TENSE POEMS

This page is specially prepared for tense poems. You can reach newest and popular tense poems from this page. You can vote and comment on the tense poems you read.

In Me, Past, Present, Future Meet

In me, past, present, future meet
To hold long chiding conference.
My lusts usurp the present tense
And strangle Reason in his seat.
.....
Siegfried Sassoon

Siegfried Sassoon
Sea Surface Full Of Clouds

                        I

In that November off Tehuantepec,
The slopping of the sea grew still one night
.....

Wallace Stevens
Little Ballads Of Timely Warning; Ii:

Little Ballads Of Timely Warning; II: On Malicious Cruelty To Harmless Creatures
The cruelty of P. L. Brownâ??
(He had ten toes as good as mine)
Was known to every one in town,
.....

Ellis Parker Butler
My Friends

The man above was a murderer, the man below was a thief;
And I lay there in the bunk between, ailing beyond belief;
A weary armful of skin and bone, wasted with pain and grief.

.....
Robert Service

Robert Service
Zero

The gate, on ice-hoarse hinges, stiff with frost,
Croaks open; and harsh wagon-wheels are heard
Creaking through cold; the horses' breath is furred
Around their nostrils; and with snow deep mossed
.....
Madison Julius Cawein

Madison Julius Cawein
Let Zeus

I

I say, I am quite done,
quite done with this;
.....

H. D.
The Ballad Of Ahmed Shah

This is the ballad of Ahmed Shah
Dealer in tats in the Sudder Bazar,
By the gate that leads to the Gold Minar
How he was done by a youth from Morar.
.....
Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling
Nearer

Nearer and ever nearer...
My body, tired but tense,
Hovers 'twixt vague pleasure
And tremulous confidence.
.....

Robert Nichols
Fall

Fall, falling, fallen. That's the way the season
Changes its tense in the long-haired maples
That dot the road; the veiny hand-shaped leaves
Redden on their branches (in a fiery competition
.....

Edward Hirsch
Elegy I

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
hierarchies? and even if one of them suddenly
pressed me against his heart, I would perish
in the embrace of his stronger existence.
.....

Rainer Maria Rilke
The Spirit Of Great Joan

Back of each soldier who fights for France,
Aye, back of each woman and man
Who toils and prays through these long tense days.
Is the spirit of Great Joan.
.....
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Tidings

THE darkness gripped us, hot, intense;
The sea snored like some sleeping brute;
We stood alert, with every sense
Like some leashed hound, nerve-thrilled, acute.
.....

Roderic Quinn
Hyperion: Book I

Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star,
Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone,
.....
John Keats

John Keats
The Ballad Of The Ice-worm Cocktail

To Dawson Town came Percy Brown from London on the Thames.
A pane of glass was in his eye, and stockings on his stems.
Upon the shoulder of his coat a leather pad he wore,
To rest his deadly rifle when it wasn't seeking gore;
.....
Robert Service

Robert Service
From The North

The northern woods are delicately sweet,
The lake is folded softly by the shore,
But I am restless for the subway's roar,
The thunder and the hurrying of feet.
.....

Sara Teasdale
The New Hawaiian Girl

EXPLANATORY

Kamehameha First, of the Hawaiian Islands, conquered his
foes in a great battle, driving them over the high mountain
.....
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Ella Wheeler Wilcox
The Struggle

I have been down in a dark valley;
I have been groping through a deep gorge;
Far above, the lips of it were rimmed with moon-
light,
.....
Don Marquis

Don Marquis
Childhood Ideogram

I lay my head sideways on the desk,
My fingers interlocked under my cheekbones,
My eyes closed. It was a three-room schoolhouse,
White, with a small bell tower, an oak tree.
.....

Larry Levis
There Is A

there is a
moon sole
in the blue
night
.....
E. E. Cummings

E. E. Cummings
Guy Of The Temple

Down the dim West slow fails the stricken sun,
And from his hot face fades the crimson flush
Veiled in death's herald-shadows sick and gray.
Silent and dark the sombre valley lies
.....
John Hay

John Hay
The Lodger

I cannot
quite recall
When first he came,
So reticent and tall,
.....
Bliss Carman

Bliss Carman
At The Bomb Testing Site

At noon in the desert a panting lizard
waited for history, its elbows tense,
watching the curve of a particular road
as if something might happen.
.....

William Stafford
The Ballad Of The Leather Medal

Only a Leather Medal, hanging there on the wall,
Dingy and frayed and faded, dusty and worn and old;
Yet of my humble treasures I value it most of all,
And I wouldn't part with that medal if you gave me its weight in gold.
.....
Robert Service

Robert Service
Grammarotics

The angle of delight is best
achieved while rubbing

the pluperfect button
.....

