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Famous Turning Away Poems by Famous Poets

These are examples of famous Turning 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 turning away poems. These examples illustrate what a famous turning away poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).

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by Levertov, Denise
...ark forest.

Rose Red's cheeks are burning,
sign of her ardent, joyful
compassionate heart.
Rose White is pale,
turning away when she hears
the bear's paw on the latch.

When he enters, there is
frost on his fur,
he draws near to the fire
giving off sparks.

Rose Red catches the scent of the forest,
of mushrooms, of rosin.

Together Rose Red and Rose White
sing to the bear;
it is a cradle song, a loom song,
a song about marriage, about
a pilgrimage to the ...Read more of this...



by Whitman, Walt
...r nurses—the work begun for, in earnest—no mere parade
 now;
War! an arm’d race is advancing!—the welcome for battle—no turning away; 
War! be it weeks, months, or years—an arm’d race is advancing to welcome it. 

4
Mannahatta a-march!—and it’s O to sing it well! 
It’s O for a manly life in the camp! 
And the sturdy artillery!
The guns, bright as gold—the work for giants—to serve well the guns: 
Unlimber them! no more, as the past forty years, for salutes for courtesies m...Read more of this...

by Lewis, C S
...being the last of one's kind: a topmost moment as one watched 
The huge wave curving over Atlantis, the shrouded barge 
Turning away with wounded Arthur, or Ilium burning. 
Now I see that, all along, I was assuming a posterity 
Of gentle hearts: someone, however distant in the depths of time, 
Who could pick up our signal, who could understand a story. There won't be. 

Between the new Hembidae and us who are dying, already 
There rises a barrier across which no v...Read more of this...

by Roethke, Theodore
...fear infinity,
The far field, the windy cliffs of forever,
The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow,
The wheel turning away from itself,
The sprawl of the wave,
The on-coming water.


II
The river turns on itself,
The tree retreats into its own shadow.
I feel a weightless change, a moving forward
As of water quickening before a narrowing channel
When banks converge, and the wide river whitens;
Or when two rivers combine, the blue glacial torrent
And the yello...Read more of this...

by Gillan, Maria Mazziotti
...made me feel in that moment,
that I would learn again and again,
the miraculous language, the music of it.
My life, turning away from the constricted world
of the 19th Street tenement, formed a line 
almost perpendicular to that old life,
I moved toward it, breathed in this new air,
racing toward a world filled with poems and
music and books that freed me from everything
that could have chained me to the ground.

Copyright © by Maria Mazziotti Gillan...Read more of this...



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