Famous Thought Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Thought poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous thought poems. These examples illustrate what a famous thought poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Emily Dickinson
I thought the Train would never come --
How slow the whistle sang --
I don't believe a peevish Bird
So whimpered for the Spring --
I taught my Heart a hundred times
Precisely what to say --
Provoking Lover, when you came
Its Treatise flew away
To hide my strategy too late
To wiser be too soon --
For miseries so halcyon
The happiness atone --...Read more of this...
by
William Shakespeare
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancelled woe,
And moan the expense of many...Read more of this...
by
William Shakespeare
If the dull substance of my flesh were thought,
Injurious distance should not stop my way;
For then despite of space I would be brought,
From limits far remote, where thou dost stay.
No matter then although my foot did stand
Upon the farthest earth removed from thee;
For nimble thought can jump both sea and land
As soon as think the place where he would...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
AS I sit with others, at a great feast, suddenly, while the music is playing,
To my mind, (whence it comes I know not,) spectral, in mist, of a wreck at sea;
Of certain ships—how they sail from port with flying streamers, and wafted
kisses—and
that is the last of them!
Of the solemn and murky mystery about the...Read more of this...
by
William Shakespeare
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear times' waste;
Then can I drown an eye, unus'd to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many...Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
One night I saw in thought a sage who said to me:
Sleep, O my friend, has never caused the rose of happiness
to bloom for anyone; why lend yourself to aught so
similar to death? Rather drink wine, for you will sleep
enough when buried in the earth.
291...Read more of this...
by
William Butler Yeats
She might, so noble from head
To great shapely knees
The long flowing line,
Have walked to the altar
Through the holy images
At pallas Athene's Side,
Or been fit spoil for a centaur
Drunk with the unmixed wine....Read more of this...
by
William Shakespeare
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste.
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancelled woe,
And moan th' expense of many...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
I found the words to every thought
I ever had -- but One --
And that -- defies me --
As a Hand did try to chalk the Sun
To Races -- nurtured in the Dark --
How would your own -- begin?
Can Blaze be shown in Cochineal --
Or Noon -- in Mazarin?...Read more of this...
by
Anna Akhmatova
You thought I was that type:
That you could forget me,
And that I'd plead and weep
And throw myself under the hooves of a bay mare,
Or that I'd ask the sorcerers
For some magic potion made from roots and send you a terrible gift:
My precious perfumed handkerchief.
Damn you! I will not grant your cursed soul
Vicarious tears or a single glance.
And I swear...Read more of this...
by
Alfred Lord Tennyson
I thought of Thee, my partner and my guide,
As being past away. -Vain sympathies!
For backward, Duddon! as I cast my eyes,
I see what was, and is, and will abide;
Still glides the Stream, and shall not cease to glide;
The Form remains, the Function never dies;
While we, the brave, the mighty, and the wise,
We Men, who in our morn of youth...Read more of this...
by
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Oh, my beloved, have you thought of this:
How in the years to come unscrupulous Time,
More cruel than Death, will tear you from my kiss,
And make you old, and leave me in my prime?
How you and I, who scale together yet
A little while the sweet, immortal height
No pilgrim may remember or forget,
As sure as the world turns, some granite night
Shall...Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
If in a city you acquire renown, you are thought to
be the most wicked of men; if you retire into a corner,
they regard you as a conspirator. What then is best,
were you Elias or Saint Jude, is to live in the way of
knowing none, and being known by none....Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
A thought went up my mind to-day
That I have had before,
But did not finish,--some way back,
I could not fix the year,
Nor where it went, nor why it came
The second time to me,
Nor definitely what it was,
Have I the art to say.
But somewhere in my soul, I know
I've met the thing before;
It just reminded me--'t was all--
And came my way no...Read more of this...
by
Lucy Maud Montgomery
It came to him in rainbow dreams,
Blent with the wisdom of the sages,
Of spirit and of passion born;
In words as lucent as the morn
He prisoned it, and now it gleams
A jewel shining through the ages....Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
The things we thought that we should do
We other things have done
But those peculiar industries
Have never been begun --
The Lands we thought that we should seek
When large enough to run
By Speculation ceded
To Speculation's Son --
The Heaven, in which we hoped to pause
When Discipline was done
Untenable to Logic
But possibly the one --...Read more of this...
by
Fernando Pessoa
Thought was born blind, but Thought knows what is seeing.
Its careful touch, deciphering forms from shapes,
Still suggests form as aught whose proper being
Mere finding touch with erring darkness drapes.
Yet whence, except from guessed sight, does touch teach
That touch is but a close and empty sense?
How does mere touch, self-uncontented, reach
For some truer sense's whole intelligence?
The thing once touched, if touch...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
OF what I write from myself—As if that were not the resumé;
Of Histories—As if such, however complete, were not less complete than the preceding
poems;
As if those shreds, the records of nations, could possibly be as lasting as the preceding
poems;
As if here were not the amount of all nations, and of all the lives of...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
AN old man’s thought of School;
An old man, gathering youthful memories and blooms, that youth itself cannot.
Now only do I know you!
O fair auroral skies! O morning dew upon the grass!
And these I see—these sparkling eyes,
These stores of mystic meaning—these young lives,
Building, equipping, like a fleet of ships—immortal ships!
Soon to sail out over...Read more of this...
by
Dante Alighieri
There is a gentle thought that often springs
to life in me, because it speaks of you.
Its reasoning about love’s so sweet and true,
the heart is conquered, and accepts these things.
‘Who is this’ the mind enquires of the heart,
‘who comes here to seduce our intellect?
Is his power so great we must reject
every other intellectual art?
The heart replies ‘O, meditative mind
this...Read more of this...
by
Rg Gregory
be moved by your own time
but move it too
the sun hasn't all the answers
it can be made to listen to you
however adamant the pavement
it's a book of feet
though they need it to take them through town
people control the street
from the irreproachable mountain
wisdom drips down
spray it with your own salt
manacled clown...Read more of this...
by
Heather McHugh
We were supposed to do a job in Italy
and, full of our feeling for
ourselves (our sense of being
Poets from America) we went
from Rome to Fano, met
the Mayor, mulled a couple
matters over. The Italian literati seemed
bewildered by the language of America: they asked us
what does "flat drink" mean? and the mysterious
"cheap date" (no explanation lessened
this one's mystery). Among Italian writers...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
OF persons arrived at high positions, ceremonies, wealth, scholarships, and the like;
To me, all that those persons have arrived at, sinks away from them, except as it results
to
their
Bodies and Souls,
So that often to me they appear gaunt and naked;
And often, to me, each one mocks the others, and mocks himself or herself,
And...Read more of this...
by
Ted Hughes
I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.
Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:
Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now
Sets neat prints into the...Read more of this...
by
Alfred Lord Tennyson
How thought you that this thing could captivate?
What are those graces that could make her dear,
Who is not worth the notice of a sneer,
To rouse the vapid devil of her hate?
A speech conventional, so void of weight,
That after it has buzzed about one's ear,
'Twere rich refreshment for a week to hear
The dentist...Read more of this...
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