Famous Any Point Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Hermit Thrush

by Amy Clampitt
 Nothing's certain. Crossing, on this longest day, 
the low-tide-uncovered isthmus, scrambling up 
the scree-slope of what at high tide
will be again an island,

to where, a decade since well-being staked 
the slender, unpremeditated claim that brings us 
back, year after year, lugging the 
makings of another picnic—

the cucumber sandwiches, the sea-air-sanctified
fig newtons—there's no knowing what the slamming 
seas, the gales...Read more of this...

We never joy enjoy to that full point

by Fernando Pessoa
We never joy enjoy to that full point

Regret doth wish joy had enjoyèd been,

Nor have the strength regret to disappoint

Recalling not past joy's thought, but its mien.

Yet joy was joy when it enjoyèd was

And after-enjoyed when as joy recalled,

It must have been joy ere its joy did pass

And, recalled, joy still, since its being-past galled.

Alas! All this is useless, for...Read more of this...

Fridolin (The Walk To The Iron Factory)

by Friedrich von Schiller
 A gentle was Fridolin,
And he his mistress dear,
Savern's fair Countess, honored in
All truth and godly fear.
She was so meek, and, ah! so good!
Yet each wish of her wayward mood,
He would have studied to fulfil,
To please his God, with earnest will.

From the first hour when daylight shone
Till rang the vesper-chime,
He lived but for her will alone,
And deemed e'en that scarce...Read more of this...

Rosalinds Scroll

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I LEFT thee last a child at heart  
A woman scarce in years: 
I come to thee a solemn corpse 
Which neither feels nor fears. 
I have no breath to use in sighs; 5 
They laid the dead-weights on mine eyes 
To seal them safe from tears. 

Look on me with thine own calm look: 
I meet it calm...Read more of this...

Loon Point

by Amy Lowell
 Softly the water ripples
Against the canoe's curving side,
Softly the birch trees rustle
Flinging over us branches wide.
Softly the moon glints and glistens
As the water takes and leaves,
Like golden ears of corn
Which fall from loose-bound sheaves,
Or like the snow-white petals
Which drop from an overblown rose,
When Summer ripens to Autumn
And the freighted year must close.
From the shore come the scents of a...Read more of this...

Sonnet XLVII

by Francesco Petrarch
SONNET XLVII. Benedetto sia 'l giorno e 'l mese e l' anno. HE BLESSES ALL THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF HIS PASSION.  Blest be the day, and blest the month, the year,The spring, the hour, the very moment blest,The lovely scene, the spot, where first oppress'dI sunk, of two bright eyes the prisoner:And...Read more of this...

To Belloc

by G K Chesterton
 For every tiny town or place
God made the stars especially;
Babies look up with owlish face
And see them tangled in a tree;
You saw a moon from Sussex Downs,
A Sussex moon, untravelled still,
I saw a moon that was the town's,
The largest lamp on Campden Hill.

Yea; Heaven is everywhere at home
The big blue cap that always fits,
And so it is (be calm;...Read more of this...

Lines

by Martha Collins
 Draw a line. Write a line. There.
Stay in line, hold the line, a glance
between the lines is fine but don't
turn corners, cross, cut in, go over
or out, between two points of no
return's a line of flight, between
two points of view's a line of vision.
But a line of thought is rarely
straight, an open line's no party
line, however fine your point.
A...Read more of this...

Carmel Point

by Robinson Jeffers
 The extraordinary patience of things! 
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of surburban houses-
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads-
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all...Read more of this...

The universe is but a point in our poor round of life;

by Omar Khayyam
The universe is but a point in our poor round of life;
the Djeihoun [Oxus] but a feeble trace of tears and
blood; Hell but a spark of useless worry which we give
ourselves, and Paradise an instant of repose, which here
below we rarely catch....Read more of this...

Clear with Light Variable Winds

by Amy Lowell
 The fountain bent and straightened itself
In the night wind,
Blowing like a flower.
It gleamed and glittered,
A tall white lily,
Under the eye of the golden moon.
From a stone seat,
Beneath a blossoming lime,
The man watched it.
And the spray pattered
On the dim grass at his feet.
The fountain tossed its water,
Up and up, like silver marbles.
Is that an arm he sees?
And for one moment
Does...Read more of this...

The Breaking Point

by Stephen Vincent Benet
 It was not when temptation came, 
Swiftly and blastingly as flame, 
And seared me white with burning scars; 
When I stood up for age-long wars 
And held the very Fiend at grips; 
When all my mutinous body rose 
To range itself beside my foes, 
And, like a greyhound in the slips, 
The Beast that dwells within me roared, 
Lunging...Read more of this...

Making Good

by Robert William Service
 No man can be a failure if he thinks he's a success;
he may not own his roof-tree overhead,
He may be on his uppers and have hocked his evening dress -
(Financially speaking - in the red)
He may have chronic shortage to repay the old home mortgage,
And almost be a bankrupt in his biz.,
But though he skips his dinner,
And each day...Read more of this...

