Famous Turn Away Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Turn Away poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous turn away poems. These examples illustrate what a famous turn away poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Robert Graves
My familiar ghost again
Comes to see what he can see,
Critic, son of Conscious Brain,
Spying on our privacy.
Slam the window, bolt the door,
Yet he’ll enter in and stay;
In tomorrow’s book he’ll score
Indiscretions of today.
Whispered love and muttered fears,
How their echoes fly about!
None escape his watchful ears,
Every sigh might be a shout.
No...Read more of this...
by
Mihai Eminescu
With the curtains drawn together,
At my table of rough wood,
And the firelight flickering softly,
Do I fall to thoughtful mood.
Flocks and flocks of sweet illusions,
Memories the mind recalls,
And they softly creep like crickets
Through time's grey and crumbled walls;
Or they drop with gentle patter
On the pavement of the soul,
As does wax...Read more of this...
by
William Butler Yeats
Endure what life God gives and ask no longer span;
Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man;
Delight becomes death-longing if all longing else be vain.
Even from that delight memory treasures so,
Death, despair, division of families, all entanglements of mankind grow,
As that old wandering beggar and these God-hated children know.
In the long echoing street the laughing dancers throng,
The...Read more of this...
by
D. H. Lawrence
When the autumn roses
Are heavy with dew,
Before the mist discloses
The leaf's brown hue,
You would, among the laughing hills
Of yesterday
Walk innocent in the daffodils,
Coiffing up your auburn hair
In a puritan fillet, a chaste white snare
To catch and keep me with you there
So far away.
When from the autumn roses
Trickles the dew,
When the...Read more of this...
by
Algernon Charles Swinburne
CHORUS
If with voice of words or prayers thy sons may reach thee,
We thy latter sons, the men thine after-birth,
We the children of thy grey-grown age, O Earth,
O our mother everlasting, we beseech thee,
By the sealed and secret ages of thy life;
By the darkness wherein grew thy sacred forces;
By the songs of stars thy sisters in their courses;
By thine own...Read more of this...
by
William Blake
HEAR the voice of the Bard
Who present past and future sees;
Whose ears have heard
The Holy Word
That walk'd among the ancient trees; 5
Calling the laps¨¨d soul
And weeping in the evening dew;
That might control
The starry pole
And fallen fallen light renew! 10
'O Earth O Earth return!
Arise from out the...Read more of this...
by
Jennifer Reeser
Send your army home to their wives and children.
It is late. Your soldiers are burdened, thirsty.
Lock the doors, the windows, and here in darkness
lie down beside me.
Speak of anything we possess in common:
ground or law or sense. Only speak it softly.
Spiders crawl the crevices. Violent voices
ruin their balance,
and they’ll fall – intuit – upon our faces,
where I...Read more of this...
by
Laure-Anne Bosselaar
I watch the man bend over his patch,
a fat gunny sack at his feet. He combs the earth
with his fingers, picks up pebbles around
tiny heads of sorrel. Clouds bruise in, clog the sky,
the first fat drops pock-mark the dust.
The man wipes his hands on his chest,
opens the...Read more of this...
by
Patricia Goedicke
Either at my friend's daughter's
sixteen-year-old body dumped
on the morgue slab, T-shirt
stuck fast to one ripped
breast I identified quick, and then
got out of there
or at the old gentleman
with tubes in the living room, spittle
stained in his wispy
beard, out of
the corner of my eye I hardly
notice it, how
could I, drink in hand
at five-thirty, at the least
sign of pain...Read more of this...
by
William Butler Yeats
I
A strange thing surely that my Heart, when love had come unsought
Upon the Norman upland or in that poplar shade,
Should find no burden but itself and yet should be worn out.
It could not bear that burden and therefore it went mad.
The south wind brought it longing, and the east wind despair,
The west wind made it pitiful, and the north...Read more of this...
by
Rabindranath Tagore
Ah me, why did they build my
house by the road to the market
town?
They moor their laden boats near
my trees.
They come and go and wander at
their will.
I sit and watch them; my time
wears on.
Turn them away I cannot. And
thus my days pass by.
Night and day their steps sound
by my door.
Vainly I cry, "I do not know
you."
Some of them are known...Read more of this...
by
Conrad Aiken
As evening falls,
The walls grow luminous and warm, the walls
Tremble and glow with the lives within them moving,
Moving like music, secret and rich and warm.
How shall we live to-night, where shall we turn?
To what new light or darkness yearn?
