Poems

Find and share the perfect poems.

Unforgotten

1886 –

1950

Wakening in the night, the pain that slumber
Strikes with her mace of silence dead and dumb
Loomed over me and, formless, said, “I come!
Bringing illusions lost beyond all number.
Rigid you lie, yet for a little cumber
This flaming world, where some die proudly, some
Glitter like granite, or dream millenium.”
It left me toiled in mountainous clouds of umber.

I lay sustaining all the old emotion,
Numbed as beneath the blows of iron cars.
Then slowly, slowly some supreme devotion
Crept down, and drew me out of ageless wars,
Like a dear voice heard over darkened ocean
When all dim heaven is trembling into stars.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on November 1, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.

William Rose Benét was a poet, editor, critic, anthologist, translator, and children’s book author. He was born on February 2, 1886, in Brooklyn, New York. Benét wrote, edited, and collaborated on more than thirty books between 1915 and 1950. A cofounder of the Saturday Review of Literature,he was best known for his column “The Phoenix Nest,” published from 1924 to 1950. Benét was on the Academy of American Poets’ original Board of Chancellors, serving from 1946 to 1950. He died in New York City on May 4, 1950.

About William Rose Benét

About this Poem

“Unforgotten” appeared in William Rose Benét’s third book, Perpetual Light: A Memorial (Yale University Press, 1919), written after the death of his first wife, Teresa Frances Thompson. In his forward to the collection, Benét writes, “As I turn these poems over—if they are even to be called poems—I realize that they can never begin to express what [Teresa’s] personality was. The earliest ones were written by a boy who was in love, and the latest by a man who has suddenly stepped into the dark. Those between are fragments from the days when we were struggling along together at the everyday tasks and outside interests and dreams that possessed us.”

Sign up for Poem-a-Day

More by this poet

The City

^{To Robert H. Davis}

I went forth to sing the city, today’s city—
The blank stone sphinx, the monster search-light-eyed,
The roaring mill where gods grind without pity,
The falling torrent, the many-colored tide.

William Rose Benét

1920

Imagination

Rich raptures, you say, our dreams assume,

Slaking the heart’s immortal thirst?

Only the old we reillume;

But think—to have dreamed the flowers first!

Think,—to have dreamed the first blue sea;

Imaged every illustrious hue

Of the earliest sunset’s tapestry;

And the snow,—and the birds, when their songs were new!

Think,—from the blue of highest heaven

To have sown all the stars, to have whispered “Light!”—

Hung a moon in a prismy even,

Spun a world on its splendid flight!

William Rose Benét

1914

Mad Blake

Blake saw a treeful of angels at Peckham Rye,

And his hands could lay hold on the tiger’s terrible heart.

Blake knew how deep is Hell, and Heaven how high,

And could build the universe from one tiny part.

Blake heard the asides of God, as with furrowed brow

He sifts the star-streams between the Then and the Now,

In vast infant sagacity brooding, an infant’s grace

Shining serene on his simple, benignant face.

William Rose Benét

1927

Poems

Page submenu block

Unforgotten

More by this poet

Newsletter Sign Up