Famous Wholly Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Wholly poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous wholly poems. These examples illustrate what a famous wholly poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...of revelation clear
In devious path they wandered oft,
Nor could strong reason with the partial beam
Of revelation, wholly dissipate
The midnight horrors of so dark an age.
Vain were their searches, and their reason vain,
Else whence the visionary tales receiv'd,
Of num'rous deities in earth, or heav'n
Or sea, or river, or the shades profound
Of Erebus, dark kingdom of the dead.
Weak deities of fabled origin
From king or hero, to the skies advanc'd
For sanguinary...Read more of this...
by
Brackenridge, Hugh Henry
...as in January
This evil genius came into our school,
And it was June when he went out of it—
If I may say that he was wholly out
Of any place that I was in thereafter.
But he was not yet gone. When we are told
By Fate to bear what we may never bear,
Fate waits a little while to see what happens;
And this time it was only for the season
Between the swift midwinter holidays
And the long progress into weeks and months
Of all the days that followed—with him there
To make...Read more of this...
by
Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...s desperate
he had passed a-plenty, and perils of war,
contest-crash, since, conqueror proud,
Hrothgar’s hall he had wholly purged,
and in grapple had killed the kin of Grendel,
loathsome breed! Not least was that
of hand-to-hand fights where Hygelac fell,
when the ruler of Geats in rush of battle,
lord of his folk, in the Frisian land,
son of Hrethel, by sword-draughts died,
by brands down-beaten. Thence Beowulf fled
through strength of himself and his swimming po...Read more of this...
by
Anonymous,
...urpose he abides
With none takes counsel and in none confides;
But slowly weaves about the foe a net
Which leaves them wholly at his mercy, yet
He strikes no fateful blow; he takes no life,
And holds in check his men, who pant for bloody strife.
XL.
Intrepid warrior and skilled diplomate,
In his strong hands he holds the red man's fate.
The craftiest plot he checks with counterplot,
Till tribe by tribe the tricky foe is brought
To fear his vengeance and to know his po...Read more of this...
by
Wilcox, Ella Wheeler
...enew'd,
Then the new mother came about her heart,
Then her good Philip was her all-in-all,
And that mysterious instinct wholly died.
And where was Enoch? prosperously sail'd
The ship `Good Fortune,' tho' at setting forth
The Biscay, roughly ridging eastward, shook
And almost overwhelm'd her, yet unvext
She slipt across the summer of the world,
Then after a long tumble about the Cape
And frequent interchange of foul and fair,
She passing thro' the summer world again,
The bre...Read more of this...
by
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...wenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
U...Read more of this...
by
Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...ely, but
All shall be well, and
All manner of thing shall be well.
If I think, again, of this place,
And of people, not wholly commendable,
Of no immediate kin or kindness,
But of some peculiar genius,
All touched by a common genius,
United in the strife which divided them;
If I think of a king at nightfall,
Of three men, and more, on the scaffold
And a few who died forgotten
In other places, here and abroad,
And of one who died blind and quiet
Why should we celebrate
These d...Read more of this...
by
Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...at venged no wrath on Theseus' deep assault,
So brings him."
"Turn thou from their sight," my guide
Enjoined, nor wholly on my fear relied,
But placed his hands across mine eyes the while
He told me further "Risk no glance. The sight
Of Gorgon, if she cometh, would bring thee night
From which were no returning."
Ye
that read
With wisdom to discern, ye well may heed
The hidden meaning of the truth that lies
Beneath the shadow-words of mysteries
That he...Read more of this...
by
Alighieri, Dante
...ve signs of woe,
That all was lost. Back to the thicket slunk
The guilty Serpent; and well might;for Eve,
Intent now wholly on her taste, nought else
Regarded; such delight till then, as seemed,
In fruit she never tasted, whether true
Or fancied so, through expectation high
Of knowledge; not was Godhead from her thought.
Greedily she ingorged without restraint,
And knew not eating death: Satiate at length,
And hightened as with wine, jocund and boon,
Thus to hersel...Read more of this...
by
Milton, John
...since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says
we are for each other: then
laugh leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph
and death i think is...Read more of this...
by
Cummings, Edward Estlin (E E)
...and talk do not prove me;
I carry the plenum of proof, and everything else, in my face;
With the hush of my lips I wholly confound the skeptic.
26
I think I will do nothing now but listen,
To accrue what I hear into myself—to let sounds contribute toward me.