The Vantage Point

by Robert Frost
 If tired of trees I seek again mankind,
Well I know where to hie me--in the dawn,
To a slope where the cattle keep the lawn.
There amid lolling juniper reclined,
Myself unseen, I see in white defined
Far off the homes of men, and farther still,
The graves of men on an opposing hill,
Living or dead, whichever are to mind.

And if by noon I...Read more of this...

The Glove - A Tale

by Friedrich von Schiller
 Before his lion-court,
Impatient for the sport,
King Francis sat one day;
The peers of his realm sat around,
And in balcony high from the ground
Sat the ladies in beauteous array.

And when with his finger he beckoned,
The gate opened wide in a second,--
And in, with deliberate tread,
Enters a lion dread,
And looks around
Yet utters no sound;
Then long he yawns
And shakes his mane,
And, stretching each...Read more of this...

Praying Drunk

by Andrew Hudgins
 Our Father who art in heaven, I am drunk.
Again. Red wine. For which I offer thanks.
I ought to start with praise, but praise
comes hard to me. I stutter. Did I tell you
about the woman, whom I taught, in bed,
this prayer? It starts with praise; the simple form
keeps things in order. I hear from her sometimes.
Do you? And after love,...Read more of this...

They talk as slow as Legends grow

by Emily Dickinson
 They talk as slow as Legends grow
No mushroom is their mind
But foliage of sterility
Too stolid for the wind --

They laugh as wise as Plots of Wit
Predestined to unfold
The point with bland prevision
Portentously untold....Read more of this...

Dæmonic Love

by Ralph Waldo Emerson
 Man was made of social earth,
Child and brother from his birth;
Tethered by a liquid cord
Of blood through veins of kindred poured,
Next his heart the fireside band
Of mother, father, sister, stand;
Names from awful childhood heard,
Throbs of a wild religion stirred,
Their good was heaven, their harm was vice,
Till Beauty came to snap all ties,
The maid, abolishing the past,
With lotus-wine obliterates
Dear memory's...Read more of this...

Long Point Light

by Mark Doty
 Long Pont's apparitional
this warm spring morning,
the strand a blur of sandy light,


and the square white
of the lighthouse-separated from us
by the bay's ultramarine


as if it were nowhere
we could ever go-gleams
like a tower's ghost, hazing


into the rinsed blue of March,
our last outpost in the huge
indetermination of sea.


It seems cheerful enough,
in the strengthening sunlight,
fixed point accompanying our walk

along the shore. Sometimes I...Read more of this...

Epipsychidion (excerpt)

by Percy Bysshe Shelley
 Emily, 
A ship is floating in the harbour now,
A wind is hovering o'er the mountain's brow;
There is a path on the sea's azure floor,
No keel has ever plough'd that path before;
The halcyons brood around the foamless isles;
The treacherous Ocean has forsworn its wiles;
The merry mariners are bold and free:
Say, my heart's sister, wilt thou sail with me?
Our bark is...Read more of this...

To The South

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Heart of the Southland, heed me pleading now,
Who bearest, unashamed, upon my brow
The long kiss of the loving tropic sun,
And yet, whose veins with thy red current run.
Borne on the bitter winds from every hand,
Strange tales are flying over all the land,
And Condemnation, with his pinions foul,
Glooms in the place where broods the midnight owl.
What art thou, that the world...Read more of this...

Pc

by David Lehman
 for Aaron Fogel 

Politically-correct 
personal computers 
point and click. 

President Clinton
(codename Peacock) 
can't protect 
crack pushing 
Communist Party 
cops pursuing 
a care package 
of peasant consciousness
in a car park. 

Poverty's a crime,
and capital punishment
par for the course,
in this penal code. 

A plausible cliffhanger 
can't cure the paralyzed, 
prevent cancer, 
or prepare California 
for Perry Como, 
that peerless crooner. 

Pitcher...Read more of this...

A Poetry Reading At West Point

by William Matthews
 I read to the entire plebe class,
in two batches. Twice the hall filled
with bodies dressed alike, each toting
a copy of my book. What would my
shrink say, if I had one, about
such a dream, if it were a dream?

Question and answer time.
"Sir," a cadet yelled from the balcony,
and gave his name and rank, and then,
closing his parentheses, yelled
"Sir" again. "Why...Read more of this...

What the Captain Said at the Point-to-Point

by Siegfried Sassoon
 I’ve had a good bump round; my little horse 
Refused the brook first time, 
Then jumped it prime; 
And ran out at the double, 
But of course
There’s always trouble at a double: 
And then—I don’t know how 
It was—he turned it up 
At that big, hairy fence before the plough; 
And some young silly pup
(I don’t know which), 
Near...Read more of this...

The Theory

by Russell Edson
 The big one went to sleep as to die and dreamed he
became a tiny one. So tiny as to have lost all substance. To have
become as theoretical as a point. 

 Then someone said, get up, big one, you're not doing
yourself any good. You puddle and stagnate in your weight.
Best to be up and toward. It irrigates you. 

...Read more of this...

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