Famous Unfinished Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Unfinished poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous unfinished poems. These examples illustrate what a famous unfinished poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Yeats, William Butler
...all once more?
Endure that toil of growing up;
The ignominy of boyhood; the distress
Of boyhood changing into man;
The unfinished man and his pain
Brought face to face with his own clumsiness;
The finished man among his enemies? -
How in the name of Heaven can he escape
That defiling and disfigured shape
The mirror of malicious eyes
Casts upon his eyes until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape?
And what's the good of an escape
If honour find him in the wintry bla...Read more of this...
by
Schwartz, Delmore
...urb me, compel me. It is not true
That "no man is happy," but that is not
The sense which guides you. If we are
Unfinished (we are, unless hope is a bad dream),
You are exact. You tug my sleeve
Before I speak, with a shadow's friendship,
And I remember that we who move
Are moved by clouds that darken midnight....Read more of this...
by
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...-fires long consumed, and bones that bleach in the sunshine.
Something there was in her life incomplete, imperfect, unfinished;
As if a morning of June, with all its music and sunshine,
Suddenly paused in the sky, and, fading, slowly descended
Into the east again, from whence it late had arisen.
Sometimes she lingered in towns, till, urged by the fever within her,
Urged by a restless longing, the hunger and thirst of the spirit,
She would commence again her endless se...Read more of this...
by
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...ds
Hiawatha stood before them.
Straight the ancient Arrow-maker
Looked up gravely from his labor,
Laid aside the unfinished arrow,
Bade him enter at the doorway,
Saying, as he rose to meet him,
'Hiawatha, you are welcome!"
At the feet of Laughing Water
Hiawatha laid his burden,
Threw the red deer from his shoulders;
And the maiden looked up at him,
Looked up from her mat of rushes,
Said with gentle look and accent,
"You are welcome, Hiawatha!"
Very spacious was...Read more of this...
by
Burnside, John
...
Its hundreds of drowned faces
Wrapped in seaweed
Slippery and green
Like creatures of the deep
The reckless Sea, unfinished story,
Removed from anquish
Full of death tales
I speak of open valleys
Fertile at men's feet
Overgrown with flowers
Of captive summits
Of mountains, of clear skies
Devoured by untamed evergreens
And of trees that know
The welcome of lakes
Black earth
Errant pathways
Echoes of the faces
Haunting our days....Read more of this...
by
Burnside, John
...s Sea
Its hundreds of drowned faces
Wrapped in seaweed
Slippery and green
Like creatures of the deep
The reckless Sea, unfinished story,
Removed from anquish
Full of death tales
I speak of open valleys
Fertile at men's feet
Overgrown with flowers
Of captive summits
Of mountains, of clear skies
Devoured by untamed evergreens
And of trees that know
The welcome of lakes
Black earth
Errant pathways
Echoes of the faces
Haunting our days....Read more of this...
by
Levine, Philip
...n the desk, the little
chronicles of death themselves
curling and blurring
into death, and took away
the book still unfinished
of a man more confused
even than I, and switched off
the light, and left me alone.
III
In June of 1975 I wakened
one late afternoon in Amsterdam
in a dim corner of a library.
I had fallen asleep over a book
and was roused by a young girl
whose hand lay on my hand.
I turned my head up and stared
into her brown eyes, deep
...Read more of this...
by
Hikmet, Nazim
...s!
In the twilight of my last morning
I
will see my friends and you,
and I'll go
to my grave
regretting nothing but an unfinished song...
My wife!
Good-hearted,
golden,
eyes sweeter than honey--my bee!
Why did I write you
they want to hang me?
The trial has hardly begun,
and they don't just pluck a man's head
like a turnip.
Look, forget all this.
If you have any money,
buy me some flannel underwear:
my sciatica is acting up again.
And don't forget,...Read more of this...
by
Aiken, Conrad
...r>
Listen! the drums of the leaves, the drums of the dust,
The delicious quivering of this air!
I will leave my work unfinished, and I will go
With ringing and certain step through the laughter of chaos
To the one small room in the void I know.
Yesterday it was there,—
Will I find it tonight once more when I climb the stair?
The drums of the street beat swift and soft:
In the blue evening of my heart
I hear the throb of the bridal star.
