Famous Well Founded Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Meditations In Time Of Civil War

by William Butler Yeats
 I. Ancestral Houses

Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns,
Amid the rustle of his planted hills,
Life overflows without ambitious pains;
And rains down life until the basin spills,
And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains
As though to choose whatever shape it wills
And never stoop to a mechanical
Or servile shape, at others' beck and call.

Mere dreams, mere dreams! Yet Homer had...Read more of this...

To the City of London

by William Dunbar
 London, thou art of town{.e}s A per se.
Soveraign of cities, semeliest in sight,
Of high renoun, riches, and royaltie;
Of lordis, barons, and many goodly knyght;
Of most delectable lusty ladies bright;
Of famous prelatis in habitis clericall;
Of merchauntis full of substaunce and myght:
London, thou art the flour of Cities all.

Gladdith anon, thou lusty Troy Novaunt,
Citie that some tyme cleped was New Troy,
In...Read more of this...

Eyrie

by Robert William Service
 The little pink house is high on the hill
And my heart is not what it used to be;
It will kick up a fuss I know, but still
I must toil up that twisty trail to see
What that empty old house can mean to me.

For a Poet lived there for donkey's years,
A Poet of parts and founded fame.
He took to the...Read more of this...

Abt Vogler

by Robert Browning
 Would that the structure brave, the manifold music I build,
Bidding my organ obey, calling its keys to their work,
Claiming each slave of the sound, at a touch, as when Solomon willed
Armies of angels that soar, legions of demons that lurk,
Man, brute, reptile, fly,--alien of end and of aim,
Adverse, each from the other heaven-high, hell-deep removed,--
Should rush into sight at...Read more of this...

The fairest Home I ever knew

by Emily Dickinson
 The fairest Home I ever knew
Was founded in an Hour
By Parties also that I knew
A spider and a Flower --
A manse of mechlin and of Floes --...Read more of this...

Benjamin Franklin

by Robert William Service
 Franklin fathered bastards fourteen,
 (So I read in the New Yorker);
If it's true, in terms of courtin'
 Benny must have been a corker.
To be prudent I've aspired,
 And my passions I have mastered;
So that I have never sired
 A single bastard.

One of course can never know;
 But I think that if I had
It would give me quite a glow
...Read more of this...

Jehovah-Shammah

by William Cowper
 (Ezekiel, xlviii.35)

As birds their infant brood protect,
And spread their wings to shelter them,
Thus saith the Lord to His elect,
"So will I guard Jerusalem."

And what then is Jerusalem,
This darling object of His cares?
Where is its worth in God's esteem?
Who built it? who inhabits there?

Jehovah founded it in blood,
The blood of His incarnate Son;
There dwell the saints, once foes to God
The...Read more of this...

Myself and Mine

by Walt Whitman
 MYSELF and mine gymnastic ever, 
To stand the cold or heat—to take good aim with a gun—to sail a boat—to
 manage
 horses—to beget superb children, 
To speak readily and clearly—to feel at home among common people, 
And to hold our own in terrible positions, on land and sea. 

Not for an embroiderer;
(There will always be plenty of embroiderers—I welcome...Read more of this...

You Can Have It

by Philip Levine
 My brother comes home from work 
and climbs the stairs to our room. 
I can hear the bed groan and his shoes drop 
one by one. You can have it, he says. 

The moonlight streams in the window 
and his unshaven face is whitened 
like the face of the moon. He will sleep 
long after noon and waken to...Read more of this...

Ballad Of The Banished And Returning Count

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 [Goethe began to write an opera called Lowenstuhl, 
founded upon the old tradition which forms the subject of this Ballad, 
but he never carried out his design.]

OH, enter old minstrel, thou time-honour'd one!
We children are here in the hall all alone,

The portals we straightway will bar.
Our mother is praying, our father is gone

To the forest, on wolves to make...Read more of this...

In Honour of the City of London

by William Dunbar
 LONDON, thou art of townes A per se. 
 Soveraign of cities, seemliest in sight, 
Of high renoun, riches and royaltie; 
 Of lordis, barons, and many a goodly knyght; 
 Of most delectable lusty ladies bright; 
Of famous prelatis, in habitis clericall; 
 Of merchauntis full of substaunce and of myght: 
London, thou art the flour of Cities...Read more of this...

The Prologue

by Anne Bradstreet
1

To sing of wars, of captains, and of kings,
Of cities founded, commonwealths begun,
For my mean pen, are too superior things,
And how they all, or each, their dates have run
Let poets, and historians set these forth,
My obscure verse shall not so dim their worth.


2

But when my wond'ring eyes, and envious heart,
Great Bartas' sugared lines do but read o'er,
Fool, I do grudge...Read more of this...

Be Still My Soul Be Still

by A E Housman
 Be still, my soul, be still; the arms you bear are brittle, 
Earth and high heaven are fixt of old and founded strong. 
Think rather,-- call to thought, if now you grieve a little, 
The days when we had rest, O soul, for they were long. 

