Famous Unbroken Poems by Famous Poets

These are examples of famous Unbroken poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous unbroken poems. These examples illustrate what a famous unbroken poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).

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To Mrs. Macmarland

by Robert Louis Stevenson
 IN Schnee der Alpen - so it runs
To those divine accords - and here
We dwell in Alpine snows and suns,
A motley crew, for half the year:
A motley crew, we dwell to taste -
A shivering band in hope and fear -
That sun upon the snowy waste,
That Alpine ether cold and clear.

Up from the laboured plains, and up
From low sea-levels, we...Read more of this...

The Dead: IV

by Rupert Brooke
 These hearts were woven of human joys and cares, 
Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth. 
The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs, 
And sunset, and the colours of the earth. 
These had seen movement, and heard music; known 
Slumber and waking; loved; gone proudly friended; 
Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone; 
Touched flowers and...Read more of this...

The Ballad Of The Children Of The Czar

by Delmore Schwartz
 1

The children of the Czar
Played with a bouncing ball

In the May morning, in the Czar's garden,
Tossing it back and forth.

It fell among the flowerbeds
Or fled to the north gate.

A daylight moon hung up
In the Western sky, bald white.

Like Papa's face, said Sister,
Hurling the white ball forth.

 2

While I ate a baked potato
Six thousand miles apart,

In Brooklyn, in 1916,
Aged two,...Read more of this...

Integrity

by Adrienne Rich
 the quality of being complete; unbroken condition; entirety
~ Webster
A wild patience has taken me this far

as if I had to bring to shore
a boat with a spasmodic outboard motor
old sweaters, nets, spray-mottled books
tossed in the prow
some kind of sun burning my shoulder-blades.
Splashing the oarlocks. Burning through.
Your fore-arms can get scalded, licked with pain
in a sun blotted like unspoken anger
behind...Read more of this...

Joyful Joyful We Adore Thee

by Henry Van Dyke
 Joyful, joyful we adore Thee, God of glory, Lord of love, 
Hearts unfold like flowers before Thee, hail Thee as the sun above. 
Melt the clouds of sin and sadness, drive the dark of doubt away; 
Giver of immortal gladness, fill us with the light of day. 

All Thy works with joy surround Thee, earth and heav'n reflect Thy...Read more of this...

The Widening Spell Of Leaves

by Larry Levis
 --The Carpathian Frontier, October, 1968
 --for my brother

Once, in a foreign country, I was suddenly ill.
I was driving south toward a large city famous
For so little it had a replica, in concrete,
In two-thirds scale, of the Arc de Triomphe stuck
In the midst of traffic, & obstructing it.
But the city was hours away, beyond the hills
Shaped like the bodies of...Read more of this...

Why Brownlee Left

by Paul Muldoon
 Why Brownlee left, and where he went,
Is a mystery even now.
For if a man should have been content
It was him; two acres of barley,
One of potatoes, four bullocks,
A milker, a slated farmhouse.
He was last seen going out to plough
On a March morning, bright and early.

By noon Brownlee was famous;
They had found all abandoned, with
The last rig unbroken, his pair...Read more of this...

The Glory Of The Heavens

by Emile Verhaeren
Shining in dim transparence, the whole of infinity lies
Behind the veil that the finger of radiant winter weaves
And down on us falls the foliage of stars in glittering sheaves;
From out the depths of the forest, the forest obscure of the skies,


The wingèd sea with her shadowy floods as of dappled silk
Speeds, 'neath the golden fires, her pale immensity o'er;
And diamond-rayed,...Read more of this...

A Crowded Trolley-Car

by Elinor Wylie
 The rain's cold grains are silver-gray 
Sharp as golden sands, 
A bell is clanging, people sway 
Hanging by their hands.

Supple hands, or gnarled and stiff, 
Snatch and catch and grope; 
That face is yellow-pale, as if 
The fellow swung from rope.

Dull like pebbles, sharp like knives, 
Glances strike and glare, 
Fingers tangle, Bluebeard's wives 
Dangle by the hair.

Orchard of...Read more of this...

For Hans Carossa

by Rainer Maria Rilke
 Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting
still has a shape in the kindgdom of transformation.
When something's let go of, it circles; and though we are
 rarely the center
of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous
 curve....Read more of this...

The Man-Moth

by Elizabeth Bishop
 Man-Moth: Newspaper misprint for "mammoth."

 Here, above,
cracks in the buldings are filled with battered moonlight.
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,
and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.
He does not see the moon; he observes only her...Read more of this...

351. Second Epistle to Robert Graham Esq. of Fintry

by Robert Burns
 LATE crippl’d of an arm, and now a leg,
About to beg a pass for leave to beg;
Dull, listless, teas’d, dejected, and deprest
(Nature is adverse to a cripple’s rest);
Will generous Graham list to his Poet’s wail?
(It soothes poor Misery, hearkening to her tale)
And hear him curse the light he first survey’d,
And doubly curse the luckless rhyming trade?


 Thou, Nature! partial...Read more of this...

