Famous Backwards Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Backwards poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous backwards poems. These examples illustrate what a famous backwards poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Emile Verhaeren
The ferryman, a green reed 'twixt his teeth,
With hand on oar, against the current strong
Had rowed and rowed so long.
But she, alas! whose voice was hailing him
Across the far waves dim.
Still further o'er the far waves seemed to float,
Still further backwards, 'mid the mists, remote.
The casements with their eyes.
The dial-faces of the towers that rise
Upon the shore,
Watched, as he strove...Read more of this...
by
Emile Verhaeren
In his village grey
At foot of the dykes, that encompass him
With weary weaving of curves and lines
Toward the sea outstretching dim,
The rope-maker, visionary white.
Stepping backwards along the way,
Prudently 'twixt his hands combines
The distant threads, in their twisting play.
That come to him from the infinite.
When day is gone.
Through ardent, weary evenings, yon
The whirr of a wheel can yet be heard;
Something by...Read more of this...
by
A S J Tessimond
You cannot see the walls that divide your hand
From his or hers or mine when you think you touch it.
You cannot see the walls because they are glass,
And glass is nothing until you try to pass it.
Beat on it if you like, but not too hard,
For glass will break you even while you break it.
Shout, and the sound will...Read more of this...
by
William Strode
Now the declining sun 'gan downwards bend
From higher heavens, and from his locks did send
A milder flame, when near to Tiber's flow
A lutinist allay'd his careful woe
With sounding charms, and in a greeny seat
Of shady oake took shelter from the heat.
A Nightingale oreheard him, that did use
To sojourn in the neighbour groves, the muse
That fill'd the place, the Syren...Read more of this...
by
Guillaume Apollinaire
ZONE
In the end you are tired of this ancient world
Shepherd oh Eiffel Tower the herd of bridges is bleating this morning
You've had enough of living in Greek and Roman antiquity
Here even the cars look antique
Only religion has stayed new religion
Has stayed simple like the hangars at Port-Aviation
You alone in Europe are not ancient...Read more of this...
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...
by
Philip Levine
Look, the eucalyptus, the Atlas pine,
the yellowing ash, all the trees
are gone, and I was older than
all of them. I am older than the moon,
than the stars that fill my plate,
than the unseen planets that huddle
together here at the end of a year
no one wanted. A year more than a year,
in...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
The children are all crying in their pens
and the surf carries their cries away.
They are old men who have seen too much,
their mouths are full of dirty clothes,
the tongues poverty, tears like puss.
The surf pushes their cries back.
Listen.
They are bewitched.
They are writing down their life
on the wings of an elf
who then dissolves.
They are writing down their life
on a century...Read more of this...
by
Charles Bukowski
don't feel sorry for me.
I am a competent,
satisfied human being.
be sorry for the others
who
fidget
complain
who
constantly
rearrange their
lives
like
furniture.
juggling mates
and
attitudes
their
confusion is
constant
and it will
touch
whoever they
deal with.
beware of them:
one of their
key words is
"love."
and beware those who
only take
instructions from their
God
for they have
failed completely to live their own
lives.
don't feel sorry for me
because I am alone
for even
at the most terrible
moments
humor
is my
companion.
I...Read more of this...
by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
OH thou cruel deadly-lovely maiden,
Tell me what great sin have I committed,
That thou keep'st me to the rack thus fasten'd,
That thou hast thy solemn promise broken?
'Twas but yestere'en that thou with fondness
Press'd my hand, and these sweet accents murmured:
"Yes, I'll come, I'll come when morn approacheth,
Come, my friend, full surely to thy chamber."
On the latch I left my doors,...Read more of this...
by
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Long long I lay in the sands
Sounds of trains in the surf
in subways of the sea
And an even greater undersound
of a vast confusion in the universe
a rumbling and a roaring
as of some enormous creature turning
under sea and earth
a billion sotto voices murmuring
a vast muttering
a swelling stuttering
in ocean's speakers
world's voice-box heard with ear to sand
a shocked echoing
a shocking shouting
of all...Read more of this...
by
Carl Rakosi
Eastern Sea, 100 fathoms,
green sand, pebbles,
broken shells.
Off Suno Saki, 60 fathoms,
gray sand, pebbles,
bubbles rising.
Plasma-bearer
and slow-
motion benthos!
The fishery vessel Ion
drops anchor here
collecting
plankton smears and fauna.
Plasma-bearer, visible
sea purge,
sponge and kelpleaf.