Men loved unkindness then, but lightless in the quarry 
I slept and saw...Read more of this...

The Rhyme of the Three Captains

by Rudyard Kipling
 This ballad appears to refer to one of the exploits of the notorious
Paul Jones, the American pirate. It is founded on fact.


 . . . At the close of a winter day,
Their anchors down, by London town, the Three Great Captains lay;
And one was Admiral of the North from Solway Firth to Skye,
And one was Lord of the Wessex...Read more of this...

The Cooks Tale

by Geoffrey Chaucer
 THE PROLOGUE.


THE Cook of London, while the Reeve thus spake,
For joy he laugh'd and clapp'd him on the back:
"Aha!" quoth he, "for Christes passion,
This Miller had a sharp conclusion,
Upon this argument of herbergage.* *lodging
Well saide Solomon in his language,
Bring thou not every man into thine house,
For harbouring by night is perilous.
*Well ought a man avised for to be* *a...Read more of this...

To Winter

by William Blake
 O Winter! bar thine adamantine doors:
The north is thine; there hast thou built thy dark
Deep-founded habitation. Shake not thy roofs,
Nor bend thy pillars with thine iron car.'
He hears me not, but o'er the yawning deep
Rides heavy; his storms are unchain'd, sheath?d
In ribb?d steel; I dare not lift mine eyes,
For he hath rear'd his sceptre o'er the world.

Lo! now the...Read more of this...

The Unbeliever

by Elizabeth Bishop
 He sleeps on the top of a mast. - Bunyan


He sleeps on the top of a mast
with his eyes fast closed.
The sails fall away below him
like the sheets of his bed,
leaving out in the air of the night the sleeper's head.

Asleep he was transported there,
asleep he curled
in a gilded ball on the mast's top,
or climbed inside
a gilded bird, or...Read more of this...

Donica - A Ballad

by Robert Southey
 Author Note: In Finland there is a Castle which is called the New Rock, moated about with a river of unfounded depth, the water black and the fish therein
very distateful to the palate. In this are spectres often seen, which
foreshew either the death of the Governor, or some prime officer
belonging to the place; and most commonly it appeareth in...Read more of this...

Felixstowe or The Last of Her Order

by John Betjeman
 With one consuming roar along the shingle
The long wave claws and rakes the pebbles down
To where its backwash and the next wave mingle,
A mounting arch of water weedy-brown
Against the tide the off-shore breezes blow.
Oh wind and water, this is Felixstowe.

In winter when the sea winds chill and shriller
Than those of summer, all their cold unload
Full on the gimcrack attic...Read more of this...

The Inauguration of the University College

by William Topaz McGonagall
 Good people of Dundee, your voices raise,
And to Miss Baxter give great praise;
Rejoice and sing and dance with glee,
Because she has founded a College in Bonnie Dundee. 

Therefore loudly in her praise sing,
And make Dundee with your voices ring,
And give honour to whom honour is due,
Because ladies like her are very few. 

'Twas on the 5th day of October,...Read more of this...

Mannahatta

by Walt Whitman
 I WAS asking for something specific and perfect for my city, 
Whereupon, lo! upsprang the aboriginal name! 

Now I see what there is in a name, a word, liquid, sane, unruly, musical, self-sufficient;

I see that the word of my city is that word up there, 
Because I see that word nested in nests of water-bays, superb, with tall and...Read more of this...

Sonnet CVII

by Francesco Petrarch
[Pg 137] SONNET CVII. Fontana di dolore, albergo d' ira. HE ATTRIBUTES THE WICKEDNESS OF THE COURT OF ROME TO ITS GREAT WEALTH.  Spring of all woe, O den of curssed ire,Scoole of errour, temple of heresye;Thow Pope, I meane, head of hypocrasye,Thow and thie churche, unsaciat of desyre,Read more of this...

Prologue

by Anne Bradstreet
 1 To sing of Wars, of Captains, and of Kings,
2 Of Cities founded, Common-wealths begun,
3 For my mean Pen are too superior things;
4 Or how they all, or each their dates have run,
5 Let Poets and Historians set these forth.
6 My obscure lines shall not so dim their worth. 

7 But when my wond'ring eyes and envious heart
8 Great...Read more of this...

Victor Hugo

by Henry Van Dyke
 Heart of France for a hundred years,
Passionate, sensitive, proud, and strong,
Quick to throb with her hopes and fears,
Fierce to flame with her sense of wrong!
You, who hailed with a morning song
Dream-light gilding a throne of old:
You, who turned when the dream grew cold,
Singing still, to the light that shone
Pure from Liberty's ancient throne,
Over the human throng!
You, who dared in...Read more of this...

Abbey Assaroe

by William Allingham
 Gray, gray is Abbey Assaroe, by Belashanny town, 
It has neither door nor window, the walls are broken down; 
The carven-stones lie scatter'd in briar and nettle-bed!
The only feet are those that come at burial of the dead. 
A little rocky rivulet runs murmuring to the tide, 
Singing a song of ancient days, in sorrow, not in pride; 
The...Read more of this...

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