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Famous We Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Dickinson, Emily
...d not stop for Death-- 
He kindly stopped for me-- 
The Carriage held but just Ourselves-- 
And Immortality. 

We slowly drove--He knew no haste 
And I had put away 
My labor and my leisure too, 
For His Civility-- 

We passed the School, where Children strove 
At Recess--in the Ring-- 
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain-- 
We passed the Setting Sun-- 

Or rather--He passed us-- 
The Dews drew quivering and chill-- 
For only Gossamer, my Gown-- 
My Tip...Read more of this...



by Ginsberg, Allen
...universities with radiant cool eyes 
 hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy 
 among the scholars of war, 
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & 
 publishing obscene odes on the windows of the 
 skull, 
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn- 
 ing their money in wastebaskets and listening 
 to the Terror through the wall, 
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through 
 Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, 
who ate fire in pain...Read more of this...

by Wilde, Oscar
...is full winter now: the trees are bare,
Save where the cattle huddle from the cold
Beneath the pine, for it doth never wear
The autumn's gaudy livery whose gold
Her jealous brother pilfers, but is true
To the green doublet; bitter is the wind, as though it blew

From Saturn's cave; a few thin wisps of hay
Lie on the sharp black hedges, where the wain
Dragged the sweet pillage of a summer's day
From the low meadows up the narrow lane;
Upon the half-thawed snow the bleating sh...Read more of this...

by Keats, John
...r's day
Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass,
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more
By reason of his fallen divinity
Spreading a shade: the Naiad 'mid her reeds
Press'd her cold finger closer to her lips.

 Along the margin-sand large foot-marks went,
No further than to where his feet had stray'd,
And slept there since. Upon the sodden ground
His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead,
Un...Read more of this...

by Alighieri, Dante
...hours forgot, 
 I turn my tale to that which next befell, 
 When the dawn opened, and the night was not. 
 The hollowed blackness of that waste, God wot, 
 Shrank, thinned, and ceased. A blinding splendour hot 
 Flushed the great height toward which my footsteps fell, 
 And though it kindled from the nether hell, 
 Or from the Star that all men leads, alike 
 It showed me where the great dawn-glories strike 
 The wide east, and the utmost peaks of snow. 

 How fir...Read more of this...



by Wordsworth, William
...'er again that happy hour,  When midway on the Mount I lay    Beside the Ruin'd Tower.   The Moonshine stealing o'er the scene  Had blended with the Lights of Eve;  And she was there, my Hope, my Joy,    My own dear Genevieve!   She lean'd against the Armed Man,  The Statue of the Armed Knight:  She stood and listen'd ...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...hings from me: 
You shall listen to all sides, and filter them from yourself. 

3
I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the
 end;
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end. 

There was never any more inception than there is now, 
Nor any more youth or age than there is now; 
And will never be any more perfection than there is now, 
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Urge, and urge, and urge; 
Alway...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...the open road. 

The earth—that is sufficient; 
I do not want the constellations any nearer; 
I know they are very well where they are; 
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens; 
I carry them, men and women—I carry them with me wherever I go; 
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them; 
I am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return.) 

2
You road I enter upon and look around! I believe you a...Read more of this...

by Chesterton, G K
...,
And these ride high in history,
But these shall not return.

Gored on the Norman gonfalon
The Golden Dragon died:
We shall not wake with ballad strings 
The good time of the smaller things,
We shall not see the holy kings
Ride down by Severn side.

Stiff, strange, and quaintly coloured
As the broidery of Bayeux
The England of that dawn remains,
And this of Alfred and the Danes
Seems like the tales a whole tribe feigns
Too English to be true.

Of a good king on a...Read more of this...

by Byron, George (Lord)
...I

Our life is twofold; Sleep hath its own world,
A boundary between the things misnamed
Death and existence: Sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality,
And dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy;
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,
They take a weight from off waking toils,
They do divide our being; they become
A portion of ourselves as of our tim...Read more of this...

by Bridges, Robert Seymour
...kmen good
Who lose in earnestness control of face,
Or reckon means, and rapt in effort base
Reach to their end by steps well understood. 
Me whom thou sawest of late strive with the pains
Of one who spends his strength to rule his nerve,
--Even as a painter breathlessly who stains
His scarcely moving hand lest it should swerve--
Behold me, now that I have cast my chains,
Master of the art which for thy sake I serve.


2
For thou art mine: and now I am ashamed
To have ...Read more of this...

by Wordsworth, William
...p;But Betty's bent on her intent,  For her good neighbour, Susan Gale,  Old Susan, she who dwells alone,  Is sick, and makes a piteous moan,  As if her very life would fail.   There's not a house within a mile,  No hand to help them in distress;  Old Susan lies a bed in pain,  And sorely puzzled are the twain,  For what she ails they cannot gues...Read more of this...

by Blake, William
...3

As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years
since its advent: the Eternal Hell revives. And lo! Swedenborg is
the Angel sitting at the tomb; his writings are the linen clothes
folded up. Now is the dominion of Edom, & the return of Adam into
Paradise; see Isaiah XXXIV & XXXV Chap:
Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and
Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to
Human existence.
From these contraries spring wh...Read more of this...

by Poe, Edgar Allan
...ONCE upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, 
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,¡ª 
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, 
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. 
"'T is some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door; 5 
Only this and nothing more." 

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak D...Read more of this...

by Carroll, Lewis
...ble spirit stoop
To join the gormandising troup
Who find a solace in the soup? 

"Canst thou desire or pie or puff?
Thy well-bred manners were enough,
Without such gross material stuff." 

"Yet well-bred men," he faintly said,
"Are not willing to be fed:
Nor are they well without the bread." 

Her visage scorched him ere she spoke:
"There are," she said, "a kind of folk
Who have no horror of a joke. 

"Such wretches live: they take their share
Of common earth and ...Read more of this...

by Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...e crimson clouds, & at the birth
Of light, the Ocean's orison arose
To which the birds tempered their matin lay,
All flowers in field or forest which unclose
Their trembling eyelids to the kiss of day,
Swinging their censers in the element,
With orient incense lit by the new ray
Burned slow & inconsumably, & sent
Their odorous sighs up to the smiling air,
And in succession due, did Continent,
Isle, Ocean, & all things that in them wear
The form & character of mortal mould
Ris...Read more of this...

by Byron, George (Lord)
...'Anti-jacobin,' by his present patrons. Hence all this 'skimble-scamble stuff' about 'Satanic,' and so forth. However, it is worthy of him — 'qualis ab incepto.' 

If there is anything obnoxious to the political opinions of a portion of the public in the following poem, they may thank Mr. Southey. He might have written hexameters, as he has written everything else, for aught that the writer cared — had they been upon another subject. But to attempt to ...Read more of this...

by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...getful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, 
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And d...Read more of this...

by Walker, Alice
...
We alone can devalue gold
by not caring
if it falls or rises
in the marketplace.
Wherever there is gold
there is a chain, you know,
and if your chain
is gold
so much the worse
for you.


Feathers, shells
and sea-shaped stones
are all as rare.


This could be our revolution:
to love what is plentiful
as much as
what's scarce.Read more of this...

by Akhmatova, Anna
...(ilya_shambat@yahoo.com)
Origin: http://www.geocities.com/ilya_shambat/akhmatova.html

 * I * 

We thought we were beggars, we thought we had nothing at all
But then when we started to lose one thing after another,
Each day became
A memorial day --
And then we made songs
Of great divine generosity
And of our former riches.


Unification

I'll leave your quiet yard and your white house -
Let life be empty and with light complete.
...Read more of this...

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Book: Shattered Sighs