Famous Vistas Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Vistas poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous vistas poems. These examples illustrate what a famous vistas poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...ng lids, as waiting, ponder’d,
Turning from all the samples, all the monuments of heroes.
While through the interior vistas,
Noiseless uprose, phantasmic (as, by night, Auroras of the North,)
Lambent tableaux, prophetic, bodiless scenes,
Spiritual projections.
In one, among the city streets, a laborer’s home appear’d,
After his day’s work done, cleanly, sweet-air’d, the gaslight burning,
The carpet swept, and a fire in the cheerful stove.
In one, the sacred parturit...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...sip my tea, list calls to make,
Sigh in frustration at unread books.
For solace I look at cards of Haworth
Moorland vistas of unending paths
Cloudscapes only a Constable could paint
High Withens in a gale, the sloping village street.
How? When? Why?
‘The truth’ - if such an entity exists -
Is that I want to run away....Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...on of the elves,
To sport by summer moons, had shaped it for themselves.
Yet wanted not the eye far scope to muse,
Nor vistas open'd by the wandering stream;
Both where at evening Alleghany views
Through ridges burning in her western beam
Lake after lake interminably gleam:
And past those settlers' haunts the eye might roam
Where earth's unliving silence all would seem;
Save where on rocks the beaver built his dome,
Or buffalo remote low'd far from human home.
But silent no...Read more of this...
by
Campbell, Thomas
...l through which those infinite offers beckoned
Has seemed to tremble, letting through
Some swift intolerable view
Of vistas past the sense of mortal seeing,
So oft, as one whose stricken eyes might see
In ferny dells the rustic deity,
I stood, like him, possessed, and all my being,
Flooded an instant with unwonted light,
Quivered with cosmic passion; whether then
On woody pass or glistening mountain-height
I walked in fellowship with winds and clouds,
Whether in ci...Read more of this...
by
Seeger, Alan
...atisfy the soul,
The feel of cobbles underfoot is at this moment more
Than all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the unending vistas
Of the moor, an infinity of purity that excels even Mallarm?.
I sit on the cracked steps to the church, sipping tea
With my eye on the Black Bull where Bramwell worshipped
Until a mobile phone playing ‘The Bluebells of Scotland’
Disturbs my reverie and I notice the Big Issue seller
Can find no takers among the ernest camera-ready Japanese
And m...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...ave no camera but imagination’s tinted glass
I cannot pass this crumbling dry stone wall
Without a break to catch the vistas of the chain of Pennine hills
That splash their shades of colour like mercury in the rising glass.
The June sun focuses upon the vivid grass,
The elder’s pale amber, the Victoria Tower’s finger
On the pulse of past shared walks, Emley’s mast
And the girl from there whose early death
We somehow took the blame for: her reach from the beyond.
S...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...re, but after a while I could think
only of the gas chamber at San Quentin.
O Caryl Chessman and Alexander Robillard Vistas ! as if
they were names for tracts of three-bedroom houses with
wall-to-wall carpets and plumbing that defies the imagination,
Then it came to me up there on Salt Creek, capital pun-
ishment being what it is, an act of state business with no
song down the railroad track after the train has gone and no
vibration on the rails, that they should ta...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...-falling steps of many dogs,
Following, following at my side.
O Roads that journey to fairyland!
Radiant highways whose vistas gleam,
Leading me on, under crimson leaves,
To the opaline gates of the Castles of Dream....Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...hilarity of youth,
In the strength and flush of manhood,
In the grandeur and exquisiteness of old age,
In the superb vistas of Death.
Wonderful to depart;
Wonderful to be here!
The heart, to jet the all-alike and innocent blood!
To breathe the air, how delicious!
To speak! to walk! to seize something by the hand!
To prepare for sleep, for bed—to look on my rose-color’d flesh;
To be conscious of my body, so satisfied, so large;
To be this incredible God I am;
To ha...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...o the Wasatch—or Idaho far, or Utah,
To the deities of the Modern henceforth yielding,
The chorus and indications, the vistas of coming humanity—the settlements, features all,
In the Mendocino woods I caught.
5
The flashing and golden pageant of California!
The sudden and gorgeous drama—the sunny and ample lands;
The long and varied stretch from Puget Sound to Colorado south;
Lands bathed in sweeter, rarer, healthier air—valleys and mountain cliffs;
The fields of Natur...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...xpanding and swift! O henceforth,
Elements, breeds, adjustments, turbulent, quick, and audacious;
A world primal again—Vistas of glory, incessant and branching;
A new race, dominating previous ones, and grander far—with new contests,
New politics, new literatures and religions, new inventions and arts.
