Famous Wider Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Cleon

...ere is the sign? I ask, 
And get no answer, and agree in sum, 
O king, with thy profound discouragement, 
Who seest the wider but to sigh the more. 
Most progress is most failure: thou sayest well. 

The last point now:--thou dost except a case-- 
Holding joy not impossible to one 
With artist-gifts--to such a man as I 
Who leave behind me living works indeed; 
For, such a poem, such a painting lives. 
What? dost thou verily trip upon a word, 
Confound the accurate view of wh...Read more of this...
by Browning, Robert


Endymion: Book I

...penitent,
Who now, ere Phoebus mounts the firmament,
Fondles the flower amid the sobbing rain.
The archers too, upon a wider plain,
Beside the feathery whizzing of the shaft,
And the dull twanging bowstring, and the raft
Branch down sweeping from a tall ash top,
Call'd up a thousand thoughts to envelope
Those who would watch. Perhaps, the trembling knee
And frantic gape of lonely Niobe,
Poor, lonely Niobe! when her lovely young
Were dead and gone, and her caressing tongue
La...Read more of this...
by Keats, John

Hiawathas Fishing

...ble Scratchers!"
And the wild and clamorous sea-gulls
Toiled with beak and claws together, 
Made the rifts and openings wider 
In the mighty ribs of Nahma, 
And from peril and from prison, 
From the body of the sturgeon, 
From the peril of the water, 
They released my Hiawatha.
He was standing near his wigwam, 
On the margin of the water, 
And he called to old Nokomis, 
Called and beckoned to Nokomis, 
Pointed to the sturgeon, Nahma, 
Lying lifeless on the pebbles, 
With the ...Read more of this...
by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

In The Days When The World Was Wide

...r Betide? 
The heart of the rebel makes answer `No! 
We'll fight till the world grows wide!' 

The world shall yet be a wider world -- for the tokens are manifest; 
East and North shall the wrongs be hurled that followed us South and West. 
The march of Freedom is North by the Dawn! Follow, whate'er betide! 
Sons of the Exiles, march! March on! March till the world grows wide!...Read more of this...
by Lawson, Henry

Inferno (English)

...curbed 
 His anxious thought to cheer me. "Doubt ye nought 
 Of power to hurt in these fiends insolent; 
 For once the wider gate on which ye read 
 The words of doom, with greater pride, they sought 
 To close against the Highest. Already is bent 
 A great One hereward, whose unhindered way 
 Descends the steeps unaided. He shall say 
 Such words as must the trembling hells obey." 





Canto IX 



 I THINK the paleness of the fear I showed 
 When he, rejected from that co...Read more of this...
by Alighieri, Dante


Old Pictures In Florence

...n they?
Are they perfect of lineament, perfect of stature?
In both, of such lower types are we
Precisely because of our wider nature;
For time, theirs---ours, for eternity.

XVI.

To-day's brief passion limits their range;
It seethes with the morrow for us and more. 
They are perfect---how else? they shall never change:
We are faulty---why not? we have time in store.
The Artificer's hand is not arrested
With us; we are rough-hewn, nowise polished:
They stand for our copy, and...Read more of this...
by Browning, Robert

On The Hurricane

...
Dispers'd and loose, the shatter'd Vessels stray, 
Some perish within sight of Shore, 
Some, happier thought, obtain a wider Sea, 
But never to return, or cast an Anchor more! 
Some on the Northern Coasts are thrown, 
And by congealing Surges compass'd round, 
To fixt and certain Ruin bound, 
Immoveable are grown:
The fatal Goodwin swallows All that come 
Within the Limits of that dangerous Sand, 
Amphibious in its kind, nor Sea nor Land; 
Yet kin to both, a false and faithl...Read more of this...
by Finch, Anne Kingsmill

Paradise Lost: Book 03

...nst which opened from beneath, 
Just o'er the blissful seat of Paradise, 
A passage down to the Earth, a passage wide, 
Wider by far than that of after-times 
Over mount Sion, and, though that were large, 
Over the Promised Land to God so dear; 
By which, to visit oft those happy tribes, 
On high behests his angels to and fro 
Passed frequent, and his eye with choice regard 
From Paneas, the fount of Jordan's flood, 
To Beersaba, where the Holy Land 
Borders on Egypt and the ...Read more of this...
by Milton, John

Paradise Lost: Book 05

...e 
In darker veil,) and roseat dews disposed 
All but the unsleeping eyes of God to rest; 
Wide over all the plain, and wider far 
Than all this globous earth in plain outspread, 
(Such are the courts of God) the angelick throng, 
Dispersed in bands and files, their camp extend 
By living streams among the trees of life, 
Pavilions numberless, and sudden reared, 
Celestial tabernacles, where they slept 
Fanned with cool winds; save those, who, in their course, 
Melodious hymn...Read more of this...
by Milton, John

Paradise Lost: Book 11

...e hemisphere of earth, in clearest ken, 
Stretched out to the amplest reach of prospect lay. 
Not higher that hill, nor wider looking round, 
Whereon, for different cause, the Tempter set 
Our second Adam, in the wilderness; 
To show him all Earth's kingdoms, and their glory. 
His eye might there command wherever stood 
City of old or modern fame, the seat 
Of mightiest empire, from the destined walls 
Of Cambalu, seat of Cathaian Can, 
And Samarchand by Oxus, Temir's throne,...Read more of this...
by Milton, John

Passage to India

...f Space. 

