Short Poems about Fate

 

FATE slew him, but he did not drop;
She felled—he did not fall—
Impaled him on her fiercest stakes—
He neutralized them all.

She stung him, sapped his firm advance,
But, when her worst was done,
And he, unmoved, regarded her,
Acknowledged him a man.

– Emily Dickinson

 

Fate

Fate followed her foreseen immutable road.
Man’s hopes and longings build the journeying wheels
That bear the body of his destiny
And lead his blind will towards an unknown goal.
His fate within him shapes his acts and rules;
Its face and form already are born in him,
Its parentage is in his secret soul:
Here Matter seems to mould the body’s life
And the soul follows where its nature drives.
Nature and Fate compel his free-will’s choice.
But greater spirits this balance can reverse
And make the soul the artist of its fate.
This is the mystic truth our ignorance hides:

– Sri Aurobindo, Savitri (Part Two, Book Seven)

 

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,
Which we ascribe to heaven: the fated sky
Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull
Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.
– Shakespeare (All’s Well that Ends Well, 1.1.209)

 

Giddy Fortune’s furious fickle wheel,

Giddy Fortune’s furious fickle wheel,
That goddess blind,
That stands upon the rolling restless stone.
– Shakespeare (Henry V, 3.3.27), Pistol to Fluellen

Be fickle, fortune

O fortune, fortune! all men call thee fickle:
If thou art fickle, what dost thou with him.
That is renown’d for faith? Be fickle, fortune;
For then, I hope, thou wilt not keep him long,
But send him back.

– Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet, 3.5.59-63)

 

Fate

Deep in the man sits fast his fate
To mould his fortunes, mean or great:
Unknown to Cromwell as to me
Was Cromwell’s measure or degree;
Unknown to him as to his horse,
If he than his groom be better or worse.
He works, plots, fights, in rude affairs,
With squires, lords, kings, his craft compares,
Till late he learned, through doubt and fear,
Broad England harbored not his peer:
Obeying time, the last to own
The Genius from its cloudy throne.
For the prevision is allied
Unto the thing so signified;
Or say, the foresight that awaits
Is the same Genius that creates.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

The Shears of Fate

Khayyam, who stitched the tents of science,
Has fallen in grief’s furnace and been suddenly burned,
The shears of Fate have cut the tent ropes of his life,
And the broker of Hope has sold him for nothing!

– Omar Khayyam  Extract from The Rubaiyat

 

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