Mute Opinion

by Thomas Hardy
 I 

I traversed a dominion 
Whose spokesmen spake out strong 
Their purpose and opinion 
Through pulpit, press, and song. 
I scarce had means to note there 
A large-eyed few, and dumb, 
Who thought not as those thought there 
That stirred the heat and hum. 

II 

When, grown a Shade, beholding 
That land in lifetime trode, 
To learn if its...Read more of this...

Christmas Bells

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 "I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!


And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!


Till, ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime
A chant sublime
Of...Read more of this...

Pan to Artemis

by Aleister Crowley
 Uncharmable charmer
Of Bacchus and Mars
In the sounding rebounding
Abyss of the stars!
O virgin in armour,
Thine arrows unsling
In the brilliant resilient
First rays of the spring!

By the force of the fashion
Of love, when I broke
Through the shroud, through the cloud,
Through the storm, through the smoke,
To the mountain of passion
Volcanic that woke ---
By the rage of the mage
I invoke, I invoke!

By the midnight...Read more of this...

My Springs

by Sidney Lanier
 In the heart of the Hills of Life, I know
Two springs that with unbroken flow
Forever pour their lucent streams
Into my soul's far Lake of Dreams.

Not larger than two eyes, they lie
Beneath the many-changing sky
And mirror all of life and time,
-- Serene and dainty pantomime.

Shot through with lights of stars and dawns,
And shadowed sweet by ferns and fawns,
-- Thus heaven...Read more of this...

Lost Star

by Rabindranath Tagore
 When the creation was new and all the stars shone in their first 
splendor, the gods held their assembly in the sky and sang 
`Oh, the picture of perfection! the joy unalloyed!' 

But one cried of a sudden 
---`It seems that somewhere there is a break in the chain of light 
and one of the stars has been lost.'...Read more of this...

Sonnet LXXVIII

by Francesco Petrarch
SONNET LXXVIII. Poi che voi ed io più volte abbiam provato. TO A FRIEND, COUNSELLING HIM TO ABANDON EARTHLY PLEASURES.  Still has it been our bitter lot to proveHow hope, or e'er it reach fruition, flies!Up then to that high good, which never dies,Lift we the heart—to heaven's pure bliss above.Read more of this...

The Mountain Castle

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 THERE stands on yonder high mountain

A castle built of yore,
Where once lurked horse and horseman

In rear of gate and of door.

Now door and gate are in ashes,

And all around is so still;
And over the fallen ruins

I clamber just as I will.

Below once lay a cellar,

With costly wines well stor'd;
No more the glad maid with her pitcher

Descends there to draw...Read more of this...

IV. The Dead

by Rupert Brooke
 These hearts were woven of human joys and cares,
Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth.
The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs,
And sunset, and the colours of the earth.
These had seen movement, and heard music; known
Slumber and waking; loved; gone proudly friended;
Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone;
Touched flowers and furs and cheeks. All this is ended.

There...Read more of this...

Alexander And Zenobia

by Anne Bronte
 Fair was the evening and brightly the sun
Was shining on desert and grove,
Sweet were the breezes and balmy the flowers
And cloudless the heavens above. 
It was Arabia's distant land
And peaceful was the hour;
Two youthful figures lay reclined
Deep in a shady bower.

One was a boy of just fourteen
Bold beautiful and bright;
Soft raven curls hung clustering round
A brow of marble white.

The...Read more of this...

Cobwebs

by Christina Rossetti
 It is a land with neither night nor day, 
Nor heat nor cold, nor any wind, nor rain, 
Nor hills nor valleys; but one even plain 
Stretches thro' long unbroken miles away: 
While thro' the sluggish air a twilight grey 
Broodeth; no moons or seasons wax and wane, 
No ebb and flow are there among the main, 
No bud-time...Read more of this...

Coffee

by Richard Brautigan
 Sometimes life is merely a matter of coffee and whatever intimacy a cup of coffee
affords. I once read something about coffee. The thing said that coffee is good for you;
it stimulates all the organs.
I thought at first this was a strange way to put it, and not altogether pleasant, but
as time goes by I have found out that it...Read more of this...

Stanzas To Augusta

by George (Lord) Byron
 When all around grew drear and dark,
And reason half withheld her ray— 
And hope but shed a dying spark
Which more misled my lonely way;

In that deep midnight of the mind,
And that internal strife of heart,
When dreading to be deemed too kind,
The weak despair—the cold depart;

When fortune changed—and love fled far,
And hatred's shafts flew thick and fast,
Thou wert the solitary...Read more of this...

June

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 SHE behind yon mountain lives,
Who my love's sweet guerdon gives.
Tell me, mount, how this can be!
Very glass thou seem'st to me,
And I seem to be close by,
For I see her drawing nigh;
Now, because I'm absent, sad,
Now, because she sees me, glad!

Soon between us rise to sight
Valleys cool, with bushes light,
Streams and meadows; next appear

Mills and wheels, the surest token
That...Read more of this...

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