Famous Arm Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Alciphron and Leucippe

by Walter Savage Landor
 An ancient chestnut’s blossoms threw
Their heavy odour over two:
Leucippe, it is said, was one;
The other, then, was Alciphron.
‘Come, come! why should we stand beneath?’
This hollow tree’s unwholesome breath?’
Said Alciphron, ‘here’s not a blade
Of grass or moss, and scanty shade.
Come; it is just the hour to rove
In the lone dingle shepherds love;
There, straight and tall, the hazel twig
Divides the crook?ed...Read more of this...

Grand-Père

by Robert William Service
 And so when he reached my bed
 The General made a stand:
"My brave young fellow," he said,
 "I would shake your hand."

So I lifted my arm, the right,
 With never a hand at all;
Only a stump, a sight
 Fit to appal.

"Well, well. Now that's too bad!
 That's sorrowful luck," he said;
"But there! You give me, my lad,
 The left...Read more of this...

Smoke and Steel

by Carl Sandburg
 SMOKE of the fields in spring is one,
Smoke of the leaves in autumn another.
Smoke of a steel-mill roof or a battleship funnel,
They all go up in a line with a smokestack,
Or they twist … in the slow twist … of the wind.

If the north wind comes they run to the south.
If the west wind comes they run to the...Read more of this...

The Death Of Marie Toro

by Robert William Service
 We're taking Marie Toro to her home in Père-La-Chaise;
We're taking Marie Toro to her last resting-place.
Behold! her hearse is hung with wreaths till everything is hid
Except the blossoms heaping high upon her coffin lid.
A week ago she roamed the street, a draggle and a ****,
A by-word of the Boulevard and everybody's butt;
A week ago she haunted us, we heard...Read more of this...

The Old Arm-chair

by Eliza Cook
 I LOVE it, I love it ; and who shall dare
To chide me for loving that old Arm-chair ?
I've treasured it long as a sainted prize ;
I've bedewed it with tears, and embalmed it with sighs.
' Tis bound by a thousand bands to my heart ;
Not a tie will break, not a link will start.
Would ye learn the spell...Read more of this...

Each One, Pull One

by Alice Walker
(Thinking of Lorraine Hansberry)


We must say it all, and as clearly
Trying to bury us.
As we can. For, even before we are dead,


Were we black? Were we women? Were we gay?
Were we the wrong shade of black? Were we yellow?
Did we, God forbid, love the wrong person, country?
Or politics? Were we Agnes Smedley or John Brown?


But, most of all, did we...Read more of this...

Hanchen the Maid of the Mill

by William Topaz McGonagall
 Near the village of Udorf, on the banks of the Rhine,
There lived a miller and his family, once on a time;
And there yet stands the mill in a state of decay,
And concerning the miller and his family, attend to my lay. 

The miller and his family went to Church one Sunday morn,
Leaving behind their darling child, the youngest born,
In...Read more of this...

The Puritans Ballad

by Elinor Wylie
 My love came up from Barnegat, 
The sea was in his eyes; 
He trod as softly as a cat 
And told me terrible lies.

His hair was yellow as new-cut pine 
In shavings curled and feathered; 
I thought how silver it would shine 
By cruel winters weathered.

But he was in his twentieth year, 
Ths time I'm speaking of; 
We were...Read more of this...

Inheritance—His

by Audre Lorde
 I. 
My face resembles your face
less and less each day. When I was young
no one mistook whose child I was.
Features build coloring
alone among my creamy fine-boned sisters
marked me Byron's daughter.

No sun set when you died, but a door
opened onto my mother. After you left
she grieved her crumpled world aloft
an iron fist sweated with business symbols
a printed blotter dwell in...Read more of this...

The Grey Rock

by William Butler Yeats
 Poets with whom I learned my trade.
Companions of the Cheshire Cheese,
Here's an old story I've remade,
Imagining 'twould better please
Your cars than stories now in fashion,
Though you may think I waste my breath
Pretending that there can be passion
That has more life in it than death,
And though at bottling of your wine
Old wholesome Goban had no say;
The moral's yours because it's...Read more of this...

Acon and Rhodope

by Walter Savage Landor
 The Year's twelve daughters had in turn gone by,
Of measured pace tho' varying mien all twelve,
Some froward, some sedater, some adorn'd
For festival, some reckless of attire.
The snow had left the mountain-top; fresh flowers
Had withered in the meadow; fig and prune
Hung wrinkling; the last apple glow'd amid
Its freckled leaves; and weary oxen blinkt
Between the trodden corn and twisted vine,
Under whose...Read more of this...

Poland

by Victor Hugo
 ("Seule au pied de la tour.") 
 
 {IX., September, 1833.} 


 Alone, beneath the tower whence thunder forth 
 The mandates of the Tyrant of the North, 
 Poland's sad genius kneels, absorbed in tears, 
 Bound, vanquished, pallid with her fears— 
 Alas! the crucifix is all that's left 
 To her, of freedom and her sons...Read more of this...

