Famous Appearances Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Griffy the Cooper

by Edgar Lee Masters
 The cooper should know about tubs. 
But I learned about life as well, 
And you who loiter around these graves 
Think you know life. 
You think your eye sweeps about a wide horizon, perhaps, 
In truth you are only looking around the interior of your tub. 
You cannot lift yourself to its rim 
And see the outer world of...Read more of this...

The Cooks Tale

by Geoffrey Chaucer
 THE PROLOGUE.


THE Cook of London, while the Reeve thus spake,
For joy he laugh'd and clapp'd him on the back:
"Aha!" quoth he, "for Christes passion,
This Miller had a sharp conclusion,
Upon this argument of herbergage.* *lodging
Well saide Solomon in his language,
Bring thou not every man into thine house,
For harbouring by night is perilous.
*Well ought a man avised for to be* *a...Read more of this...

Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances

by Walt Whitman
 OF the terrible doubt of appearances, 
Of the uncertainty after all—that we may be deluded, 
That may-be reliance and hope are but speculations after all, 
That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful fable only, 
May-be the things I perceive—the animals, plants, men, hills, shining and flowing
 waters,
The skies of day and night—colors, densities, forms—May-be these are, (as
...Read more of this...

he and the hilltown

by Rg Gregory
 when they look into his mind they find a hill town
somewhat surprised they go off to their learned books
outside (architecturally) he’d seems a little wind-blown
not special – a common sort of shackman by his looks
not the sure kind to want the sun to get its hooks
into his self-containment (his bunched-up notions)
thoughts crammed like the heads of ripened corn in...Read more of this...

How Beastly The Bourgeois Is

by D. H. Lawrence
 How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species--

Presentable, eminently presentable--
shall I make you a present of him?

Isn't he handsome? Isn't he healthy? Isn't he a fine specimen?
Doesn't he look the fresh clean Englishman, outside?
Isn't it God's own image? tramping his thirty miles a day
after partridges, or a little rubber ball?
wouldn't you like to be like that, well...Read more of this...

The Death of the Hired Man

by Robert Frost
 Mary sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table
Waiting for Warren. When she heard his step,
She ran on tip-toe down the darkened passage
To meet him in the doorway with the news
And put him on his guard. 'Silas is back.'
She pushed him outward with her through the door
And shut it after her. "Be kind,' she said.
She took the market things...Read more of this...

Smoky the Bear Sutra

by Gary Snyder
Smokey the Bear Sutra

Once in the Jurassic about 150 million years ago,
 the Great Sun Buddha in this corner of the Infinite
 Void gave a Discourse to all the assembled elements
 and energies: to the standing beings, the walking beings,
 the flying beings, and the sitting beings -- even grasses,
 to the number of thirteen billion, each one born from...Read more of this...

The River of Rivers in Connecticut

by Wallace Stevens
There is a great river this side of Stygia
Before one comes to the first black cataracts
And trees that lack the intelligence of trees.

In that river, far this side of Stygia,
The mere flowing of the water is a gayety,
Flashing and flashing in the sun. On its banks,

No shadow walks. The river is fateful,
Like the last one. But there is no ferryman.
He...Read more of this...

Preface to Hunting of the Snark

by Lewis Carroll
 PREFACE

If---and the thing is wildly possible---the charge of writing 
nonsense were ever brought against the author of this brief but 
instructive poem, it would be based, I feel convinced, on the line 

``Then the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes'' 

In view of this painful possibility, I will not (as I might) appeal 
indignantly to my other writings...Read more of this...

Favrile

by Mark Doty
 Glassmakers,
at century's end,
compounded metallic lusters

in reference
to natural sheens (dragonfly
and beetle wings,

marbled light on kerosene)
and invented names
as coolly lustrous

as their products'
scarab-gleam: Quetzal,
Aurene, Favrile.

Suggesting,
respectively, the glaze
of feathers,

that sun-shot fog
of which halos
are composed,

and -- what?
What to make of Favrile,
Tiffany's term

for his coppery-rose
flushed with gold
like the alchemized

atmosphere of sunbeams
in a Flemish room?
Faux Moorish,

fake Japanese,
his lamps illumine
chiefly themselves,

copying waterlilies'
bronzy stems,
wisteria or trout scales;

surfaces burnished
like...Read more of this...

Ghoti

by Heather McHugh
 The gh comes from rough, the o from women's,
and the ti from unmentionables--presto:
there's the perfect English instance of
unlovablility--complete

with fish. Our wish was for a better
revelation: for a correspondence--
if not lexical, at least
phonetic; if not with Madonna

then at least with Mary Magdalene.
Instead we get the sheer
opacity of things: an accident
of incident, a tracery of history: the dung

inside the dungarees, the...Read more of this...

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