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Famous Alan Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Seeger, Alan
...You have the grit and the guts, I know; 
You are ready to answer blow for blow 
You are virile, combative, stubborn, hard, 
But your honor ends with your own back-yard; 
Each man intent on his private goal, 
You have no feeling for the whole; 
What singly none would tolerate 
You let unpunished hit the state, 
Unmindful that each man must share 
The stain ...Read More



by Flynn, Nick
...He reads my latest attempt at a poem
and is silent for a long time, until it feels
like that night we waited for Apollo,
my mother wandering in and out of her bedroom, asking,
Haven't they landed yet? At last
Dugan throws it on the table and says,
This reads like a cheap detective novel
and I've got nothing to say about it. It sits,
naked and white, wi...Read More

by Milne, Alan Alexander (A A)
...There are lions and roaring tigers,
and enormous camels and things,
There are biffalo-buffalo-bisons,
and a great big bear with wings.
There's a sort of a tiny potamus,
and a tiny nosserus too -
But I gave buns to the elephant
when I went down to the Zoo!

There are badgers and bidgers and bodgers,
and a Super-in-tendent's House,
There are masses...Read More

by Seeger, Alan
...Do you remember once, in Paris of glad faces, 
The night we wandered off under the third moon's rays 
And, leaving far behind bright streets and busy places, 
Stood where the Seine flowed down between its quiet quais? 


The city's voice was hushed; the placid, lustrous waters 
Mirrored the walls across where orange windows burned. 
Out of the starry s...Read More

by Dugan, Alan
...I know but will not tell
you, Aunt Irene, why there
are soap suds in the whiskey:
Uncle Robert had to have
A drink while shaving....Read More



by Seeger, Alan
...In that fair capital where Pleasure, crowned 
Amidst her myriad courtiers, riots and rules, 
I too have been a suitor. Radiant eyes 
Were my life's warmth and sunshine, outspread arms 
My gilded deep horizons. I rejoiced 
In yielding to all amorous influence 
And multiple impulsion of the flesh, 
To feel within my being surge and sway 
The force th...Read More

by Milne, Alan Alexander (A A)
...I often wish I were a King,
And then I could do anything.

If only I were King of Spain,
I'd take my hat off in the rain.

If only I were King of France,
I wouldn't brush my hair for aunts.

I think, if I were King of Greece,
I'd push things off the mantelpiece.

If I were King of Norroway,
I'd ask an elephant to stay.

If I were King of Baby...Read More

by Tebb, Barry
...
Four children, an alcoholic father and

An Irish immigrant mother. Failure’s metaphor.

I did not make it like Alan Bennett,

Who still sends funny postcards

About our Leeds childhood.

Of your’s, you could never speak

And found my nostalgia

Wholly inappropriate.



Forgetting your glasses for the eleven plus,

No money for the uniform for the pass at thirteen.

It wasn’t - as I imagined - shame that kept you from telling

But fear of the consequences ...Read More

by Seeger, Alan
...In Lyonesse was beauty enough, men say: 
Long Summer loaded the orchards to excess, 
And fertile lowlands lengthening far away, 
In Lyonesse. 


Came a term to that land's old favoredness: 
Past the sea-walls, crumbled in thundering spray, 
Rolled the green waves, ravening, merciless. 


Through bearded boughs immobile in cool decay, 
Where sea-blo...Read More

by Seeger, Alan
...A shell surprised our post one day 
And killed a comrade at my side. 
My heart was sick to see the way 
He suffered as he died. 

I dug about the place he fell, 
And found, no bigger than my thumb, 
A fragment of the splintered shell 
In warm aluminum. 

I melted it, and made a mould, 
And poured it in the opening, 
And worked it, when the cast...Read More

by Seeger, Alan
...First, London, for its myriads; for its height, 
Manhattan heaped in towering stalagmite; 
But Paris for the smoothness of the paths 
That lead the heart unto the heart's delight. . . . 


Fair loiterer on the threshold of those days 
When there's no lovelier prize the world displays 
Than, having beauty and your twenty years, 
You have the...Read More

by Seeger, Alan
...Why should you be astonished that my heart, 
Plunged for so long in darkness and in dearth, 
Should be revived by you, and stir and start 
As by warm April now, reviving Earth? 
I am the field of undulating grass 
And you the gentle perfumed breath of Spring, 
And all my lyric being, when you pass, 
Is bowed and filled with sudden murmuring. 
I asked y...Read More

by Seeger, Alan
...I have sought Happiness, but it has been 
A lovely rainbow, baffling all pursuit, 
And tasted Pleasure, but it was a fruit 
More fair of outward hue than sweet within. 
Renouncing both, a flake in the ferment 
Of battling hosts that conquer or recoil, 
There only, chastened by fatigue and toil, 
I knew what came the nearest to content. 
For there a...Read More

by Seeger, Alan
...Her courts are by the flux of flaming ways, 
Between the rivers and the illumined sky 
Whose fervid depths reverberate from on high 
Fierce lustres mingled in a fiery haze. 
They mark it inland; blithe and fair of face 
Her suitors follow, guessing by the glare 
Beyond the hilltops in the evening air 
How bright the cressets at her portals blaze. 
...Read More

by Seeger, Alan
...I know a village in a far-off land
Where from a sunny, mountain-girdled plain
With tinted walls a space on either hand
And fed by many an olive-darkened lane
The high-road mounts, and thence a silver band
Through vineyard slopes above and rolling grain,
Winds off to that dim corner of the skies
Where behind sunset hills a stately city lies.

Here, amon...Read More

by Seeger, Alan
...The need to love that all the stars obey
Entered my heart and banished all beside.
Bare were the gardens where I used to stray;
Faded the flowers that one time satisfied.

Before the beauty of the west on fire,
The moonlit hills from cloister-casements viewed
Cloud-like arose the image of desire,
And cast out peace and maddened solitude.

I sou...Read More

by Seeger, Alan
...He faints with hope and fear. It is the hour. 
Distant, across the thundering organ-swell, 
In sweet discord from the cathedral-tower, 
Fall the faint chimes and the thrice-sequent bell. 
Over the crowd his eye uneasy roves. 
He sees a plume, a fur; his heart dilates -- 
Soars . . . and then sinks again. It is not hers he lo...Read More

by Lanier, Sidney
...dream slowlier came to a close,
Till they woke and were still, breath-bound with waiting and wonder and fear.

Then Alan the huntsman sprang over the hillock, the hounds shot by,
The does and the ten-tined buck made a marvellous bound,
The hounds swept after with never a sound,
But Alan loud winded his horn in sign that the quarry was nigh.

For at dawn of that day proud Maclean of Lochbuy to the hunt had waxed wild,
And he cursed at old Alan till Alan fared off with ...Read More

by Seeger, Alan
...Their strength had fed on this when Death's white arms 
Came sleeved in vapors and miasmal dew, 
Curling across the jungle's ferny floor, 
Becking each fevered brain. On bleak divides, 
Where Sleep grew niggardly for nipping cold 
That twinged blue lips into a mouthed curse, 
Not back to Seville and its sunny plains 
Winged their brief-biding dreams, b...Read More

by Seeger, Alan
...To see the clouds his spirit yearned toward so 
Over new mountains piled and unploughed waves, 
Back of old-storied spires and architraves 
To watch Arcturus rise or Fomalhaut,

And roused by street-cries in strange tongues when day 
Flooded with gold some domed metropolis, 
Between new towers to waken and new bliss 
Spread on his pillow in a wondrous way:...Read More

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