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Famous Outlived Poems by Famous Poets

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

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...een holy men who hid themselves 
Deep in the woody wilderness, and gave 
Their lives to thought and prayer, till they outlived 
The generation born with them, nor seemed 
Less aged than the hoary trees and rocks 
Around them;---and there have been holy men 
Who deemed it were not well to pass life thus. 
But let me often to these solitudes 
Retire, and in thy presence reassure 
My feeble virtue. Here its enemies, 
The passions, at thy plainer footsteps shrin...Read more of this...
by Bryant, William Cullen



...been holy men who hid themselves 
Deep in the woody wilderness and gave 
Their lives to thought and prayer till they outlived 
The generation born with them nor seemed 
Less aged than the hoary trees and rocks 95 
Around them;¡ªand there have been holy men 
Who deemed it were not well to pass life thus. 
But let me often to these solitudes 
Retire and in thy presence reassure 
My feeble virtue. Here its enemies 100 
The passions at thy plainer footsteps shr...Read more of this...
by Bryant, William Cullen
...ght --
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone --

This is the Hour of Lead --
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow --
First -- Chill -- then Stupor -- then the letting go --...Read more of this...
by Dickinson, Emily
...loss of years, 
The gradual decay of dignity. 
Men lived within these foundries, hour by hour; 
Nothing they forged outlived the rusted gears 
Which might have served to grind their eulogy....Read more of this...
by Levine, Philip
...ght—
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone—

This is the Hour of Lead—
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—
First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—

441

This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me—
The simple News that Nature told—
With tender Majesty

Her Message is committed
To Hands I cannot see—
For love of Her—Sweet—countrymen—
Judge tenderly—of Me.

448

This was a Poet—...Read more of this...
by Dickinson, Emily



...in would for a time survive,
If but to see what next can well arrive.

Kingdoms and empires in my little day
I have outlived, and yet I am not old;
And when I look on this, the petty spray
Of my own years of trouble, which have rolled
Like a wild bay of breakers, melts away:
Something—I know not what—does still uphold
A spirit of slight patience;—not in vain,
Even for its own sake, do we purchase pain.

Perhaps the workings of defiance stir
Within me,—or perhaps of co...Read more of this...
by Byron, George (Lord)
...in his mind
 Is oh so good!

Please leave him to his dream,
 This old, unweary man,
Who shuns the busy stream
 And has outlived his span.
Just leave him on his shelf
 To watch the world go by . . .
Because he is--myself:
 Yea, such be I....Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William
...he Eternal Town!
The Palatine hath welcomed back her king,
And with his name the seven mountains ring!

And Naples hath outlived her dream of pain,
And mocks her tyrant! Venice lives again,
New risen from the waters! and the cry
Of Light and Truth, of Love and Liberty,
Is heard in lordly Genoa, and where
The marble spires of Milan wound the air,
Rings from the Alps to the Sicilian shore,
And Dante's dream is now a dream no more.

But thou, Ravenna, better loved than all,
...Read more of this...
by Wilde, Oscar
...ept;
It's not for sins committed
My heart is full of rue,
but gentle acts omitted,
Kind deeds I did not do.

I have outlived the blindness,
The selfishness of youth;
The canker of unkindness,
The cruelty of truth;
The searing hurt of rudeness . . .
By mercies great and small,
I've come to reckon goodness
The greatest gift of all.

Let us be helpful ever
to those who are in need,
And each new day endeavour
To do some gentle deed;
For faults beyond our griev...Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William
...ou hid'st the spectral past; 
Where, closely mingling, pale and glow 
The characters of joy and woe; 
The monographs of outlived years, 
Or smile-illumed or dim with tears, 
Green hills of life that slope to death, 
And haunts of home, whose vistaed trees 
Shade off to mournful cypresses, 
With the white amaranths underneath. 
Even while I look, I can but heed 
The restless sands' incessant fall, 
Importunate hours that hours succeed 
Each clamorous with its own sharp nee...Read more of this...
by Whittier, John Greenleaf
...kinship,
Assumed our friendship coatlike,
Not as a badge one fights for"?

How say "and you remembered
The sins of our outlived selves and
Your own forgiveness, buried
The hatchet to slow music;

Shared money but not your secrets;
Will leave as your final legacy
A box double-locked by the spider
Packed with your unsolved problems"?

How say all this without capitals,
Italics, anger or pathos,
To those who have seen from the womb come
Enemies? How not say it?...Read more of this...
by Tessimond, A S J
...t 
May then have eased a painful going down 
From pictured heights of power and lost renown, 
Revealed at length to his outlived endeavor 
Remote and unapproachable forever;
And at his heart there may have gnawed 
Sick memories of a dead faith foiled and flawed 
And long dishonored by the living death 
Assigned alike by chance 
To brutes and hierophants;
And anguish fallen on those he loved around him 
May once have dealt the last blow to confound him, 
And so have left him a...Read more of this...
by Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...neath either pinion
Of him whom from the flock of conquerors
Fame singled as her thunderbearing minion;
"The other long outlived both woes & wars,
Throned in new thoughts of men, and still had kept
The jealous keys of truth's eternal doors
"If Bacon's spirit [[blank]] had not leapt
Like lightning out of darkness; he compelled
The Proteus shape of Nature's as it slept
"To wake & to unbar the caves that held
The treasure of the secrets of its reign--
See the great bards of old ...Read more of this...
by Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...cruples, and softly she him beguiled:
"You, who are verily man among men, speak with the tongue of a child.
We have outlived the old standards; we have burst, like an over-tight thong,
The ancient, outworn, Puritanic traditions of Right and Wrong."

Then the Master feared for His angel, and called him again to His side,
For oh, the woman was wondrous, and oh, the angel was tried!
And deep in his hell sang the Devil, and this was the strain of his song:
"The ancient, o...Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William
...obligingly, it lived 
With me all my life; it's weeping branches 
Fanned my insomnia with dreams. 
And strange!--I outlived it. 
There the stump stands; with strange voices 
Other willows are conversing 
Under our, under those skies. 
And I am silent...As if a brother had died....Read more of this...
by Akhmatova, Anna

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