Out Of The Arm Of One Love..

by Charles Bukowski
 out of the arm of one love
and into the arms of another 
I have been saved from dying on the cross
by a lady who smokes pot
writes songs and stories
and is much kinder than the last,
much much kinder,
and the sex is just as good or better. 
it isn't pleasant to be put on the cross and left there,
it is much...Read more of this...

As the Teams Head- Brass

by Edward Thomas
 As the team's head-brass flashed out on the turn
The lovers disappeared into the wood.
I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm
That strewed the angle of the fallow, and
Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square
Of charlock. Every time the horses turned
Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned
Upon the handles to say or ask a word, 
About the weather,...Read more of this...

After Hearing a Waltz by Bartok

by Amy Lowell
 But why did I kill him? Why? Why?
In the small, gilded room, near the stair?
My ears rack and throb with his cry,
And his eyes goggle under his hair,
As my fingers sink into the fair
White skin of his throat. It was I!
I killed him! My God! Don't you hear?
I shook him until his red tongue
Hung flapping out through the black,...Read more of this...

Opposite To Meloncholly

by William Strode
 Returne my joyes, and hither bring
A tongue not made to speake but sing,
A jolly spleene, an inward feast,
A causelesse laugh without a jest,
A face which gladnesse doth anoynt,
An arm that springs out of his joynt,
A sprightfull gate that leaves no print,
And makes a feather of a flint,
A heart that's lighter than the ayre,
An eye still dancing in his spheare,
Strong...Read more of this...

A Soldiers Reprieve

by William Topaz McGonagall
 'Twas in the United States of America some years ago
An aged father sat at his fireside with his heart full of woe,
And talking to his neighbour, Mr Allan, about his boy Bennie
That was to be shot because found asleep doing sentinel duty. 

"Inside of twenty-four hours, the telegram said,
And, oh! Mr Allan, he's dead, I am afraid.
Where is my...Read more of this...

The Iliad: Book VI (excerpt)

by Alexander Pope
 He said, and pass'd with sad presaging heart
To seek his spouse, his soul's far dearer part;
At home he sought her, but he sought in vain:
She, with one maid of all her menial train,
Had thence retir'd; and, with her second joy,
The young Astyanax, the hope of Troy,
Pensive she stood on Ilion's tow'ry height,
Beheld the war, and sicken'd at the sight;
There...Read more of this...

My arm for a pillow

by Yosa Buson
 My arm for a pillow,
I really like myself
under the hazy moon....Read more of this...

Cripples And Other Stories

by Anne Sexton
 My doctor, the comedian
I called you every time
and made you laugh yourself
when I wrote this silly rhyme...


 Each time I give lectures
 or gather in the grants
 you send me off to boarding school
 in training pants.

God damn it, father-doctor,
I'm really thirty-six.
I see dead rats in the toilet.
I'm one of the lunatics.

Disgusted, mother put me
on the potty. She was...Read more of this...

Song Of An Old General

by Wang Wei
When he was a youth of fifteen or twenty, 
He chased a wild horse, he caught him and rode him, 
He shot the white-browed mountain tiger, 
He defied the yellow-bristled Horseman of Ye. 
Fighting single- handed for a thousand miles, 
With his naked dagger he could hold a multitude. 
...Granted that the troops of China were as swift as heaven's...Read more of this...

A Servant to Servants

by Robert Frost
 I didn't make you know how glad I was 
To have you come and camp here on our land. 
I promised myself to get down some day 
And see the way you lived, but I don't know! 
With a houseful of hungry men to feed 
I guess you'd find.... It seems to me 
I can't express my feelings any...Read more of this...

Recorders Ages Hence

by Walt Whitman
 RECORDERS ages hence! 
Come, I will take you down underneath this impassive exterior—I will tell you what to
 say
 of
 me; 
Publish my name and hang up my picture as that of the tenderest lover, 
The friend, the lover’s portrait, of whom his friend, his lover, was fondest, 
Who was not proud of his songs, but of the measureless...Read more of this...

sublimely

by Rg Gregory
 you may get fed up with me
she says (seing herself slightly)
fearing old age in a woman
must render her blightly

old age’s eyes he thinks
see only old-agely
she lifted him from the pits
and has come to him sagely

so much she offers him now
so he takes to her wisely
she’s been his steady arm
since they re-met surprisely

love has consumed them both
without hiccough and calmly
say...Read more of this...

Thars More In the Man Than Thar Is In The Land

by Sidney Lanier
 I knowed a man, which he lived in Jones, 
Which Jones is a county of red hills and stones, 
And he lived pretty much by gittin' of loans, 
And his mules was nuthin' but skin and bones, 
And his hogs was flat as his corn-bread pones, 
And he had 'bout a thousand acres o' land. 

This man -- which...Read more of this...

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