Famous Any Theme Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Any Theme 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 theme poems. These examples illustrate what a famous any theme poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Isaac Watts
The inward witness to Christianity.
1 Jn. 5:10.
Questions and doubts be heard no more,
Let Christ and joy be all our theme;
His Spirit seals his gospel sure,
To every soul that trusts in him.
Jesus, thy witness speaks within;
The mercy which thy words reveal
Refines the heart from sense and sin,
And stamps its own celestial seal.
'Tis God's inimitable hand
That molds and forms the heart...Read more of this...
by
Francesco Petrarch
CANZONE II. Amor, se vuoi ch' i' torni al giogo antico. UNLESS LOVE CAN RESTORE HER TO LIFE, HE WILL NEVER AGAIN BE HIS SLAVE. If thou wouldst have me, Love, thy slave again,One other proof, miraculous and new,Must yet be wrought by you,Ere, conquer'd, I resume my ancient chain—Lift my...Read more of this...
by
Robert Burns
WHY, why tell thy lover
Bliss he never must enjoy”?
Why, why undeceive him,
And give all his hopes the lie?
O why, while fancy, raptur’d slumbers,
“Chloris, Chloris” all the theme,
Why, why would’st thou, cruel—
Wake thy lover from his dream?...Read more of this...
by
Lucy Maud Montgomery
There is never a wind to sing o'er the sea
On its dimpled bosom that holdeth in fee
Wealth of silver and magicry;
And the harbor is like to an ebon cup
With mother-o'-pearl to the lips lined up,
And brimmed with the wine of entranced delight,
Purple and rare, from the flagon of night.
Lo, in the east...Read more of this...
by
Denise Levertov
A certain day became a presence to me;
there it was, confronting me--a sky, air, light:
a being. And before it started to descend
from the height of noon, it leaned over
and struck my shoulder as if with
the flat of a sword, granting me
honor and a task. The day's blow
rang out, metallic--or it was I, a bell awakened,
and what I heard was...Read more of this...
by
Anne Kingsmill Finch
Give me, O indulgent Fate!
Give me yet before I die
A sweet, but absolute retreat,
'Mongst paths so lost and trees so high
That the world may ne'er invade
Through such windings and such shade
My unshaken liberty.
No intruders thither come
Who visit but to be from home!
None who their vain moments pass
Only studious of their glass;
News, that charm to list'ning ears,
That false alarm...Read more of this...
by
Amy Lowell
Thou dear and well-loved haunt of happy hours,
How often in some distant gallery,
Gained by a little painful spiral stair,
Far from the halls and corridors where throng
The crowd of casual readers, have I passed
Long, peaceful hours seated on the floor
Of some retired nook, all lined with books,
Where reverie and quiet reign supreme!
Above, below, on every side, high shelved
From careless grasp...Read more of this...
by
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
We walk on starry fields of white
And do not see the daisies;
For blessings common in our sight
We rarely offer praises.
We sigh for some supreme delight
To crown our lives with splendor,
And quite ignore our daily store
Of pleasures sweet and tender.
Our cares are bold and push their way
Upon our thought and feeling.
They hang about us all the day,
Our time from pleasure...Read more of this...
by
Langston Hughes
The instructor said,
Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you--
Then, it will be true.
I wonder if it's that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham, then here
to this college on the hill above Harlem.
I am the only colored student in my class.
The steps from...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Carew
Can we not force from widow'd poetry,
Now thou art dead (great Donne) one elegy
To crown thy hearse? Why yet dare we not trust,
Though with unkneaded dough-bak'd prose, thy dust,
Such as th' unscissor'd churchman from the flower
Of fading rhetoric, short-liv'd as his hour,
Dry as the sand that measures it, should lay
Upon thy ashes,...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
If anybody's friend be dead
It's sharpest of the theme
The thinking how they walked alive --
At such and such a time --
Their costume, of a Sunday,
Some manner of the Hair --
A prank nobody knew but them
Lost, in the Sepulchre --
How warm, they were, on such a day,
You almost feel the date --
So short way off it seems --
And now --...Read more of this...
by
Francesco Petrarch
SONNET CLIV. Giunto Alessandro alla famosa tomba. HE FEARS THAT HE IS INCAPABLE OF WORTHILY CELEBRATING HER. The son of Philip, when he saw the tombOf fierce Achilles, with a sigh, thus said:"O happy, whose achievements erst found roomFrom that illustrious trumpet to be spreadO'er earth for ever!"—But, beyond the gloomRead more of this...
by
Francesco Petrarch
SONNET XCI. Dell' empia Babilonia, ond' è fuggita. LEAVING ROME, HE DESIRES ONLY PEACE WITH LAURA AND PROSPERITY TO COLONNA. Yes, out of impious Babylon I'm flown,Whence flown all shame, whence banish'd is all good,That nurse of error, and of guilt th' abode,To lengthen out a life which else were gone:Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
I spot the hills
With yellow balls in autumn.
