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Famous Undertone Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Russell, George William
...your heart alone go dreaming.
Dream unto dream may pass: deep in the heart alone
Murmurs the Mighty One his solemn undertone.
Canst thou not see adown the silver cloudland streaming
Rivers of faery light, dewdrop on dewdrop falling,
Star-fire of silver flames, lighting the dark beneath?
And what enraptured hosts burn on the dusky heath!
Come thou away with them for Heaven to Earth is calling.
These are Earth’s voice—her answer—spirits thronging.
Come to the L...Read more of this...



by Field, Eugene
...n platter of ancient date
Beareth Amandy Baker's crest;
What times soever I've been their guest,
Says I to myself in an undertone:
"Of womenfolk, it must be confessed,
These do I love, and these alone."

Well, again, in the Nutmeg State,
Dorothy Pratt is richly blest
With a relic of art and a land effete--
A pitcher of glass that's cut, not pressed.
And a Washington teapot is possessed
Down in Pelham by Marthy Stone--
Think ye now that I say in jest
"These do I love, ...Read more of this...

by Sherrick, Fannie Isabelle
...There was a sound of music low—
  An undertone of laughter;
The song was done, and can't you guess
  The words that followed after?
Like autumn leaves sometimes they fall—
  The words that burn and falter;
And is it true they too must fade
  Upon Love's sacred alter?
From memory each one of us
  Can cull some sweetest treasure;
Yet golden days, like golden leaves,
  Give pain as well ...Read more of this...

by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...ll my life long my language shall declare." 

To-day we make the poet's words our own, 
And utter them in plaintive undertone; 
Nor to the living only be they said, 
But to the other living called the dead, 
Whose dear, paternal images appear 
Not wrapped in gloom, but robed in sunshine here; 
Whose simple lives, complete and without flaw, 
Were part and parcel of great Nature's law; 
Who said not to their Lord, as if afraid, 
"Here is thy talent in a napkin laid," 
But l...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...Soul, swiftly depositing,
The strange tears down the cheeks coursing, 
The colloquy there—the trio—each uttering, 
The undertone—the savage old mother, incessantly crying, 
To the boy’s Soul’s questions sullenly timing—some drown’d secret hissing, 
To the outsetting bard of love.

9
Demon or bird! (said the boy’s soul,) 
Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it mostly to me? 
For I, that was a child, my tongue’s use sleeping, 
Now I have heard you, 
Now in a mome...Read more of this...



by Sassoon, Siegfried
...Sleepless I listen to the surge and drone 
And drifting roar of the town’s undertone; 
Till through quiet falling rain I hear the bells 
Tolling and chiming their brief tune that tells 
Day’s midnight end. And from the day that’s over
No flashes of delight I can recover; 
But only dreary winter streets, and faces 
Of people moving in loud clanging places: 
And I in my loneliness, longing for you... 

For all I did t...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...WILD, wild the storm, and the sea high running, 
Steady the roar of the gale, with incessant undertone muttering, 
Shouts of demoniac laughter fitfully piercing and pealing, 
Waves, air, midnight, their savagest trinity lashing, 
Out in the shadows there milk-white combs careering,
On beachy slush and sand spirts of snow fierce slanting, 
Where through the murk the easterly death-wind breasting, 
Through cutting swirl and spray watchful and firm adv...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...; 
You chords left us by vast composers! you choruses! 
You formless, free, religious dances! you from the Orient! 
You undertone of rivers, roar of pouring cataracts; 
You sounds from distant guns, with galloping cavalry!
Echoes of camps, with all the different bugle-calls! 
Trooping tumultuous, filling the midnight late, bending me powerless, 
Entering my lonesome slumber-chamber—Why have you seiz’d me? 

2
Come forward, O my Soul, and let the rest retire; 
Listen—lose not—...Read more of this...

by Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
...III.
And thus I thought that I would come
And kneel here where I knelt before,
And feel your souls around me hum
In undertone to the ocean's roar;
And lift my black face, my black hand,
Here, in your names, to curse this land
Ye blessed in freedom's evermore.

IV.
I am black, I am black;
And yet God made me, they say.
But if He did so, smiling back
He must have cast His work away
Under the feet of His white creatures,
With a look of scorn,--that the dusky feat...Read more of this...

by Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
...III.
And thus I thought that I would come
And kneel here where I knelt before,
And feel your souls around me hum
In undertone to the ocean's roar;
And lift my black face, my black hand,
Here, in your names, to curse this land
Ye blessed in freedom's evermore.

IV.
I am black, I am black;
And yet God made me, they say.
But if He did so, smiling back
He must have cast His work away
Under the feet of His white creatures,
With a look of scorn,--that the dusky feat...Read more of this...

by Seeger, Alan
...
Even so his voice flows on unceasingly, -- 
Lisping sweet names of passion overblown, 
Breaking with dull, persistent undertone 
The breathless silence that forever broods 
Round those colossal, lustrous solitudes. 
Times change. Man's fortune prospers, or it falls. 
Change harbors not in those eternal halls 
And tranquil chamber where Tithonus lies. 
But through his window there the eastern skies 
Fall palely fair to the dim ocean's end. 
There, in blue...Read more of this...

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