It weaves deliciousl...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...ly risen;)
Whether I shall complete what is here started,
Whether I shall attain my own height, to justify these, yet unfinished,
Whether I shall make THE POEM OF THE NEW WORLD, transcending all others—depends, rich
persons, upon you,
Depends, whoever you are now filling the current Presidentiad, upon you,
Upon you, Governor, Mayor, Congressman,
And you, contemporary America....Read more of this...
by
Hayden, Robert
...and fare you well,
dryweeps the pain his treacherous jailers
have released him from for a while.
His fears and his unfinished self
await him down in the anywhere streets.
He hides on the dark side of the moon,
takes refuge in a stained-glass cell,
flies to a clockless country of crystal.
Only the ghost of Lady Day knows where
he is. Only the music. And he swings
oh swings: beyond complete immortal now....Read more of this...
by
Akhmatova, Anna
...ws of my room
The northern breezes often fly.
And from my hand a dove eats grains of wheat...
As for my unfinished page,
The Muse's tawny hand, divinely calm
And delicate, will finish it....Read more of this...
by
Chaucer, Geoffrey
...ise meaning of the word is unknown, but it
is doubtless included in the cant term "pal".
4. The Cook's Tale is unfinished in all the manuscripts; but in
some, of minor authority, the Cook is made to break off his
tale, because "it is so foul," and to tell the story of Gamelyn, on
which Shakespeare's "As You Like It" is founded. The story is
not Chaucer's, and is different in metre, and inferior in
composition to the Tales. It is supposed that Chaucer expunged...Read more of this...
by
Gorman, Amanda
...urs
before we knew it
Somehow we do it
Somehow we've weathered and witnessed
a nation that isn't broken
but simply unfinished
We the successors of a country and a time
Where a skinny Black girl
descended from slaves and raised by a single mother
can dream of becoming president
only to find herself reciting for one
And yes we are far from polished
far from pristine
but that doesn't mean we are
striving to form a union that is perfect
We are striving to forge a u...Read more of this...
by
Bronte, Charlotte
...?
Nay, watch her still more closely, ask
Her own eyes' serious light;
Where do they turn, as now her pen
Hangs o'er th' unfinished line ?
Whence fell the tearful gleam that then
Did in their dark spheres shine ?
The summer-parlour looks so dark,
When from that sky you turn,
And from th' expanse of that green park,
You scarce may aught discern.
Yet o'er the piles of porcelain rare,
O'er flower-stand, couch, and vase,
Sloped, as if leaning on the air,
One picture meets th...Read more of this...
by
Brooks, Gwendolyn
...the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches,
and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine...Read more of this...
by
Raine, Craig
...h hands held up before its face,
stammers softly on, trying to complete a phrase--
while we, together and apart,
repeat unfinished festures got by heart.
And afterwards, I blunder with the washing on the line--
headless torsos, faceless lovers, friends of mine....Read more of this...
by
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...ands
Hiawatha stood before them.
Straight the ancient Arrow-maker
Looked up gravely from his labor,
Laid aside the unfinished arrow,
Bade him enter at the doorway,
Saying, as he rose to meet him,
"Hiawatha, you are welcome!"
At the feet of Laughing Water
Hiawatha laid his burden,
Threw the red deer from his shoulders;
And the maiden looked up at him,
Looked up from her mat of rushes,
Said with gentle look and accent,
"You are welcome, Hiawatha!"
Very spacious was the w...Read more of this...
by
von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang
...rit Song' over the Waters, The
God-like, and, above all, the magnificent sketch of Prometheus,
which forms part of an unfinished piece bearing the same name, and
called by Goethe a 'Dramatic Fragment.'
TO MY FRIEND.
[These three Odes are addressed to a certain
Behrisch, who was tutor to Count Lindenau, and of whom Goethe gives
an odd account at the end of the Seventh Book of his Autobiography.]
FIRST ODE.
TRANSPLANT the beauteous tree!
Gardener, it ...Read more of this...
by
Darwish, Mahmoud
...nd fifty olive trees...
Added to this the structural flaw that
Will arrive at the poem, the play, and the unfinished canvas.
***
A woman told the cloud: cover my beloved
For my clothing is drenched with his blood.
***
If you are not rain, my love
Be tree
Sated with fertility, be tree
If you are not tree, my love
Be stone
Saturated with humidity, be stone
If you are not stone, my love
Be moon
In the dream of the beloved woman, be moon
[So ...Read more of this...
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