These! my voice announcing—I will sleep no more, but arise;
You oceans that have been calm within me! how I feel you, fathomless, stirring,
preparing unprecedented waves...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...and, by luxury betrayed,
In nature's simplest charms at first arrayed;
But verging to decline, its splendours rise,
Its vistas strike, its palaces surprise;
While, scourged by famine, from the smiling land
The mournful peasant leads his humble band;
And while he sinks, without one arm to save,
The country blooms—a garden, and a grave.
Where then, ah! where, shall poverty reside,
To 'scape the pressure of contiguous pride?
If to some common's fenceless limits strayed,
He driv...Read more of this...
by
Goldsmith, Oliver
...t a hell-vapor breaking.
Rolls on through the street,
And higher and higher
Aloft moves the column of fire!
Through the vistas and rows
Like a whirlwind it goes,
And the air like the stream from the furnace glows.
Beams are crackling--posts are shrinking
Walls are sinking--windows clinking--
Children crying--
Mothers flying--
And the beast (the black ruin yet smouldering under)
Yells the howl of its pain and its ghastly wonder!
Hurry and skurry--away--away,
The face of the ni...Read more of this...
by
Schiller, Friedrich von
...ixties, brass coach-lamps
By glass front doors, irreproachable gardens,
The estate lodge’s great oak doors opening to vistas
Of street on street, the fields and cows gone.
We peered through the polished windows at the hearth
We’d sat around, our hearts numb, all hope gone; but then
A quiet came we had not felt for years, a lens of silence
Enclosed us, a single leaf fell at my feet.
IV
The rat we tried to frighten, trap or poison, saw us off instead;
It seemed as i...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
..., an aureole encircling, suns his brow with gold,
Like to one who hails the morning on the mountains old.
Open mightier vistas, changing human loves to scorns,
And the spears of glory pierce him like a crown of thorns.
High and yet more high to freedom as a bird he springs,
And the aureole outbreathing, gold and silver wings
Plume the brow and crown the seraph: soon his journey done
He will pass our eyes that follow, sped beyond the sun.
None may know the mystic radiance, Kin...Read more of this...
by
Russell, George William
...le I felt its breath astir upon my cheek.
I was so happy there; so fleeting was my stay,
What wonder if, assailed with vistas so divine,
I only lived to search and sample them the day
When between dawn and dusk the sultan's courts were mine !
Speak not of other worlds of happiness to be,
As though in any fond imaginary sphere
Lay more to tempt man's soul to immortality
Than ripens for his bliss abundant now and here!
Flowerlike I hope to die as flowerlike was my birth.
Roo...Read more of this...
by
Seeger, Alan
...:
he sought to quench his thirst, to rest and find repose.
His eyes looked far beyond the saint's enclosure,
reflecting vistas and events long vanished,
and closed the circle of this ancient mystic legend....Read more of this...
by
Rilke, Rainer Maria
...e leaders, every one
Perfect as a perfect star
Till the slow descent is done.
Look beyond them, see how far
Down the vistas dim and grey,
Multitudes are on the way.
Now a sudden brightness
Dawns within the sombre day,
Over fields of whiteness;
And the sky is swiftly alive
With the flutter and the flight
Of the shimmering bees, that pour
From the hidden door of the hive
Till you can count no more.
IV
Now on the branches of hemlock and pine
Thickly they settle and c...Read more of this...
by
Dyke, Henry Van
...loft full-dazzling! thou hot October noon!
Flooding with sheeny light the gray beach sand,
The sibilant near sea with vistas far and foam,
And tawny streaks and shades and spreading blue;
O sun of noon rufulgent! my special word to thee.
Hear me illustrious!
Thy lover me, for always I have loved thee,
Even as basking babe, then happy boy alone by some wood edge, thy touching-distant beams
enough,
Or man matured, or young or old, as now to thee I launch my invocation....Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...ging for good—loosing, untying the tent-ropes;)
In the freshness, the forenoon air, in the far-stretching circuits and vistas, again to
peace
restored,
To the fiery fields emanative, and the endless vistas beyond—to the south and the
north;
To the leaven’d soil of the general western world, to attest my songs,
(To the average earth, the wordless earth, witness of war and peace,)
To the Alleghanian hills, and the tireless Mississippi,
To the rocks I, calling, sing, and...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
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