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Famous Stance Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Heaney, Seamus
...ocess in the colony,
The battering ram, the boom burst from within.
The act sprouted an obsinate fifth column
Whose stance is growing unilateral.
His heart beneath your heart is a wardrum
Mustering force. His parasitical
And ignmorant little fists already
Beat at your borders and I know they're cocked
At me across the water. No treaty
I foresee will salve completely your tracked
And stretchmarked body, the big pain
That leaves you raw, like opened ground, agai...Read more of this...



by Ferlinghetti, Lawrence
...thing
for what it may not be
For he's the super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
with gravity
to start her death-defying leap
And he
a little charleychaplin man
who may or may not catch
her fair eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence...Read more of this...

by Berryman, John
...for hurling me downtown.

We dream of honour, and we get along.
Fate winged me, in the person of a cab
and your stance on the sand.
Think it across, in freezing wind: withstand
my blistered wish: flop, there, to his blind song
who pick up the tab....Read more of this...

by Gregory, Rg
...d if you see two ibises (say) standing together
by a river waiting for their friend the moon to appear
they do have the stance of a couple of old professors
who have said all there is to say about the fraught
histories of every species that has got itself a life

not that they disguise their own frailties - any joker
could knock their legs from under them - they have
such a tenuous touch on earth you'd have to guess
their brains were in their beaks which maybe sums up
the bas...Read more of this...

by Mueller, Lisel
...n Boy

Whitewashed, the eyes refuse you. 

And so the mouth must be serene,
the muscles play, the body
take an easy stance 

to divert you from the two
boarded-up chambers
where someone has died. 

V. Washing Day

Each year her laundry line gets lighter.
One by one they disappear,
ten little Indians. They take their socks,
their jeans, their stiff plaid shirts. 

Above the Ford on its concrete blocks,
striped and zippered,
her cotton dress flutters on ...Read more of this...



by Service, Robert William
...While I make rhymes my brother John
Makes shiny shoes which dames try on,
And finding to their fit and stance
They buy and wear with elegance;
But mine is quite another tale,--
 For song there is no sale.

My brother Tom a tailor shop
Is owner of, and ladies stop
To try the models he has planned,
And richly pay, I understand:
Yet not even a dingy dime
Can I make with my rhyme.

My brother Jim sells stuff to eat
Like trotters, tripe and sausage meat.Read more of this...

by Levine, Philip
...apes 
his heritage, then what have 

I left but false remembrance 
and the name? Against that day 
there is no armor or stance, 
only the frail dignity 
of surrender, which is all 
that can separate me now 
or then from the dumb beast's fall, 
unseen in the frozen snow....Read more of this...

by Edson, Russell
...m, who 
having required much in his neglect of proper choice, turns 
now, on good advice, to a more advantageous social stance, 
said the father. 

 But then his son became his father.
 Behold, the son is become as one of us, said the father.
 His son said, behold, the son is become as one of us.
 Will you stop repeating me, screamed the father.
 Will you stop repeating me, screamed his son.
 Oh well, I suppose imitation is the sincerest form of 
flatt...Read more of this...

by Levine, Philip
...d shuffling when I rose to eloquence, 
Determined not to die and not to show 
The fear that held them in their careless stance, 
And yet they died, how many wars ago? 

Or came back cream puffs, 45, and fat. 
I know that I am touched for my eyes brim 
With tears I had forgotten. Death is not 
For these car salesmen whose only dream 

Is of a small percentage of the take. 
Oh my eternal smilers, weep for death 
Whose harvest withers with your aged aches 
And cannot...Read more of this...

by Edson, Russell
...The floor is something we must fight against. 
Whilst seemingly mere platform for the human 
stance, it is that place that men fall to.
 I am not dizzy. I stand as a tower, a lighthouse; 
the pale ray of my sentiency flowing from my face.

 But should I go dizzy I crash down into the floor; 
my face into the floor, my attention bleeding into 
the cracks of the floor.

 Dear horizontal place, I do not wish to be a rug. 
Do not pul...Read more of this...

by Brooks, Gwendolyn
...droughts and manias of the day
and a felicity entreat.
Love.
Complete
your pledges, reinforce your aides, renew
stance, testament....Read more of this...

by Scott, Sir Walter
...s head,
     The deep-mouthed bloodhound's heavy bay
     Resounded up the rocky way,
     And faint, from farther distance borne,
     Were heard the clanging hoof and horn.
     II.

     As Chief, who hears his warder call,
     'To arms! the foemen storm the wall,'
     The antlered monarch of the waste
     Sprung from his heathery couch in haste.
     But ere his fleet career he took,
     The dew-drops from his flanks he shook;
     Like crested leader pro...Read more of this...

by Tebb, Barry
...adolescence but in

The quieter intimacies of shared grief.



The hills have not moved nor the clouds altered the stance of their lazy azure

Nor has the watery Pennine sun gone in before the swallows gather.



Perhaps I have lost that jouissance-and who would not given the tornadoes,

Undivined and undeserved that seized our lives in their burning fury,

Leaving us awake in a world of dark horizons and troubled days,

Our memory a cave of broken shards.



One...Read more of this...

by Emanuel, James A
...Crammed in, bursting out,
Flesh will sing
And hide its doubt
In nervous hips, hopping glance,
Usurping rouge,
Provoking stance.

Put off, or put on,
Youth hurts. And then
It's gone....Read more of this...

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Book: Shattered Sighs