Famous Wise Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Wise poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous wise poems. These examples illustrate what a famous wise poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Rudyard Kipling
1902
When the darkened Fifties dip to the North,
And frost and the fog divide the air,
And the day is dead at his breaking-forth,
Sirs, it is bitter beneath the Bear!
Far to Southward they wheel and glance,
The million molten spears of morn --
The spears of our deliverance
That shine on the house where we were born.
Flying-fish about our bows,
...Read more of this...
by
Robinson Jeffers
Wise men in their bad hours have envied
The little people making merry like grasshoppers
In spots of sunlight, hardly thinking
Backward but never forward, and if they somehow
Take hold upon the future they do it
Half asleep, with the tools of generation
Foolishly reduplicating
Folly in thirty-year periods; the eat and laugh too,
Groan against labors, wars...Read more of this...
by
Mother Goose
Three wise men of Gotham
Went to sea in a bowl;
If the bowl had been stronger
My song had been longer....Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
In Allah's name, say, wherefore set the wise
Their hearts upon this house of vanities?
Whene'er they think to rest them from their toils,
Death takes them by the hand, and says, «Arise.»...Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
Go, choose bliss, if you are wise, and finally you may
be able to drink wine from the hand of the drinkers of
eternity, but you are one of the ignorant and joy is not
in you, it is not given to every ignorant one to taste
the sweets that ignorance gives.
387...Read more of this...
by
Andrew Barton Paterson
Parliament's a stage,
And all the Politicians merely players!
They have their exits and entrances,
And Wise doth in his time play many parts,
His acts being seven changes.
First the Runner,
With spiked shoe he spurns the cinder track,
And just for once runs straight.
The next the Student,
Burning the midnight oil with Adam Smith
For Cobden...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
"Houses" -- so the Wise Men tell me --
"Mansions"! Mansions must be warm!
Mansions cannot let the tears in,
Mansions must exclude the storm!
"Many Mansions," by "his Father,"
I don't know him; snugly built!
Could the Children find the way there --
Some, would even trudge tonight!...Read more of this...
by
William Shakespeare
Be wise as thou art cruel; do not press
My tongue-tied patience with too much disdain,
Lest sorrow lend me words and words express
The manner of my pity-wanting pain.
If I might teach thee wit, better it were,
Though not to love, yet, love, to tell me so,
As testy sick men, when their deaths be near,
No news but health from their physicians know.
For...Read more of this...
by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
AFTER ANACREON.
[The strong resemblance of this fine poem to
Cowley's Ode bearing the same name, and beginning "Happy insect!
what can be," will be at once seen.]
HAPPY art thou, darling insect,
Who, upon the trees' tall branches,
By a modest draught inspired,
Singing, like a monarch livest!
Thou possessest as thy portion
All that on the plains thou seest,
All that by the hours is...Read more of this...
by
Imamu Amiri Baraka
WHYS (Nobody Knows
The Trouble I Seen)
Traditional
If you ever find
yourself, some where
lost and surrounded
by enemies
who won't let you
speak in your own language
who destroy your statues
& instruments, who ban
your omm bomm ba boom
then you are in trouble
deep trouble
they ban your
own boom ba boom
you in deep deep
trouble
humph!
probably take you several hundred...Read more of this...
by
Sidney Godolphin
LORD when the wise men came from farr
Ledd to thy Cradle by A Starr,
Then did the shepheards too rejoyce,
Instructed by thy Angells voyce,
Blest were the wisemen in their skill, 5
And shepheards in their harmelesse will.
Wisemen in tracing natures lawes
Ascend unto the highest cause,
Shepheards with humble fearefulnesse
Walke safely, though their light...Read more of this...
by
Delmira Agustini
Spanish Su idilio fue una larga sonrisa a cuatro labios…En el regazo cálido de rubia primaveraAmáronse talmente que entre sus dedos sabiosPalpitó la divina forma de la Quimera. En los palacios fúlgidos de las tardes en calmaHablábanse un lenguaje sentido como un lloro,Y se besaban hondo hasta morderse el alma!…Las horas deshojáronse como flores de oro, Y el Destino interpuso sus dos manos...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
Follow wise Orion
Till you waste your Eye --
Dazzlingly decamping
He is just as high --...Read more of this...
by
Countee Cullen
Dead men are wisest, for they know
How far the roots of flowers go,
How long a seed must rot to grow.
Dead men alone bear frost and rain
On throbless heart and heatless brain,
And feel no stir of joy or pain.
Dead men alone are satiate;
They sleep and dream and have no weight,
To curb their rest, of love or hate.
Strange, men should flee...Read more of this...
by
Edwin Arlington Robinson
FIRST VOICE
So long adrift, so fast aground,
What foam and ruin have we found—
We, the Wise Brothers?
Could heaven and earth be framed amiss,
That we should land in fine like this—
We, and no others?
SECOND VOICE
Convoyed by what accursèd thing
Made we this evil reckoning—
We, the Wise Brothers?
And if the failure be complete,
Why look...Read more of this...
by
Lucy Maud Montgomery
My Claudia, it is long since we have met,
So kissed, so held each other heart to heart!
I thought to greet thee as a conqueror comes,
Bearing the trophies of his prowess home,
But Jove hath willed it should be otherwise
Jove, say I? Nay, some mightier stranger-god
Who thus hath laid his heavy hand on me,
No victor,...Read more of this...
by
Czeslaw Milosz
I have always aspired to a more spacious form
that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose
and would let us understand each other without exposing
the author or reader to sublime agonies.
In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:
a thing is brought forth which we didn't know we had in us,
so we blink our eyes, as...Read more of this...
by
Kalidasa
Until the wise are satisfied,
I cannot feel that skill is shown;
The best-trained mind requires support,
And does not trust itself alone....Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
To wise and worthy men your life devote,
But from the worthless keep your walk remote;
Dare to take poison from a sage's hand,
But from a fool refuse an antidote....Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
Wine, which the wise man knows how to appreciate,
is for me the water of life and I its prophet am. It is
balm for the heart, an elixir which fortifies the soul.
Has God Himself not said: The benefits of the human
race are found in wine....Read more of this...
by
Siegfried Sassoon
I
Fires in the dark you build; tall quivering flames
In the huge midnight forest of the unknown.
Your soul is full of cities with dead names,
And blind-faced, earth-bound gods of bronze and stone
Whose priests and kings and lust-begotten lords
Watch the procession of their thundering hosts,
Or guard relentless fanes with flickering swords
And wizardry of ghosts.
II
In...Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
I have seen a wise man in the house of a drunken man
at evening. I asked him if he could give me some news
of the absent. He answered me: Drink wine, friend, for
many like you have gone out but have never returned.
382...Read more of this...
by
Hafez
For sake of these two splendours do the wise
Set store on riches, & for these alone:
For these two glories only do they prize
Power & majesty of kingly throne:
Or this: to succour friendship in distress,
To comfort humble sorrow, nor despise
To cheer the joyless heart of weariness,
To guard & aid whom fortune doth oppress
That he to life’s glad kingdom be restor’d
(& thus...Read more of this...
by
Constantine P Cavafy
Because gods perceive future things, men what is happening now,
but wise men perceive approaching things.
Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana, VIII, 7.
Men know what is happening now.
The gods know the things of the future,
the full and sole possessors of all lights.
Of the future things, wise men perceive
approaching things. Their hearing
is sometimes, during serious studies,
disturbed. The mystical clamor
of...Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
So in this palace of brief being, you ought, O wise man,
to give yourself up to rose-colored wine. Then each
atom of your dust that the wind carries away will fall
on the sill of the tavern, all saturate with wine....Read more of this...
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