I light the prairie cornfields
Orange and tawny gold clusters
And I am called pumpkins.
On the last of October
When dusk is fallen
Children join hands
And circle round me
Singing ghost songs
And love to the harvest moon;
I am a jack-o'-lantern
With terrible teeth
And the children know
I am fooling....Read more of this...
by
Alan Seeger
Thy petals yet are closely curled,
Rose of the world,
Around their scented, golden core;
Nor yet has Summer purpled o'er
Thy tender clusters that begin
To swell within
The dewy vine-leaves' early screen
Of sheltering green.
O hearts that are Love's helpless prey,
While yet you may,
Fly, ere the shaft is on the string!
The fire that...Read more of this...
by
Robert Francis
Amherst never had a witch
O Coos or of Grafton
But once upon a time
There were three old women.
One wore a small beard
And carried a big umbrella.
One stood in the middle
Of the road hailing cars.
One drove an old cart
All over the town collecting junk.
They were not weird sisters,
No relation to one another.
A duly accredited witch I
Never heard Amherst ever had
But as...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Bowers
Long days, short nights, this Southern summer
Fixes the mind within its timeless place.
Athwart pale limbs the brazen hummer
Hangs and is gone, warm sound its quickened space.
Butterfly weed and cardinal flower,
Orange and red, with indigo the band,
Perfect themselves unto the hour.
And blood suffused within the sunlit hand,
Within the...Read more of this...
by
George William Russell
I FAIN would leave the tender songs
I sang to you of old,
Thinking the oft-sung beauty wrongs
The magic never told.
And touch no more the thoughts, the moods,
That win the easy praise;
But venture in the untrodden woods
To carve the future ways.
Though far or strange or cold appear
The shadowy things I tell,
Within the heart the hidden seer
...Read more of this...
by
Kenneth Koch
1
I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.
2
We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.
3
I gave away the...Read more of this...
by
Denise Levertov
"Adam, where are you?"
God's hands
palpate darkness, the void
that is Adam's inattention,
his confused attention to everything,
impassioned by multiplicity, his despair.
Multiplicity, his despair;
God's hands
enacting blindness. Like a child
at a barbaric fairgrounds --
noise, lights, the violent odors --
Adam fragments himself. The whirling rides!
Fragmented Adam stares.
God's hands
unseen, the whirling rides
dazzle, the lights blind him. Fragmented,
he is not present to himself....Read more of this...
by
George Meredith
'In Paris, at the Louvre, there have I seen
The sumptuously-feathered angel pierce
Prone Lucifer, descending. Looked he fierce,
Showing the fight a fair one? Too serene!
The young Pharsalians did not disarray
Less willingly their locks of floating silk:
That suckling mouth of his, upon the milk
Of heaven might still be feasting through the fray.
Oh, Raphael!...Read more of this...
by
James Henry Leigh Hunt
I have been reading Pomfret's "Choice" this spring,
A pretty kind of--sort of--kind of thing,
Not much a verse, and poem none at all,
Yet, as they say, extremely natural.
And yet I know not. There's an art in pies,
In raising crusts as well as galleries;
And he's the poet, more or less, who knows
The charm that...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Moore
The Ghost of Miltiades came at night,
And he stood by the bed of the Benthamite,
And he said, in a voice, that thrill'd the frame,
"If ever the sound of Marathon's name
Hath fir'd they blood or flush'd thy brow,
Lover of Liberty, rise thee now!"
The Benthamite, yawning, left his bed --
Away to the Stock Exchange he sped,
And he found the Scrip of...Read more of this...
by
Robert Herrick
Thrice, and above, blest, my soul's half, art thou,
In thy both last and better vow;
Could'st leave the city, for exchange, to see
The country's sweet simplicity;
And it to know and practise, with intent
To grow the sooner innocent;
By studying to know virtue, and to aim
More at her nature than her name;
The last is but the least; the first doth tell
Ways less...Read more of this...
by
Lewis Carroll
I never loved a dear Gazelle--
Nor anything that cost me much:
High prices profit those who sell,
But why should I be fond of such?
To glad me with his soft black eye
My son comes trotting home from school;
He's had a fight but can't tell why--
He always was a little fool!
But, when he came...Read more of this...
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