Famous Vanish Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Vision of Beauty

by George William Russell
 WHERE we sat at dawn together, while the star-rich heavens shifted,
We were weaving dreams in silence, suddenly the veil was lifted.
By a hand of fire awakened, in a moment caught and led
Upward to the heaven of heavens—through the star-mists overhead
Flare and flaunt the monstrous highlands; on the sapphire coast of night
Fall the ghostly froth and fringes of the ocean...Read more of this...

Hertha

by Algernon Charles Swinburne
 I AM that which began; 
 Out of me the years roll; 
 Out of me God and man; 
 I am equal and whole; 
God changes, and man, and the form of them bodily; I am the soul. 

 Before ever land was, 
 Before ever the sea, 
 Or soft hair of the grass, 
 Or fair...Read more of this...

I Am

by John Clare
 I am: yet what I am none cares or knows
 My friends forsake me like a memory lost,
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
 They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love's frenzied, stifled throes—
And yet I am, and live—like vapors tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
 Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is...Read more of this...

The Invincible Armada

by Friedrich von Schiller
 She comes, she comes--the burden of the deeps!
Beneath her wails the universal sea!
With clanking chains and a new god, she sweeps,
And with a thousand thunders, unto thee!
The ocean-castles and the floating hosts--
Ne'er on their like looked the wild water!--Well
May man the monster name "Invincible."
O'er shuddering waves she gathers to thy coasts!
The horror that she spreads can claim
Just title to...Read more of this...

The Ideal And The Actual Life

by Friedrich von Schiller
 Forever fair, forever calm and bright,
Life flies on plumage, zephyr-light,
For those who on the Olympian hill rejoice--
Moons wane, and races wither to the tomb,
And 'mid the universal ruin, bloom
The rosy days of Gods--With man, the choice,
Timid and anxious, hesitates between
The sense's pleasure and the soul's content;
While on celestial brows, aloft and sheen,
The beams of both are blent.

Seekest thou on...Read more of this...

A Litany For Survival

by Audre Lorde
For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed
futures
like bread in our children’s mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death...Read more of this...

The Apparition Of His Mistresscalling Him To Elysium

by Robert Herrick
 THE APPARITION OF HIS, MISTRESS,
CALLING HIM TO ELYSIUM

DESUNT NONNULLA--

Come then, and like two doves with silvery wings,
Let our souls fly to th' shades, wherever springs
Sit smiling in the meads; where balm and oil,
Roses and cassia, crown the untill'd soil;
Where no disease reigns, or infection comes
To blast the air, but amber-gris and gums.
This, that, and ev'ry thicket doth transpire
More sweet...Read more of this...

My Friends

by W S Merwin
 My friends without shields walk on the target

It is late the windows are breaking

My friends without shoes leave
What they love
Grief moves among them as a fire among
Its bells
My friends without clocks turn
On the dial they turn
They part

My friends with names like gloves set out
Bare handed as they have lived
And nobody knows them
It is they that lay the wreaths at...Read more of this...

To Flowers From Italy in Winter

by Thomas Hardy
 Sunned in the South, and here to-day; 
 --If all organic things 
Be sentient, Flowers, as some men say, 
 What are your ponderings? 

How can you stay, nor vanish quite 
 From this bleak spot of thorn, 
And birch, and fir, and frozen white 
 Expanse of the forlorn? 

Frail luckless exiles hither brought! 
 Your dust will...Read more of this...

Portrait of a Baby

by Stephen Vincent Benet
 He lay within a warm, soft world 
Of motion. Colors bloomed and fled, 
Maroon and turquoise, saffron, red, 
Wave upon wave that broke and whirled 
To vanish in the grey-green gloom, 
Perspectiveless and shadowy. 
A bulging world that had no walls, 
A flowing world, most like the sea, 
Compassing all infinity 
Within a shapeless, ebbing room, 
An endless tide...Read more of this...

De Hortis Julii Martialis

by Robert Louis Stevenson
 MY Martial owns a garden, famed to please,
Beyond the glades of the Hesperides;
Along Janiculum lies the chosen block
Where the cool grottos trench the hanging rock.
The moderate summit, something plain and bare,
Tastes overhead of a serener air;
And while the clouds besiege the vales below,
Keeps the clear heaven and doth with sunshine glow.
To the June stars that circle in the skies
The...Read more of this...

Drink thou of wine before thy name shall vanish from

by Omar Khayyam
Drink thou of wine before thy name shall vanish from
this world, for, when this nectar enters thy heart, sorrow
disappears. Unbind strand by strand the hair of thy
charming idol, before the jointure of thy frame itself is
loosed....Read more of this...

Stepping Westward

by Denise Levertov
 What is green in me
darkens, muscadine.
If woman is inconstant,
good, I am faithful to
ebb and flow, I fall
in season and now
is a time of ripening.
If her part
is to be true,
a north star,
good, I hold steady
in the black sky
and vanish by day,
yet burn there
in blue or above
quilts of cloud.
There is no savor
more sweet, more salt
than to be glad to be
what, woman,
and...Read more of this...

