, Kenneth

Fragment of a Greek Tragedy

...h
To this conclusion I at last have come:
LIFE IS UNCERTAIN.
This truth I have written deep
In my reflective midriff
On tablets not of wax,
Nor with a pen did I inscribe it there,
For many reasons: LIFE, I say, IS NOT
A STRANGER TO UNCERTAINTY.
Not from the flight of omen-yelling fowls
This fact did I discover,
Nor did the Delphine tripod bark it out,
Nor yet Dodona.
Its native ingunuity sufficed
My self-taught diaphragm.

Antistrophe

Why should I mention
The Inachean daught...Read more of this...
by Housman, A E

In Memoriam 131: O Living Will That Shalt Endure

...m
At last must part with her to thee; 

Now waiting to be made a wife,
Her feet, my darling, on the dead;
Their pensive tablets round her head,
And the most living words of life 

Breathed in her ear. The ring is on,
The "wilt thou" answer'd, and again
The "wilt thou" ask'd, till out of twain
Her sweet "I will" has made you one. 

Now sign your names, which shall be read,
Mute symbols of a joyful morn,
By village eyes as yet unborn;
The names are sign'd, and overhead 

Begins...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord

In Memoriam A. H. H.: 131. O living will that shalt endure

...rm
At last must part with her to thee;

Now waiting to be made a wife,
Her feet, my darling, on the dead;
Their pensive tablets round her head,
And the most living words of life

Breathed in her ear. The ring is on,
The "wilt thou" answer'd, and again
The "wilt thou" ask'd, till out of twain
Her sweet "I will" has made you one.

Now sign your names, which shall be read,
Mute symbols of a joyful morn,
By village eyes as yet unborn;
The names are sign'd, and overhead

Begins th...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord

Original Preface

...e case with Goethe, 
the most masterly of all the master minds of modern times, whose 
name is already inscribed on the tablets of immortality, and whose 
fame already extends over the earth, although as yet only in its 
infancy. Scarcely have two decades passed away since he ceased to 
dwell among men, yet he now stands before us, not as a mere individual, 
like those whom the world is wont to call great, but as a type, 
as an emblem--the recognised emblem and representative...Read more of this...
by von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang

Poem (Halleck monument dedication)

...as built a nobler shrine,
Whose walls of stately rhyme
Roll back the tides of time,
While o'er their gates the gleaming tablets shine
That wear his name inwrought with many a golden line!

Call not our Poet dead,
Though on his turf we tread!
Green is the wreath their brows so long have worn,--
The minstrels of the morn,
Who, while the Orient burned with new-born flame,
Caught that celestial fire
And struck a Nation's lyre!
These taught the western winds the poet's name;
Their...Read more of this...
by Holmes, Oliver Wendell

Pompeii And Herculaneum

...f old--perchance a prize
More precious yet in yon papyrus lies,
And see ev'n still the tokens of their toil--
The waxen tablets--the recording style.
The earth, with faithful watch, has hoarded all!
Still stand the mute penates in the hall;
Back to his haunts returns each ancient god.
Why absent only from their ancient stand
The priests?--waves Hermes his Caducean rod,
And the winged victory struggles from the hand.
Kindle the flame--behold the altar there!
Long hath the god ...Read more of this...
by Schiller, Friedrich von

Saul

...omprised there! Which fault to amend,
``In the grove with his kind grows the cedar, whereon they shall spend
``(See, in tablets 'tis level before them) their praise, and record
``With the gold of the graver, Saul's story,---the statesman's great word
``Side by side with the poet's sweet comment. The river's a-wave
``With smooth paper-reeds grazing each other when prophet-winds rave:
``So the pen gives unborn generations their due and their part
``In thy being! Then, first of ...Read more of this...
by Browning, Robert

Speaking To You (From Rock Bottom)

...
this hour
these days when
I have lost the feather of poetry
and the rains
of separation 
surround us tock
tock like Go tablets

Everyone has learned 
to move carefully

'Dancing' 'laughing' 'bad taste'
is a memory
a tableau behind trees of law

In the midst of love for you
my wife's suffering
anger in every direction
and the children wise
as tough shrubs
but they are not tough
--so I fear
how anything can grow from this

all the wise blood
poured from little cuts
down into t...Read more of this...
by Ondaatje, Michael

The Addict

..., the orange,
the green and the white goodnights.
I'm becoming something of a chemical
mixture.
that's it!
My supply
of tablets
has got to last for years and years.
I like them more than I like me.
It's a kind of marriage.
It's a kind of war where I plant bombs inside
of myself.
Yes
I try
to kill myself in small amounts,
an innocuous occupation.
Actually I'm hung up on it.
But remember I don't make too much noise.
And frankly no one has to lug me out
and I don't stand there i...Read more of this...
by Sexton, Anne

The Forgotten Dialect Of The Heart

...ld
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egypti...Read more of this...
by Gilbert, Jack

The Jewish Cemetery at Newport

...of Death.

And these sepulchral stones, so old and brown,
That pave with level flags their burial-place,
Seem like the tablets of the Law, thrown down
And broken by Moses at the mountain's base.

The very names recorded here are strange,
Of foreign accent, and of different climes;
Alvares and Rivera interchange
With Abraham and Jacob of old times.

"Blessed be God! for he created Death!"
The mourner said, "and Death is rest and peace!"
Then added, in the certainty of faith,
...Read more of this...
by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

The Name

...h a lone splash a distant beach;
or in the timbered night a cry ...

'T will leave a lifeless trace among
names on your tablets: the design
of an entangled gravestone line
in an unfathomable tongue.

What is it then? A long-dead past,
lost in the rush of madder dreams,
upon your soul it will not cast
Mnemosyne's pure tender beams.

But if some sorrow comes to you,
utter my name with sighs, and tell
the silence: "Memory is true -
there beats a heart wherein I dwell."...Read more of this...
by Pushkin, Alexander

The Sompnours Tale

...egged meal and cheese, or elles corn.
His fellow had a staff tipped with horn,
A pair of tables* all of ivory, *writing tablets
And a pointel* y-polish'd fetisly,** *pencil **daintily
And wrote alway the names, as he stood;
Of all the folk that gave them any good,
Askaunce* that he woulde for them pray. *see note 
"Give us a bushel wheat, or malt, or rey,* *rye
A Godde's kichel,* or a trip** of cheese, *little cake **scrap
Or elles what you list, we may not chese;* *cho...Read more of this...
by Chaucer, Geoffrey

To Gnedich

...ts,
Our waiting hours were passing slowly,
And shining you came down from the mysterious heights
And brought to us your tablets holy -
So? in the wilderness, beneath a tent, you found
Us, feasting mad in empty gaiety,
Singing our savage songs and galloping around
Some newly hand-created deity.
We grew confused, aloof from your good rays hid we.
Then, seized of wrath and desolation,
Have you, O prophet, cursed your mindless family And smashed your tablets in frustration?
No, y...Read more of this...
by Pushkin, Alexander

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