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Famous Substances Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry
...tide or gale,
Canst in thy map securely sail;
Seeing those painted countries, and so guess
By those fine shades, their substances;
And from thy compass taking small advice,
Buy'st travel at the lowest price.
Nor are thine ears so deaf but thou canst hear,
Far more with wonder than with fear,
Fame tell of states, of countries, courts, and kings,
And believe there be such things;
When of these truths thy happier knowledge lies
More in thine ears than in thine eyes.
And...Read more of this...
by Herrick, Robert



...e light his west-bred face, 
To him the hereditary countenance bequeath’d, both mother’s and father’s, 
His first parts substances, earth, water, animals, trees, 
Built of the common stock, having room for far and near, 
Used to dispense with other lands, incarnating this land,
Attracting it Body and Soul to himself, hanging on its neck with incomparable love, 
Plunging his seminal muscle into its merits and demerits, 
Making its cities, beginnings, events, diversities, wars,...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt
...hen good and ill,
And joy and moan,
Melt into one.
There Past, Present, Future, shoot
Triple blossoms from one root
Substances at base divided
In their summits are united,
There the holy Essence rolls,
One through separated souls,
And the sunny &Aelig;on sleeps
Folding nature in its deeps,
And every fair and every good
Known in part or known impure
To men below,
In their archetypes endure.

The race of gods,
Or those we erring own,
Are shadows flitting up and down
In ...Read more of this...
by Emerson, Ralph Waldo
...br>

Now blotches rankling, coloured gay and grim,
Now patches where some leanness of the soil's
Broke into moss or substances like boils;
Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him
Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim
Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils.

And just as far as ever from the end!
Naught in the distance but the evening, naught
To point my footstep further! At the thought,
A great black bird, Apollyon's bosom-friend,
Sailed past, not ...Read more of this...
by Browning, Robert
...ans all the depths of magic, and expounds
The meanings of all motions, shapes, and sounds;
If he explores all forms and substances
Straight homeward to their symbol-essences;
He shall not die. Moreover, and in chief,
He must pursue this task of joy and grief
Most piously;--all lovers tempest-tost,
And in the savage overwhelming lost,
He shall deposit side by side, until
Time's creeping shall the dreary space fulfil:
Which done, and all these labours ripened,
A youth, by h...Read more of this...
by Keats, John



...SIMILITUDE interlocks all, 
All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets, comets, asteroids,
All the substances of the same, and all that is spiritual upon the same, 
All distances of place, however wide, 
All distances of time—all inanimate forms, 
All Souls—all living bodies, though they be ever so different, or in different worlds, 
All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes—the fishes, the brutes,
All men and women—me also; 
All nations, colors, ...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt
...o Man in part 
Spiritual, may of purest Spirits be found 
No ingrateful food: And food alike those pure 
Intelligential substances require, 
As doth your rational; and both contain 
Within them every lower faculty 
Of sense, whereby they hear, see, smell, touch, taste, 
Tasting concoct, digest, assimilate, 
And corporeal to incorporeal turn. 
For know, whatever was created, needs 
To be sustained and fed: Of elements 
The grosser feeds the purer, earth the sea, 
Earth and...Read more of this...
by Milton, John
...d best known. 
The swiftness of those circles attribute, 
Though numberless, to his Omnipotence, 
That to corporeal substances could add 
Speed almost spiritual: Me thou thinkest not slow, 
Who since the morning-hour set out from Heaven 
Where God resides, and ere mid-day arrived 
In Eden; distance inexpressible 
By numbers that have name. But this I urge, 
Admitting motion in the Heavens, to show 
Invalid that which thee to doubt it moved; 
Not that I so affirm, thou...Read more of this...
by Milton, John
...QUICKSAND years that whirl me I know not whither, 
Your schemes, politics, fail—lines give way—substances mock and elude me; 
Only the theme I sing, the great and strong-possess’d Soul, eludes not; 
One’s-self must never give way—that is the final substance—that out of all
 is
 sure; 
Out of politics, triumphs, battles, life—what at last finally remains?
When shows break up, what but One’s-Self is sure?...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt
...e few seize on what
 they
 choose! let the rest gawk, giggle, starve, obey!
Let shadows be furnish’d with genitals! let substances be deprived of their genitals!

Let there be wealthy and immense cities—but still through any of them, not a single
 poet,
 savior, knower, lover! 
Let the infidels of These States laugh all faith away! 
If one man be found who has faith, let the rest set upon him! 
Let them affright faith! let them destroy the power of breeding faith!
Let the she...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt
...rs and the suns
And the countless worlds.
But I have measured their distances
And weighed them and discovered their substances.
I have devised wings for the air,
And keels for water,
And horses of iron for the earth.
I have lengthened the vision you gave me a million times,
And the hearing you gave me a million times,
I have leaped over space with speech,
And taken fire for light out of the air.
I have built great cities and bored through the hills,
And bridge...Read more of this...
by Masters, Edgar Lee
...has reference to the Soul.) 

14Was somebody asking to see the Soul? 
See! your own shape and countenance—persons, substances, beasts, the trees,
 the running rivers, the rocks and sands.

All hold spiritual joys, and afterwards loosen them: 
How can the real body ever die, and be buried? 

Of your real body, and any man’s or woman’s real body, 
Item for item, it will elude the hands of the corpse-cleaners, and pass to
 fitting spheres, 
Carrying what has accrued to ...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt
...olors and shapes, 
To try to understand the imperceptible 
Power pervading the world; 
To fly and find pure ethereal substances 
That are not of matter 
But of that invisible soul pervading reality. 
To hear another soul and to whisper to another soul; 
To be a lantern in the darkness 
Or an umbrella in a stormy day; 
To feel much more than know. 
To be the eyes of an eagle, slope of a mountain; 
To be a wave understanding the influence of the moon; 
To be...Read more of this...
by Stojanovic, Dejan
...ion, child; this chalice,
Less than a lily's, thou shalt daily draw
From my great arteries; nor less, nor more.
All substances the cunning chemist Time
Melts down into that liquor of my life,
Friends, foes, joys, fortunes, beauty, and disgust,
And whether I am angry or content,
Indebted or insulted, loved or hurt,
All he distils into sidereal wine,
And brims my little cup; heedless, alas!
Of all he sheds how little it will hold,
How much runs over on the desert sands....Read more of this...
by Emerson, Ralph Waldo
...ad of vanished shadows—Are they so?
Is not the past all shadow?—What are they?
Creations of the mind?—The mind can make
Substances, and people planets of its own
With beings brighter than have been, and give
A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh.
I would recall a vision which I dreamed
Perchance in sleep—for in itself a thought,
A slumbering thought, is capable of years,
And curdles a long life into one hour.

II

I saw two beings in the hues of youth
Standing...Read more of this...
by Byron, George (Lord)
...id unbind
The inmost lore of love--let the profane
Tremble to ask what secrets they contain.

And wondrous works of substances unknown,
To which the enchantment of her Father's power
Had changed those ragged blocks of savage stone,
Were heaped in the recesses of her bower;
Carved lamps and chalices, and phials which shone
In their own golden beams--each like a flower
Out of whose depth a firefly shakes his light
Under a cypress in a starless night.

At first she lived...Read more of this...
by Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...ertainties --

A firm appearance still inflates
The card -- the chance -- the friend --
The spectre of solidities
Whose substances are sand --...Read more of this...
by Dickinson, Emily

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Book: Reflection on the Important Things