Nick Carbo
The Mother Of A Poet

She is too kind, I think, for mortal things,
Too gentle for the gusty ways of earth;
God gave to her a shy and silver mirth,
And made her soul as clear
.....

Sara Teasdale
Corn

To-day the woods are trembling through and through
With shimmering forms, that flash before my view,
Then melt in green as dawn-stars melt in blue.
The leaves that wave against my cheek caress
.....
Sidney Lanier

Sidney Lanier
Has She Forgotten?

I.

Has she forgotten? On this very May
We were to meet here, with the birds and bees,
.....

James Whitcomb Riley
T.a.h.

YES, he was that, or that, as you prefer,â??
Did so and so, though, faith, it was nâ??t all;
Lived like a fool, or a philosopher,
And had whateverâ??s needful to a fall.
.....

Ambrose Bierce
The Woful Tale Of Mr. Peters

I should like, good friends, to mention the disaster which befell
Mr. William Perry Peters, of the town of Muscatel,
Whose fate is full of meaning, if correctly understood
Admonition to the haughty, consolation to the good.
.....

Ambrose Bierce
Seventeen

All the loud winds were in the garden wood,
All shadows joyfuller than lissom hounds
Doubled in chasing, all exultant clouds
That ever flung fierce mist and eddying fire
.....

Robert Nichols
A Sign-seeker

I MARK the months in liveries dank and dry,
The day-tides many-shaped and hued;
I see the nightfall shades subtrude,
And hear the monotonous hours clang negligently by.
.....
Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy
Ode On A Distant Prospect Of Clapham Academy

I

Ah me! those old familiar bounds!
That classic house, those classic grounds
.....
Thomas Hood

Thomas Hood
Nero

This Rome, that was the toil of many men,
The consummation of laborious years-
Fulfilment's crown to visions of the dead
And image of the wide desire of kings-
.....

Clark Ashton Smith
Renyard The Fox - Part 2

On old Cold Crendon's windy tops
Grows wintrily Blown Hilcote Copse,
Wind-bitten beech with badger barrows,
Where brocks eat wasp-grubs with their marrows,
.....
John Masefield

John Masefield
Here I Sit With My Paper...

Here I sit with my paper, my pen my ink,
First of this thing, and that thing,
and t'other thing think ;
I Then my thoughts come so pell and
.....
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley
The Helot

I.

Low the sun beat on the land,
Red on vine and plain and wood;
.....
Isabella Valancy Crawford

Isabella Valancy Crawford
Monadnoc

Thousand minstrels woke within me,
“Our music's in the hills; “-
Gayest pictures rose to win me,
Leopard-colored rills.
.....
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Progress

There is no progress in the world of bees,
However wise and wonderful they are.
Their wisdom makes not increase. Lies the bar,
To wider goals, in that tense strife to please
.....
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Ella Wheeler Wilcox
The Great Figure

Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
.....

William Carlos Williams
Into The Smiting

into the smiting
sky tense
with
blend
.....
E. E. Cummings

E. E. Cummings
The Watch At Midnight

Dead stars, beneath the midnight's granite cope
and round your dungeon-gulf that blindly grope
and fall not, since no lower than any place
needs when the wing is dash'd and foil'd the face:
.....

Christopher John Brennan
Under Ben Bulben

I

Swear by what the sages spoke
Round the Mareotic Lake
.....
William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats
It Is Later Than You Think

Lone amid the cafe's cheer,
Sad of heart am I to-night;
Dolefully I drink my beer,
But no single line I write.
.....
Robert Service

Robert Service
An Athenian Reverie

How the returning days, one after one,
Came ever in their rhythmic round, unchanged,
Yet from each looped robe for every man
Some new thing falls. Happy is he
.....

Archibald Lampman
Esther, A Sonnet Sequence: Xxxviii

``I do not doubt it. You have a look of truth
Which is beyond suspicion. But the world
Is as full of knaves as fools. You have your youth
And I my wisdom. Then your head is curled
.....
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
Death In The Arctic

I

I took the clock down from the shelf;
“At eight,” said I, “I shoot myself.”
.....
Robert Service

Robert Service
No Tears

Under the blue skies of her native land
She languished and began to fade. . .
Until surely there flew without a sound
Above me, her young shade.
.....

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin
Under The Blue Skies...

Under the blue skies of her native land
She languished and began to fade...
Until surely there flew without a sound
Above me, her young shade;
.....

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin
My Book

Before I drink myself to death,
God, let me finish up my Book!
At night, I fear, I fight for breath,
And wake up whiter than a spook;
.....
Robert Service

Robert Service
Room 6: The Little Workgirl

Three gentlemen live close beside me-
A painter of pictures bizarre,
A poet whose virtues might guide me,
A singer who plays the guitar;
.....
Robert Service

Robert Service