Famous Ultimate Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Ultimate poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous ultimate poems. These examples illustrate what a famous ultimate poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Walt Whitman
A WOMAN waits for me—she contains all, nothing is lacking,
Yet all were lacking, if sex were lacking, or if the moisture of the right man were
lacking.
Sex contains all,
Bodies, Souls, meanings, proofs, purities, delicacies, results, promulgations,
Songs, commands, health, pride, the maternal mystery, the seminal milk;
All hopes, benefactions, bestowals,
All the passions, loves, beauties, delights of...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
1901
Not in the camp his victory lies
Or triumph in the market-place,
Who is his Nation's sacrifice
To turn the judgement from his race.
Happy is he who, bred and taught
By sleek, sufficing Circumstance --
Whose Gospel was the apparelled thought,
Whose Gods were Luxury and Chance --
Seese, on the threshold of his days,
The old life shrivel like a scroll,
And to...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
"Angels of the love affair, do you know that other,
the dark one, that other me?"
1. ANGEL OF FIRE AND GENITALS
Angel of fire and genitals, do you know slime,
that green mama who first forced me to sing,
who put me first in the latrine, that pantomime
of brown where I was beggar and she was king?
I said, "The devil is down that...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
Barbarous insult to Yeats’ memory and Claudel’s
Allen, thank God you are dead, you who breathed the air of Apollinaire,
Ghost of Reverdy bear witness to the mendacity of his clamour,
Hart Crane, rise from the estuary of the great river you drowned in,
John Clare, rise from your country churchyard grave,
Gray, from your carv?d tomb and Wilde, cast off your winged shield
In...Read more of this...
by
Alan Seeger
At dusk, when lowlands where dark waters glide
Robe in gray mist, and through the greening hills
The hoot-owl calls his mate, and whippoorwills
Clamor from every copse and orchard-side,
I watched the red star rising in the East,
And while his fellows of the flaming sign
From prisoning daylight more and more released,
Lift their pale lamps, and,...Read more of this...
by
Hafez
If there be any power in passion’s prayer—
But no: such ultimate longings have no word:
There is no eloquence in last despair.
Many have voiced their pain & answer heard;
Though ’twere but this, that to give bodied form
To grief, call’d their own heart to combat it:
But not ev’n thus can I pray;—thou strong storm,
All-overpowering, baffling bravest wit,
Wild spirit spurning cage of time...Read more of this...
by
Alan Seeger
Oft when sweet music undulated round,
Like the full moon out of a perfumed sea
Thine image from the waves of blissful sound
Rose and thy sudden light illumined me.
And in the country, leaf and flower and air
Would alter and the eternal shape emerge;
Because they spoke of thee the fields seemed fair,
And Joy to wait...Read more of this...
by
Marge Piercy
The construction of a woman:
a woman is not made of flesh
of bone and sinew
belly and breasts, elbows and liver and toe.
She is manufactured like a sports sedan.
She is retooled, refitted and redesigned
every decade.
Cecile had been seduction itself in college.
She wriggled through bars like a satin eel,
her hips and ass promising, her...Read more of this...
by
Rupert Brooke
Out of the nothingness of sleep,
The slow dreams of Eternity,
There was a thunder on the deep:
I came, because you called to me.
I broke the Night's primeval bars,
I dared the old abysmal curse,
And flashed through ranks of frightened stars
Suddenly on the universe!
The eternal silences were broken;
Hell became Heaven as I passed. --
What shall I give you as a token,
A sign...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
The wrecks dissolve above us; their dust drops down from afar --
Down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are.
There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep,
Or the great gray level plains of ooze where the shell-burred cables creep.
Here in the womb of the world -- here on...Read more of this...
by
Alec Derwent (A D) Hope
When, darkly brooding on this Modern Age,
The journalist with his marketable woes
Fills up once more the inevitable page
Of fatuous, flatulent, Sunday-paper prose;
Whenever the green aesthete starts to whoop
With horror at the house not made with hands
And when from vacuum cleaners and tinned soup
Another pure theosophist demands
Rebirth in other, less industrial stars...Read more of this...
by
Rupert Brooke
All night the ways of Heaven were desolate,
Long roads across a gleaming empty sky.
Outcast and doomed and driven, you and I,
Alone, serene beyond all love or hate,
Terror or triumph, were content to wait,
We, silent and all-knowing. Suddenly
Swept through the heaven low-crouching from on high,
One horseman, downward to the earth's low gate.
