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Famous Wildness Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Yeats, William Butler
...breath
A mouthful held the extreme of life and death.

But even at the starting-post, all sleek and new,
I saw the wildness in her and I thought
A vision of terror that it must live through
Had shattered her soul. Propinquity had brought
Imagiation to that pitch where it casts out
All that is not itself: I had grown wild
And wandered murmuring everywhere, 'My child, my
 child.'

Or else I thought her supernatural;
As though a sterner eye looked through her eye
On...Read more of this...



by Yeats, William Butler
...O bid me mount and sail up there
Amid the cloudy wrack,
For peg and Meg and Paris' love
That had so straight a back,
Are gone away, and some that stay
Have changed their silk for sack.

Were I but there and none to hear
I'd have a peacock cry,
For that is natural to a man
That lives in memory,
Being all alone I'd nurse a stone
And sing it lullaby....Read more of this...

by Pope, Alexander
...ardens next your admiration call,
On ev'ry side you look, behold the wall!
No pleasing intricacies intervene,
No artful wildness to perplex the scene;
Grove nods at grove, each alley has a brother,
And half the platform just reflects the other.
The suff'ring eye inverted Nature sees,
Trees cut to statues, statues thick as trees;
With here a fountain, never to be play'd;
And there a summerhouse, that knows no shade;
Here Amphitrite sails through myrtle bow'rs;
There gladia...Read more of this...

by Dickey, James
...e I place

The New World's last eagle
Hunched in mangy feathers giving

Up on the theory of flight.
Dear God of the wildness of poetry, let them mate
To the death in the rotten branches,
Let the tree sway and burst into flame

And mingle them, crackling with feathers,

In crownfire. Let something come
Of it something gigantic legendary

Rise beyond reason over hills
Of ice SCREAMING that it cannot die,
That it has come back, this time
On wings, and will spare no earth...Read more of this...

by Bronte, Charlotte
...ing 
Of death, and dubious life to come ? 
I see a nearer beacon gleaming 
Over dejection's sea of gloom.

The very wildness of my sorrow 
Tells me I yet have innate force; 
My track of life has been too narrow, 
Effort shall trace a broader course. 

The world is not in yonder tower, 
Earth is not prisoned in that room, 
'Mid whose dark pannels, hour by hour, 
I've sat, the slave and prey of gloom.

One feeling­turned to utter anguish, 
Is not my being's only aim...Read more of this...



by Armstrong, Martin
...e Clover. Field by scented field,
Round farms like islands in the rolling weald,
It spreads thick-flowering or in wildness springs
Short-stemmed upon the naked downs, to yield
A richer store of honey than the Rose,
The Pink, the Honeysuckle. Thence there flows
Nectar of clearest amber, redolent
Of every flowery scent
That the warm wind upgathers as he goes.

In mid-July be ready for the noise
Of million bees in old Lime-avenues,
As though hot noon had ...Read more of this...

by Hopkins, Gerard Manley
...itches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn. 

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet....Read more of this...

by Dunn, Stephen
...edly sunning herself
on a large rock, thinks the man fed up
with nature, or perhaps a lost tiger,
the maximum amount of wildness a landscape
can bear, but the man knows and fears
his history of tampering with everything,
and besides to anyone who might see him
he's just a figure in a clearing
in a forest in a universe
that is as random as desire itself,
his desire in particular, so much going on
with and without him, moles humping up
the ground near the daffodils, a mockingbi...Read more of this...

by Byron, George (Lord)
...high, 
And ask'd if greater dwelt beyond the sky: 
Chain'd to excess, the slave of each extreme, 
How woke he from the wildness of that dream? 
Alas! he told not — but he did awake 
To curse the wither'd heart that would not break. 

IX. 

Books, for his volume heretofore was Man, 
With eye more curious he appear'd to scan, 
And oft, in sudden mood, for many a day 
From all communion he would start away: 
And then, his rarely call'd attendants said, 
Through night's ...Read more of this...

by Tsvetaeva, Marina
...in flourishes ...
I was, passer-by, I existed!
Passer-by, stop here, please.

And take, pluck a stem of wildness,
The fruit that comes with its fall --
It's true that graveyard strawberries
Are the biggest and sweetest of all.

All I care is that you don't stand there,
Dolefully hanging your head.
Easily about me remember,
Easily about me forget.