I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames, clack of
sticks cooking my meals;
I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice;
I hear all sounds running together, combin...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...very deed,
"Then would this breathing clarionet
Type what the poet fain would be;
For none o' the singers ever yet
Has wholly lived his minstrelsy,
"Or clearly sung his true, true thought,
Or utterly bodied forth his life,
Or out of life and song has wrought
The perfect one of man and wife;
"Or lived and sung, that Life and Song
Might each express the other's all,
Careless if life or art were long
Since both were one, to stand or fall:
"So that the wonder struck the crowd...Read more of this...
by
Lanier, Sidney
...ck water: it is barely possible that even men's present
Lives are something; their arts and sciences (by moonlight)
Not wholly ridiculous, nor their cities merely an offense.
VII
Under my windows, between the road and the sea-cliff, bitter wild grass
Stands narrowed between the people and the storm.
The ocean winter after winter gnaws at its earth, the wheels and the feet
Summer after summer encroach and destroy.
Stubborn green life, for the cliff-eater I cannot comfort you...Read more of this...
by
Jeffers, Robinson
...stature,
And her step kept pace with mine nor faltered,
As if age had foregone its usurpature,
And the ignoble mien was wholly altered,
And the face looked quite of another nature,
And the change reached too, whatever the change meant,
Her shaggy wolf-skin cloak's arrangement:
For where its tatters hung loose like sedges,
Gold coins were glittering on the edges,
Like the band-roll strung with tomans
Which proves the veil a Persian woman's.
And under her brow, like a snail's h...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Robert
...ardly mattered, because
He had seven coats on when he came,
With three pair of boots--but the worst of it was,
He had wholly forgotten his name.
He would answer to "Hi!" or to any loud cry,
Such as "Fry me!" or "Fritter my wig!"
To "What-you-may-call-um!" or "What-was-his-name!"
But especially "Thing-um-a-jig!"
While, for those who preferred a more forcible word,
He had different names from these:
His intimate friends called him "Candle-ends,"
And his enemies "Toasted...Read more of this...
by
Carroll, Lewis
...wot how sore it can a man distrain*, *distress
As he that oft hath been caught in his last*, *snare
I you forgive wholly this trespass,
At request of the queen that kneeleth here,
And eke of Emily, my sister dear.
And ye shall both anon unto me swear,
That never more ye shall my country dere* *injure
Nor make war upon me night nor day,
But be my friends in alle that ye may.
I you forgive this trespass *every deal*. *completely*
And they him sware *his asking* fair and w...Read more of this...
by
Chaucer, Geoffrey
...ned land;
Yet monsters from thy large increase we find
Engendered on the slime thou leavest behind.
Sedition has not wholly seized on thee,
Thy nobler parts are from infection free.
Of Israel's tribes thou hast a numerous band,
But still the Canaanite is in the land.
Thy military chiefs are brave and true,
Nor are thy disenchanted burghers few.
The head is loyal which thy heart commands,
But what's a head with two such gouty hands?
The wise and wealthy love the sur...Read more of this...
by
Dryden, John
...e she dissected, word by word,
His speech, half guessed at and half heard,
As might a cat a little bird.
Then, having wholly overthrown
His views, and stripped them to the bone,
Proceeded to unfold her own.
"Shall Man be Man? And shall he miss
Of other thoughts no thought but this,
Harmonious dews of sober bliss?
"What boots it? Shall his fevered eye
Through towering nothingness descry
The grisly phantom hurry by?
"And hear dumb shrieks that fill the air;
See mouths t...Read more of this...
by
Carroll, Lewis
...ll the rest.
Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into
the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct
from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman,
and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact,
is the substance of the poem. The whole passage from Ovid is
of great anthropological interest:
'. . . Cum Iunone iocos et maior vestra
profecto est
Quam, quae contingit maribus,' dixisse,
'voluptas.'
Illa negat...Read more of this...
by
Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...
A wise woman will busy her ever-in-one* *constantly
To get their love, where that she hath none.
But, since I had them wholly in my hand,
And that they had me given all their land,
Why should I take keep* them for to please, *care
But* it were for my profit, or mine ease? *unless
I set them so a-worke, by my fay,
That many a night they sange, well-away!
The bacon was not fetched for them, I trow,
That some men have in Essex at Dunmow.9
I govern'd them so well after my law,
T...Read more of this...
by
Chaucer, Geoffrey
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