Famous Uncertain Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Uncertain poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous uncertain poems. These examples illustrate what a famous uncertain poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Robert William Service
On the ragged edge of the world I'll roam,
And the home of the wolf shall be my home,
And a bunch of bones on the boundless snows
The end of my trail . . . who knows, who knows!
I'm dreaming to-night in the fire-glow, alone in my study tower,
My books battalioned around me, my Kipling flat on my knee;
But I'm not...Read more of this...
by
Andrew Barton Paterson
The boys had come back from the races
All silent and down on their luck;
They'd backed 'em, straight out and for places,
But never a winner they's struck.
They lost their good money on Slogan,
And fell most uncommonly flat
When Partner, the pride of the Bogan,
Was beaten by Aristocrat.
And one said, "I move that instanter...Read more of this...
by
Alexander Pushkin
I saw the Death, and she was seating
By quiet entrance at my own home,
I saw the doors were opened in my tomb,
And there, and there my hope was a-flitting
I'll die, and traces of my past
In days of future will be never sighted,
Look of my eyes will never be delighted
By dear look, in my existence last.
Farewell the somber world, where,...Read more of this...
by
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Old Eben Flood, climbing alone one night
Over the hill between the town below
And the forsaken upland hermitage
That held as much as he should ever know
On earth again of home, paused warily.
The road was his with not a native near;
And Eben, having leisure, said aloud,
For no man else in Tilbury Town to hear:
"Well, Mr. Flood, we have the harvest moon
Again,...Read more of this...
by
Elizabeth Bishop
Here is a coast; here is a harbor;
here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery:
impractically shaped and--who knows?--self-pitying mountains,
sad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery,
with a little church on top of one. And warehouses,
some of them painted a feeble pink, or blue,
and some tall, uncertain palms. Oh, tourist,
is this how this country is...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
Uncertain lease -- develops lustre
On Time
Uncertain Grasp, appreciation
Of Sum --
The shorter Fate -- is oftener the chiefest
Because
Inheritors upon a tenure
Prize --...Read more of this...
by
Wislawa Szymborska
Nothing has changed.
The body is susceptible to pain,
it must eat and breathe air and sleep,
it has thin skin and blood right underneath,
an adequate stock of teeth and nails,
its bones are breakable, its joints are stretchable.
In tortures all this is taken into account.
Nothing has changed.
The body shudders as it shuddered
before the founding of Rome and after,
in the twentieth century...Read more of this...
by
C K Williams
The first morning of Three Mile Island: those first disquieting, uncertain,
mystifying hours.
All morning a crew of workmen have been tearing the old decrepit roof
off our building,
and all morning, trying to distract myself, I've been wandering out to
watch them
as they hack away the leaden layers of asbestos paper and disassemble
the disintegrating drains.
After half a night of listening...Read more of this...
by
Alfred Lord Tennyson
By an Evolutionist
The Lord let the house of a brute to the soul of a man,
And the man said, ‘Am I your debtor?’
And the Lord–‘Not yet; but make it as clean as you can,
And then I will let you a better.’
I.
If my body come from brutes, my soul uncertain or a fable,
Why not bask amid the senses while the...Read more of this...
by
Adrian Green
The curlew and the heron call,
the hissing mud and whispering wings
beat eery through the idle air
until the moonlit midnight silence falls
and then the tide flows softly
through the gut and sluice of estuary sands
and dark against the dreamlit sky
the trees arise from hedgerows,
and the hills
alive with monstrous shapes
are menacing with soundless fear,
and still below the blundering man,
the beery and uncertain...Read more of this...
by
Elizabeth Bishop
The brown enormous odor he lived by
was too close, with its breathing and thick hair,
for him to judge. The floor was rotten; the sty
was plastered halfway up with glass-smooth dung.
Light-lashed, self-righteous, above moving snouts,
the pigs' eyes followed him, a cheerful stare--
even to the sow that always ate her young--
till, sickening, he leaned to scratch her head.
But sometimes mornings after...Read more of this...
by
Arthur Symons
IT was a day of sun and rain,
Uncertain as a child’s swift moods;
And I shall never spend again
So blithe a day among the woods.
Was it because the Gods were pleased
That they were awful in our eyes,
Whom we in very deed appeased
With barley-cakes of sacrifice?
