Famous The Past Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous The Past poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous the past poems. These examples illustrate what a famous the past poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...FROM off a hill whose concave womb reworded
A plaintful story from a sistering vale,
My spirits to attend this double voice accorded,
And down I laid to list the sad-tuned tale;
Ere long espied a fickle maid full pale,
Tearing of papers, breaking rings a-twain,
Storming her world with sorrow's wind and rain.
Upon her head a platted hive of straw,
Which fo...Read more of this...
by
Shakespeare, William
...all hazards,
Stands removed, spacious, composite, sound—initiates the true use of precedents,
Does not repel them, or the past, or what they have produced under their forms,
Takes the lesson with calmness, perceives the corpse slowly borne from the house,
Perceives that it waits a little while in the door—that it was fittest for its days,
That its life has descended to the stalwart and well-shaped heir who approaches,
And that he shall be fittest for his days.
Any peri...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other’s hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & ...Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
...BOOK I
Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star,
Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Forest on forest hung above his head
Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there,
Not so much life as on a summer's day
Robs not one ligh...Read more of this...
by
Keats, John
...CANTO I
ONE night, when half my life behind me lay,
I wandered from the straight lost path afar.
Through the great dark was no releasing way;
Above that dark was no relieving star.
If yet that terrored night I think or say,
As death's cold hands its fears resuming are.
Gladly the dreads I felt, too dire to tell,
The hopeless, pathless, li...Read more of this...
by
Alighieri, Dante
...ther clime
Had lent a flagging wing to weary Time.
They see, they recognise, yet almost deem
The present dubious, or the past a dream.
He lives, nor yet is past his manhood's prime,
Though sear'd by toil, and something touch'd by time;
His faults, whate'er they were, if scarce forgot,
Might be untaught him by his varied lot;
Nor good nor ill of late were known, his name
Might yet uphold his patrimonial fame.
His soul in youth was haughty, but his sins
No more than...Read more of this...
by
Byron, George (Lord)
...The first time I walked
With a girl, I was twelve,
Cold, and weighted down
With two oranges in my jacket.
December. Frost cracking
Beneath my steps, my breath
Before me, then gone,
As I walked toward
Her house, the one whose
Porch light burned yellow
Night and day, in any weather.
A dog barked at me, until
She came out pulling
At her gloves, fa...Read more of this...
by
Soto, Gary
...stable doctrine;
Thoughts and deeds of the present, our rouse and early start.
This minute that comes to me over the past decillions,
There is no better than it and now.
What behaved well in the past, or behaves well to-day, is not such a wonder;
The wonder is, always and always, how there can be a mean man or an infidel.
23
Endless unfolding of words of ages!
And mine a word of the modern—the word En-Masse.
A word of the faith that never balks;
Her...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...the
landscape and flowing currents.
Here is realization;
Here is a man tallied—he realizes here what he has in him;
The past, the future, majesty, love—if they are vacant of you, you are vacant of them.
Only the kernel of every object nourishes;
Where is he who tears off the husks for you and me?
Where is he that undoes stratagems and envelopes for you and me?
Here is adhesiveness—it is not previously fashion’d—it is apropos;
Do you know what it is, as you pass, to ...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.
Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high...Read more of this...
by
Angelou, Maya
...DEDICATION
Of great limbs gone to chaos,
A great face turned to night--
Why bend above a shapeless shroud
Seeking in such archaic cloud
Sight of strong lords and light?
Where seven sunken Englands
Lie buried one by one,
Why should one idle spade, I wonder,
Shake up the dust of thanes like thunder
To smoke and choke the sun?
In cloud of clay so cast to ...Read more of this...
by
Chesterton, G K
...being; they become
A portion of ourselves as of our time,
And look like heralds of eternity;
They pass like spirits of the past—they speak
Like sibyls of the future; they have power—
The tyranny of pleasure and of pain;
They make us what we were not—what they will,
And shake us with the vision that's gone by,
The dread of vanished shadows—Are they so?
Is not the past all shadow?—What are they?
Creations of the mind?—The mind can make
Substances, and people planets of its ow...Read more of this...
by
Byron, George (Lord)
...1
They that in play can do the thing they would,
Having an instinct throned in reason's place,
--And every perfect action hath the grace
Of indolence or thoughtless hardihood--
These are the best: yet be there workmen good
Who lose in earnestness control of face,
Or reckon means, and rapt in effort base
Reach to their end by steps well understood.
Me whom...Read more of this...
by
Bridges, Robert Seymour
...Dedication
Inscribed to a dear Child:
in memory of golden summer hours
and whispers of a summer sea.
Girt with a boyish garb for boyish task,
Eager she wields her spade; yet loves as well
Rest on a friendly knee, intent to ask
The tale he loves to tell.
Rude spirits of the seething outer strife,
Unmeet to read her pure and simple spright,
Deem, if y...Read more of this...
by
Carroll, Lewis
...The IDIOT BOY. 'Tis eight o'clock,—a clear March night, The moon is up—the sky is blue, The owlet in the moonlight air, He shouts from nobody knows where; He lengthens out his lonely shout, Halloo! halloo! a long halloo! —Why bustle thus about your door,&n...Read more of this...
by
Wordsworth, William
...
A rood beyond the farthest mark;
And still in Stirling's royal park,
The gray-haired sires, who know the past,
To strangers point the Douglas cast,
And moralize on the decay
Of Scottish strength in modern day.
XXIV.
The vale with loud applauses rang,
The Ladies' Rock sent back the clang.
The King, with look unmoved, bestowed
A purse well filled with pieces broad.
Indignant smiled the Douglas proud,
...Read more of this...
by
Scott, Sir Walter
...Swift as a spirit hastening to his task
Of glory & of good, the Sun sprang forth
Rejoicing in his splendour, & the mask
Of darkness fell from the awakened Earth.
The smokeless altars of the mountain snows
Flamed above crimson clouds, & at the birth
Of light, the Ocean's orison arose
To which the birds tempered their matin lay,
All flowers in field or fore...Read more of this...
by
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...'Tis true, he was a tool from first to last
(I have the workmen safe); but as a tool
So let him be consumed. From out the past
Of ages, since mankind have known the rule
Of monarchs — from the bloody rolls amass'd
Of sin and slaughter — from the C?sar's school,
Take the worst pupil; and produce a reign
More drench'd with gore, more cumber'd with the slain.
XLV
'He ever warr'd with freedom and the free:
Nations as men, home subjects, foreign foes,
So that they utt...Read more of this...
by
Byron, George (Lord)
...The Waste Land
by T. S. Eliot
"Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis
vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent:
Sibylla ti theleis; respondebat illa: apothanein thelo."
I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter ke...Read more of this...
by
Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...et.
x x x
He was jealous, fearful and tender,
He loved me like God's only light,
And that she not sing of the past times
He killed my bird colored white.
He said, in the lighthouse at sundown:
"Love me, laugh and write poetry!"
And I buried the joyous songbird
Behind a round well near a tree.
I promised that I would not mourn her.
But my heart turned to stone without choice,
And it seems to me that everywhere
And always I'll hear her sweet voice.
...Read more of this...
by
Akhmatova, Anna
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