Greater than stars or suns, 
Bounding, O soul, thou journeyest forth; 
—What love, than thine and ours could wider amplify?
What aspirations, wishes, outvie thine and ours, O soul? 
What dreams of the ideal? what plans of purity, perfection, strength? 
What cheerful willingness, for others’ sake, to give up all? 
For others’ sake to suffer all? 

Reckoning ahead, O soul, when thou, the time achiev’d,
(The seas all cross’d, weather’d the capes, the voyage done,) 
Su...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt

Renascence

...e of every day;
God, I can push the grass apart
And lay my finger on Thy heart!

The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky,—
No higher than the soul is high.
The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.
But East and West will pinch the heart
That can not keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat—the sky
Will cave...Read more of this...
by St. Vincent Millay, Edna

Song of Myself

...s pouring and filling me full. 

I hear the train’d soprano—(what work, with hers, is this?)
The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies; 
It wrenches such ardors from me, I did not know I possess’d them; 
It sails me—I dab with bare feet—they are lick’d by the indolent
 waves; 
I am exposed, cut by bitter and angry hail—I lose my breath, 
Steep’d amid honey’d morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of
 death;
At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzle...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt

The Artists

...ze
The higher, fairer orders that the mind
May traverse with its magic rays,
Or compass with enjoyment unconfined--
The wider thoughts and feelings open lie
To more luxuriant floods of harmony.
To beauty's richer, more majestic stream,--
The fair members of the world's vast scheme,
That, maimed, disgrace on his creation bring,
He sees the lofty forms then perfecting--

The fairer riddles come from out the night--
The richer is the world his arms enclose,
The broader stream th...Read more of this...
by Schiller, Friedrich von

The Bonfire

...roared first and mixed sparks with stars,
And sweeping round it with a flaming sword,
Made the dim trees stand back in wider circle—
Done so much and I know not how much more
I mean it shall not do if I can bind it.
Well if it doesn’t with its draft bring on
A wind to blow in earnest from some quarter,
As once it did with me upon an April.
The breezes were so spent with winter blowing
They seemed to fail the bluebirds under them
Short of the perch their languid flight was to...Read more of this...
by Frost, Robert

The Missionary

...Lough, vessel, plough the British main,
Seek the free ocean's wider plain; 
Leave English scenes and English skies,
Unbind, dissever English ties; 
Bear me to climes remote and strange, 
Where altered life, fast-following change,
Hot action, never-ceasing toil, 
Shall stir, turn, dig, the spirit's soil; 
Fresh roots shall plant, fresh seed shall sow, 
Till a new garden there shall grow, 
Cleared of the weeds that fill ...Read more of this...
by Bronte, Charlotte

The Occultation Of Orion

...s and harmonious strings,
In sweet vibration, sphere by sphere,
From Dian's circle light and near,
Onward to vaster and wider rings.
Where, chanting through his beard of snows,
Majestic, mournful, Saturn goes,
And down the sunless realms of space
Reverberates the thunder of his bass.

Beneath the sky's triumphal arch
This music sounded like a march,
And with its chorus seemed to be
Preluding some great tragedy.
Sirius was rising in the east;
And, slow ascending one by one,
Th...Read more of this...
by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

The Prisoner of Chillon

...e from to escape,
For I had buried one and all
Who loved me in a human shape;
And the whole earth would henceforth be
A wider prison unto me:
No child - no sire - no kin had I
No partner in my misery;
I thought of this, and I was glad,
For thought of them had made me mad;
But I was curious to ascend
To my barr'd windows, and to bend
Once more, upon the mountains high,
The quiet of a loving eye. 

XIII
I saw them - and they were the same,
They were not changed like me in frame...Read more of this...
by Byron, George (Lord)

To A Young Lady

...ine,
The mingling colours sweetly fade,
And justly temper light and shade.


He look'd; the swelling Cloud on high
With wider circuit spread the sky,
Stretch'd to the sun an ampler train,
And pour'd new glories on the main.
As quick, effacing every ground,
His pencil swept the canvas round,
And o'er its field, with magic art,
Call'd forth new forms in every part.


But now the sun, with rising ray,
Advanced with speed his early way;
Each colour takes a differing die,
The oran...Read more of this...
by Trumbull, John

Upon Appleton House to My Lord Fairfax

...e innocently as you see.
"these Walls restrain the World without,
"But hedge our Liberty about.
"These Bars inclose the wider Den
"Of those wild Creatures, called Men.
"The Cloyster outward shuts its Gates,
"And, from us, locks on them the Grates.

"Here we, in shining Armour white,
"Like Virgin Amazons do fight.
"And our chast Lamps we hourly trim,
"Lest the great Bridegroom find them dim.
"Our Orient Breaths perfumed are
"With insense of incessant Pray'r.
"And Holy-water of...Read more of this...
by Marvell, Andrew

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