How rays of pure light suffuse you!
A golden dust wraps you round ...
And don't let it con...Read more of this...

by Yeats, William Butler
...lie?

When long ago I saw her ride
Under Ben Bulben to the meet,
The beauty of her country-side
With all youth's lonely wildness stirred,
She seemed to have grown clean and sweet
Like any rock-bred, sea-borne bird:

Sea-borne, or balanced on the air
When first it sprang out of the nest
Upon some lofty rock to stare
Upon the cloudy canopy,
While under its storm-beaten breast
Cried out the hollows of the sea....Read more of this...

by Petrarch, Francesco
...rous fate;And imprecate that beauty's blaze,Which o'er my form such wildness threw.No forest surely in its gloomsNurtures a savage so unkindAs she who bids these sorrows flow:Me, nor the dawn nor sleep o'ercomes;For, though of mortal mould, my mindFeels more than passion'...Read more of this...

by Gilbert, Jack
...e die and are put into the earth forever. 
We should insist while there is still time. We must 
eat through the wildness of her sweet body already 
in our bed to reach the body within that body....Read more of this...

by Lewis, C S
...There is a wildness still in England that will not feed 
In cages; it shrinks away from the touch of the trainer's hand,
Easy to kill, not easy to tame. It will never breed 
In a zoo for the public pleasure. It will not be planned.

Do not blame us too much if we that are hedgerow folk 
Cannot swell the rejoicings at this new world you make -
We, hedge-hogg...Read more of this...

by Nash, Ogden
...ity.
How could there be enough? I have given
my life for this, emotion has ruined me, oh lover,
I have exchanged my wildness—little tricks
with the mouth and feet, with the tail, my tongue is a parrots's,
I am a rampant horse, I am a lion,
I wait for the cookie, I snap my teeth—
as you have taught me, oh distant and brilliant and lonely....Read more of this...

by Bradstreet, Anne
...een, ev'n such have I before,
5.2 And all you say, say I, and something more.
5.3 Babe's innocence, Youth's wildness I have seen,
5.4 And in perplexed Middle-age have been,
5.5 Sickness, dangers, and anxieties have past,
5.6 And on this Stage am come to act my last.
5.7 I have been young, and strong, and wise as you
5.8 But now, Bis pueri senes is too true.
5.9 In every Age I've found much vanity.
5.10 An end of all perfecti...Read more of this...

by Bukowski, Charles
...ndness and caring. She
gave herself away without knowing it. At the same time she would leap back into areas of
wildness and incoherence. Schitzi. A beautiful and spiritual schitzi. Perhaps some man,
something, would ruin her forever. I hoped that it wouldn't be me. We went to bed and
after I turned out the lights Cass asked me, 
"When do you want it? Now or in the morning?" 
"In the morning," I said and turned my back. 
In the morning I got up...Read more of this...

by Scott, Duncan Campbell
...face,
Where all her pagan passion burns and glows;
Her blood is mingled with her ancient foes,
And thrills with war and wildness in her veins;
Her rebel lips are dabbled with the stains
Of feuds and forays and her father's woes.

And closer in the shawl about her breast,
The latest promise of her nation's doom,
Paler than she her baby clings and lies,
The primal warrior gleaming from his eyes;
He sulks, and burdened with his infant gloom,
He draws his heavy brows and will...Read more of this...

by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...che, Cyril? both are fled: 
What, if together? that were not so well. 
Would rather we had never come! I dread 
His wildness, and the chances of the dark.' 

'And yet,' I said, 'you wrong him more than I 
That struck him: this is proper to the clown, 
Though smocked, or furred and purpled, still the clown, 
To harm the thing that trusts him, and to shame 
That which he says he loves: for Cyril, howe'er 
He deal in frolic, as tonight--the song 
Might have been worse an...Read more of this...

by von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang
...culiar manner, 
the naturally happy disposition of the Poet himself and the unhappiness 
of his friend; it pictures the wildness of the road and the dreariness 
of the prospect, which is relieved at one spot by the distant sight 
of a town, a very vague allusion to which is made in the third strophe; 
it recalls the hunting party on which his companions have gone; 
and after an address to Love, concludes by a contrast between the 
unexplored recesses of the highest peak of th...Read more of this...

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