The Ocean's Song

by Victor Hugo
 ("Nous nous promenions à Rozel-Tower.") 
 
 {Bk. VI. iv., October, 1852.} 


 We walked amongst the ruins famed in story 
 Of Rozel-Tower, 
 And saw the boundless waters stretch in glory 
 And heave in power. 
 
 O ocean vast! we heard thy song with wonder, 
 Whilst waves marked time. 
 "Appeal, O Truth!" thou...Read more of this...

An Autograph

by John Greenleaf Whittier
 I write my name as one, 
On sands by waves o'errun 
Or winter's frosted pane, 
Traces a record vain. 

Oblivion's blankness claims 
Wiser and better names, 
And well my own may pass 
As from the strand or glass. 

Wash on, O waves of time! 
Melt, noons, the frosty rime! 
Welcome the shadow vast, 
The silence that shall last! 

When...Read more of this...

Garden Francies

by Robert Browning
 I. THE FLOWER'S NAME

Here's the garden she walked across,
Arm in my arm, such a short while since:
Hark, now I push its wicket, the moss
Hinders the hinges and makes them wince!
She must have reached this shrub ere she turned,
As back with that murmur the wicket swung;
For she laid the poor snail, my chance foot spurned,
To feed and forget it the...Read more of this...

Fata Morgana

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 O sweet illusions of song
That tempt me everywhere,
In the lonely fields, and the throng
Of the crowded thoroughfare!

I approach and ye vanish away,
I grasp you, and ye are gone;
But ever by night and by day,
The melody soundeth on.

As the weary traveller sees
In desert or prairie vast,
Blue lakes, overhung with trees
That a pleasant shadow cast;

Fair towns with turrets high,
And shining roofs...Read more of this...

Fortune Of War

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 NOUGHT more accursed in war I know

Than getting off scot-free;
Inured to danger, on we go

In constant victory;
We first unpack, then pack again,

With only this reward,
That when we're marching, we complain,

And when in camp, are bor'd.

The time for billeting comes next,--

The peasant curses it;
Each nobleman is sorely vex'd,

'Tis hated by the cit.
Be civil, bad though be thy food,

The clowns politely...Read more of this...

Leave Me My Blamer XIII

by Kahlil Gibran
 Leave me, my blamer, 
For the sake of the love 
Which unites your soul with 
That of your beloved one; 
For the sake of that which 
Joins spirit with mothers 
Affection, and ties your 
Heart with filial love. Go, 
And leave me to my own 
Weeping heart. 


Let me sail in the ocean of 
My dreams; Wait until Tomorrow...Read more of this...

Romance Moderne

by William Carlos (WCW) Williams
 Tracks of rain and light linger in
the spongy greens of a nature whose 
flickering mountain—bulging nearer, 
ebbing back into the sun 
hollowing itself away to hold a lake,— 
or brown stream rising and falling at the roadside, turning about, 
churning itself white, drawing 
green in over it,—plunging glassy funnels 
fall— 
And—the other world— 
the windshield a blunt barrier: 
Talk...Read more of this...

Dear Reader

by Billy Collins
 Baudelaire considers you his brother,
and Fielding calls out to you every few paragraphs 
as if to make sure you have not closed the book,
and now I am summoning you up again,
attentive ghost, dark silent figure standing 
in the doorway of these words.

Pope welcomes you into the glow of his study,
takes down a leather-bound Ovid to show you.
Tennyson lifts the...Read more of this...

The Englishman In Italy

by Robert Browning
 (PIANO DI SORRENTO.)

Fortu, Frotu, my beloved one,
Sit here by my side,
On my knees put up both little feet!
I was sure, if I tried,
I could make you laugh spite of Scirocco;
Now, open your eyes— 
Let me keep you amused till he vanish
In black from the skies,
With telling my memories over
As you tell your beads;
All the memories plucked at Sorrento
—The flowers,...Read more of this...

The house where I was born (02)

by Yves Bonnefoy
  I woke up, it was the house where I was born.
It was raining softly in all the rooms,
I went from one to another, looking at
The water that shone on the mirrors
Piled up everywhere, some broken or even
Pushed between the furniture and the walls.
It was from these reflections that sometimes a face
Would emerge, laughing, of a gentleness
That was different...Read more of this...

Botany Bay Eclogues 05 - Frederic

by Robert Southey
 (Time Night. Scene the woods.)


Where shall I turn me? whither shall I bend
My weary way? thus worn with toil and faint
How thro' the thorny mazes of this wood
Attain my distant dwelling? that deep cry
That rings along the forest seems to sound
My parting knell: it is the midnight howl
Of hungry monsters prowling for their prey!
Again! oh save me--save me gracious...Read more of this...

The Little Black Boy

by William Blake
MY mother bore me in the southern wild, 
And I am black, but O, my soul is white! 
White as an angel is the English child, 
But I am black, as if bereaved of light. 

My mother taught me underneath a tree, 5 
And, sitting down before the heat of day, 
She took me on her lap and kiss¨¨d me,...Read more of this...

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