A thousand winding stairs lead down before us;
And one by one in myriads we descend
By lamplit flowered walls, long balustrades,
Through half-lit...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Lee Masters
They told me I had three months to live,
So I crept to Bernadotte,
And sat by the mill for hours and hours
Where the gathered waters deeply moving
Seemed not to move:
O world, that's you!
You are but a widened place in the river
Where Life looks down and we rejoice for her
Mirrored in us, and so we dream
And turn away, but when again
We...Read more of this...
by
Dorothy Parker
A dream lies dead here. May you softly go
Before this place, and turn away your eyes,
Nor seek to know the look of that which dies
Importuning Life for life. Walk not in woe,
But, for a little, let your step be slow.
And, of your mercy, be not sweetly wise
With words of hope and Spring and...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
When a girl's sixteen, and as poor as she's pretty,
And she hasn't a friend and she hasn't a home,
Heigh-ho! She's as safe in Paris city
As a lamb night-strayed where the wild wolves roam;
And that was I; oh, it's seven years now
(Some water's run down the Seine since then),
And I've almost forgotten the pangs and the tears...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
Like prim Professor of a College
I primed my shelves with books of knowledge;
And now I stand before them dumb,
Just like a child that sucks its thumb,
And stares forlorn and turns away,
With dolls or painted bricks to play.
They glour at me, my tomes of learning.
"You dolt!" they jibe; "you undiscerning
Moronic oaf, you make a fuss,
With highbrow swank selecting us;
Saying: "I'll...Read more of this...
by
Lucy Maud Montgomery
Through the pungent hours of the afternoon,
On the autumn slopes we have lightly wandered
Where the sunshine lay in a golden swoon
And the lingering year all its sweetness squandered.
Oh, it was blithesome to roam at will
Over the crest of each westering hill,
Over those dreamy, enchanted lands
Where the trees held to us their friendly hands!
Winds...Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
O turn away those roguish eyes of thine!
Be still! seek not my peace to undermine!
Thou say'st, «Look not.» I might as well essay
To slant my goblet, and not spill my wine....Read more of this...
by
Thomas Flatman
O THE sad day!
When friends shall shake their heads, and say
Of miserable me--
'Hark, how he groans!
Look, how he pants for breath!
See how he struggles with the pangs of death!'
When they shall say of these dear eyes--
'How hollow, O how dim they be!
Mark how his breast doth rise and swell
Against his potent enemy!'
When some old friend shall step to my...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
When I was cub reporter I
Would interview the Great,
And sometimes they would make reply,
And sometimes hesitate;
But often they would sharply say,
With bushy eyebrows bent:
"Young man, your answer for to-day
Is - No Comment."
Nigh sixty years have called the tune,
And silver is my pate;
No longer do I importune
Important men of state;
But time has made me wise, and so
When button-holed I...Read more of this...
by
Alfred Lord Tennyson
WHEN the breeze of a joyful dawn blew free
In the silken sail of infancy,
The tide of time flow'd back with me,
The forward-flowing tide of time;
And many a sheeny summer-morn,
Adown the Tigris I was borne,
By Bagdat's shrines of fretted gold,
High-walled gardens green and old;
True Mussulman was I and sworn,
For it was...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
We Cover Thee -- Sweet Face --
Not that We tire of Thee --
But that Thyself fatigue of Us --
Remember -- as Thou go --
We follow Thee until
Thou notice Us -- no more --
And then -- reluctant -- turn away
To Con Thee o'er and o'er --
And blame the scanty love
We were Content to show --
Augmented -- Sweet -- a Hundred...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
I'm dead.
Officially I'm dead. Their hope is past.
How long I stood as missing! Now, at last
I'm dead.
Look in my face -- no likeness can you see,
No tiny trace of him they knew as "me".
How terrible the change!
Even my eyes are strange.
So keyed are they to pain,
That if I chanced to meet
My mother in the street
She'd look at me...Read more of this...
by
Edwin Arlington Robinson
“The sea is everywhere the sea.”
I
Gone—faded out of the story, the sea-faring friend I remember?
Gone for a decade, they say: never a word or a sign.
Gone with his hard red face that only his laughter could wrinkle,
Down where men go to be still, by the old way of the sea.
Never again will he come, with...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
Distrustful of the Gentian --
And just to turn away,
The fluttering of her fringes
Child my perfidy --
Weary for my ----------
I will singing go --
I shall not feel the sleet -- then --
I shall not fear the snow.
Flees so the phantom meadow
Before the breathless Bee --
So bubble brooks in deserts
On Ears that dying lie --
Burn so the Evening Spires
To Eyes that...Read more of this...
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