Halicystus the Sea Bottle
resembles emeralds
and is the largest
cell in the world.
Young sea horse
Hippocampus twenty
minutes old,
nobody has ever
seen this marine
freak blink.
It...Read more of this...
by
Adela Florence Cory Nicolson
How I loved you in your sleep,
With the starlight on your hair!
The touch of your lips was sweet,
Aziza whom I adore,
I lay at your slender feet,
And against their soft palms pressed,
I fitted my face to...Read more of this...
by
Craig Raine
Divorced, but friends again at last,
we walk old ground together
in bright blue uncomplicated weather.
We laugh and pause
to hack to bits these tiny dinosaurs,
prehistoric, crenelated, cast
between the tractor ruts in mud.
On the green, a junior Douglas Fairbanks,
swinging on the chestnut's unlit chandelier,
defies the corporation spears--
a single rank around the bole,
rusty with blood.
Green, tacky phalluses curve up, romance
A gust--the old flag...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Lux
What I love about this little leaning mark
is how it divides
without divisiveness. The left
or bottom side prying that choice up or out,
the right or top side pressing down upon
its choice: either/or,
his/her. Sometimes called a slash (too harsh), a slant
(a little dizzy, but the Dickinson association
nice: "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant--"), solidus (sounding
too much like a Roman...Read more of this...
by
David Lehman
We were smoking some of this knockout weed when
Operation Memory was announced. To his separate bed
Each soldier went, counting backwards from a hundred
With a needle in his arm. And there I was, in the middle
Of a recession, in the middle of a strange city, between jobs
And apartments and wives. Nobody told me the gun was loaded.
We'd been drinking since...Read more of this...
by
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Am I not he that hath made thee and begotten thee,
I, God, the spirit of man?
Wherefore now these eighteen years hast thou forgotten me,
From whom thy life began?
Thy life-blood and thy life-breath and thy beauty,
Thy might of hands and feet,
Thy soul made strong for divinity of duty
And service which was sweet.
Through the red sea brimmed with blood didst thou...Read more of this...
by
Rg Gregory
i met a frog in my garden today
lurking under a stone - it said
there used to be a pond here
i know i said i had to dig it up
pity said the frog and looked at me
as if i was the thickest mortal
a garden without water it croaked
is worse than a tongue without spit
there's a pond next door i said
you...Read more of this...
by
David Lehman
He woke up in New York City on Valentine's Day,
Speeding. The body in the booth next to his was still warm,
Was gone. He had bought her a sweater, a box of chocolate
Said her life wasn't working he looked stricken she said
You're all bent out of shape, accusingly, and when he
She went from being an Ivy League professor of French
To...Read more of this...
by
David Wagoner
He would leave early and walk slowly
As if balancing books
On the way to school, already expecting
To be tardy once again and heavy
With numbers, the unfashionably rounded
Toes of his shoes invisible beyond
The slope of his corporation. He would pause
At his favorite fundamentally sound
Park bench, which had been the birthplace
Of paeans and ruminations on other...Read more of this...
by
William Topaz McGonagall
Ye sons of Great Britain, I think no shame
To write in praise of brave General Graham!
Whose name will be handed down to posterity without any stigma,
Because, at the battle of El-Teb, he defeated Osman Digna.
With an army about five thousand strong,
To El-Teb, in the year 1884, he marched along,
And bivouacked there for the night;
While around their fires they only...Read more of this...
by
Elizabeth Bishop
The roaring alongside he takes for granted,
and that every so often the world is bound to shake.
He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,
in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.
The beach hisses like fat. On his left, a sheet
of interrupting water comes and goes
and glazes over his dark and brittle feet.
He runs, he runs straight...Read more of this...
by
Elizabeth Bishop
Man-Moth: Newspaper misprint for "mammoth."
Here, above,
cracks in the buldings are filled with battered moonlight.
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,
and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.
He does not see the moon; he observes only her...Read more of this...
by
Robert Frost
The old dog barks backwards without getting up.
I can remember when he was a pup....Read more of this...
by
Rg Gregory
just as the dusk comes hooting
down through the shivering black leaves
of the swinging trees we (the brave ones
swaggering like marshalls through a lynch-mob)
crash-bang our way to the door
of the so-called haunted house
knock knock - kick in a pane of glass
and the dusk hoots louder in our ears
and the swinging trees ride like a mob
with murder in mind - knock...Read more of this...
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