Oh, perfect from the ultimate height of living,
Lightly we...Read more of this...
by
Delmore Schwartz
Let me not, ever, to the marriage in Cana
Of Galilee admit the slightest sentiment
Of doubt about the astonishing and sustaining manna
Of chance and choice to throw a shadow's element
Of disbelief in truth -- Love is not love
Nor is the love of love its truth in consciousness
If it can be made hesitant by any crow or dove or
seeming...Read more of this...
by
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Read by the poet at The Public Ceremonial of The Naional Institute
of Arts and Letters at Carnegie Hall, New York, January 18th, 1941.
Great Muse, that from this hall absent for long
Hast never been,
Great Muse of Song,
Colossal Muse of mighty Melody,
Vocal Calliope,
With thine august and contrapuntal brow
And thy vast throat builded for Harmony,
For the strict monumental pure design,
And...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
This is the law of the Yukon, and ever she makes it plain:
"Send not your foolish and feeble; send me your strong and your sane --
Strong for the red rage of battle; sane for I harry them sore;
Send me men girt for the combat, men who are grit to the core;
Swift as the panther in triumph, fierce as the...Read more of this...
by
Galway Kinnell
1
We walk across the snow,
The stars can be faint,
The moon can be eating itself out,
There can be meteors flaring to death on earth,
The Northern Lights can be blooming and seething
And tearing themselves apart all night,
We walk arm in arm, and we are happy.
2
You in whose ultimate madness we live,
You flinging...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Allan Poe
By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule-
From a wild clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of SPACE- out of TIME.
Bottomless vales and boundless floods,
And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods,
With forms that no man can discover
For the tears that...Read more of this...
by
Aleister Crowley
[Dedicated to K.M.Ward]
"I will arise and go unto my father"
MALKUTH
Dark, dark all dark! I cower, I cringe.
Only ablove me is a citron tinge
As if some echo of red, gold and lue
Chimed on the night and let its shadow through.
Yet I who am thus prisoned and exiled
Am the right heir of glory, the crowned child.
I match my might against my...Read more of this...
by
John Berryman
What is the boy now, who has lost his ball,
What, what is he to do? I saw it go
Merrily bouncing, down the street, and then
Merrily over—there it is in the water!
No use to say 'O there are other balls':
An ultimate shaking grief fixes the boy
As he stands rigid, trembling, staring down
All his young days into the harbour where
His ball...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
WITH all thy gifts, America,
(Standing secure, rapidly tending, overlooking the world,)
Power, wealth, extent, vouchsafed to thee—With these, and like of these, vouchsafed
to
thee,
What if one gift thou lackest? (the ultimate human problem never solving;)
The gift of Perfect Women fit for thee—What of that gift of gifts thou lackest?
The towering Feminine of thee? the beauty,...Read more of this...
by
Alan Seeger
Oh, you are more desirable to me
Than all I staked in an impulsive hour,
Making my youth the sport of chance, to be
Blighted or torn in its most perfect flower;
For I think less of what that chance may bring
Than how, before returning into fire,
To make my dearest memory of the thing
That is but...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Hardy
At last I entered a long dark gallery,
Catacomb-lined; and ranged at the side
Were the bodies of men from far and wide
Who, motion past, were nevertheless not dead.
"The sense of waiting here strikes strong;
Everyone's waiting, waiting, it seems to me;
What are you waiting for so long? --
What is to happen?" I said.
"O we are waiting for one called God," said...Read more of this...
by
Alec Derwent (A D) Hope
A Nation of trees, drab green and desolate grey
In the field uniform of modern wars,
Darkens her hills, those endless, outstretched paws
Of Sphinx demolished or stone lion worn away.
They call her a young country, but they lie:
She is the last of lands, the emptiest,
A woman beyond her change of life, a breast
Still tender...Read more of this...
by
Aleister Crowley
Forth flashed the serpent streak of steel,
Consummate crown of man's device;
Down crashed upon an immobile
And brainless barrier of ice.
Courage!
The grey gods shoot a laughing lip: -
Let not faith founder with the ship!
We reel before the blows of fate;
Our stout souls stagger at the shock.
Oh! there is Something ultimate
Fixed faster than the living rock.
Courage!
Catastrophe beyond belief
Harden our hearts to fear...Read more of this...
by
Conrad Aiken
From time to time, lifting his eyes, he sees
The soft blue starlight through the one small window,
The moon above black trees, and clouds, and Venus,—
And turns to write . . . The clock, behind ticks softly.
It is so long, indeed, since I have written,—
Two years, almost, your last is turning yellow,—
That these first words I write seem cold and...Read more of this...
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