The forest knew her and was glad,
And...Read more of this...
by
Percy Bysshe Shelley
The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats through unseen among us, -- visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower, --
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,
It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance;
Like hues and harmonies of evening, --
Like clouds in starlight widely spread, --
Like memory of music fled,...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
Said President MacConnachie to Treasurer MacCall:
"We ought to have a piper for our next Saint Andrew's Ball.
Yon squakin' saxophone gives me the syncopated gripes.
I'm sick of jazz, I want to hear the skirling of the pipes."
"Alas! it's true," said Tam MacCall. "The young folk of to-day
Are fox-trot mad and dinna ken a reel from Strathspey.
Now, what we want's a...Read more of this...
by
Robert Herrick
Man knows where first he ships himself; but he
Never can tell where shall his landing be....Read more of this...
by
Robert Louis Stevenson
NOT thine where marble-still and white
Old statues share the tempered light
And mock the uneven modern flight,
But in the stream
Of daily sorrow and delight
To seek a theme.
I too, O friend, have steeled my heart
Boldly to choose the better part,
To leave the beaten ways of art,
And wholly free
To dare, beyond the scanty chart,
The deeper sea.
All vain restrictions left behind,
Frail bark! I...Read more of this...
by
Michael Drayton
To Despair
I ever love where never hope appears,
Yet hope draws on my never-hoping care,
And my life's hope would die, but for despair;
My never-certain joy breeds ever-certain fears;
Uncertain dread gives wings unto my hope,
Yet my hope's wings are laden so with fear
As they cannot ascend to my hope's sphere;
Though fear gives them more...Read more of this...
by
Robert Burns
THIS day, Time winds th’ exhausted chain;
To run the twelvemonth’s length again:
I see, the old bald-pated fellow,
With ardent eyes, complexion sallow,
Adjust the unimpair’d machine,
To wheel the equal, dull routine.
The absent lover, minor heir,
In vain assail him with their prayer;
Deaf as my friend, he sees them press,
Nor makes the hour one moment less,
Will you (the Major’s with the hounds,
The...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
1
YET, yet, ye downcast hours, I know ye also;
Weights of lead, how ye clog and cling at my ankles!
Earth to a chamber of mourning turns—I hear the o’erweening, mocking voice,
Matter is conqueror—matter, triumphant only, continues onward.
2
Despairing cries float ceaselessly toward me,
The call of my nearest lover, putting forth, alarm’d, uncertain,
The Sea I am quickly...Read more of this...
by
D. H. Lawrence
Had I but known yesterday,
Helen, you could discharge the ache
Out of the cloud;
Had I known yesterday you could take
The turgid electric ache away,
Drink it up with your proud
White body, as lovely white lightning
Is drunk from an agonised sky by the earth,
I might have hated you, Helen.
But since my limbs gushed full of fire,
Since from out...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
I heard a fly buzz when I died;
The stillness round my form
Was like the stillness in the air
Between the heaves of storm.
The eyes beside had wrung them dry,
And breaths were gathering sure
For that last onset, when the king
Be witnessed in his power.
I willed my keepsakes, signed away
What portion of me I
Could make assignable,--and then
There interposed a fly,
With blue, uncertain, stumbling...Read more of this...
by
Henry Van Dyke
June 22, 1611
THE SHALLOP ON HUDSON BAY
One sail in sight upon the lonely sea
And only one, God knows! For never ship
But mine broke through the icy gates that guard
These waters, greater grown than any since
We left the shores of England. We were first,
My men, to battle in between the bergs
And floes to these wide...Read more of this...
by
Thom Gunn
The blue jay scuffling in the bushes follows
Some hidden purpose, and the gush of birds
That spurts across the field, the wheeling swallows,
Have nested in the trees and undergrowth.
Seeking their instinct, or their pose, or both,
One moves with an uncertain violence
Under the dust thrown by a baffled sense
Or the dull thunder of approximate...Read more of this...
by
Andrew Marvell
Luxurious Man, to bring his Vice in use,
Did after him the World seduce:
And from the Fields the Flow'rs and Plants allure,
Where Nature was most plain and pure.
He first enclos'd within the Gardens square
A dead and standing pool of Air:
And a more luscious Earth for them did knead,
Which stupifi'd them while it fed.
The Pink grew then as double as his...Read more of this...
by
William Carlos (WCW) Williams
By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen
patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees
All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed...Read more of this...
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