Famous Behind Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Always For The First Time

by Andre Breton
 Always for the first time
Hardly do I know you by sight
You return at some hour of the night to a house at an angle to my window
A wholly imaginary house
It is there that from one second to the next
In the inviolate darkness
I anticipate once more the fascinating rift occurring
The one and only rift
In the facade and in my heart
The...Read more of this...

The Worlds in this World

by Laure-Anne Bosselaar
 Doors were left open in heaven again: 
drafts wheeze, clouds wrap their ripped pages 
around roofs and trees. Like wet flags, shutters 
flap and fold. Even light is blown out of town,
its last angles caught in sopped
newspaper wings and billowing plastic — 
all this in one American street. 
 Elsewhere, somewhere, a tide 
recedes, incense is lit, an infant...Read more of this...

The Rising Of The Storm

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
The lake's dark breast
Is all unrest,
It heaves with a sob and a sigh.
Like a tremulous bird,
From its slumber stirred,
The moon is a-tilt in the sky.[Pg 9]
From the silent deep
The waters sweep,
But faint on the cold white stones,
And the wavelets fly
With a plaintive cry
O'er the old earth's bare, bleak bones.
And the spray upsprings
On its ghost-white wings,
And tosses a kiss...Read more of this...

Perch-Fishing

by Edmund Blunden
On the far hill the cloud of thunder grew
And sunlight blurred below; but sultry blue
Burned yet on the valley water where it hoards
Behind the miller's elmen floodgate boards,
And there the wasps, that lodge them ill-concealed
In the vole's empty house, still drove afield
To plunder touchwood from old crippled trees
And build their young ones their hutched nurseries;
Still creaked the grasshoppers' rasping unison
Nor...Read more of this...

The Jewel

by James Wright
 There is this cave
In the air behind my body
That nobodyt is going to touch:
A cloister, a silence
Closing around a blossom of fire.
When I stand upright in the wind,
My bones turn to dark emeralds....Read more of this...

Sonnet CXLIII

by William Shakespeare
 Lo! as a careful housewife runs to catch
One of her feather'd creatures broke away,
Sets down her babe and makes an swift dispatch
In pursuit of the thing she would have stay,
Whilst her neglected child holds her in chase,
Cries to catch her whose busy care is bent
To follow that which flies before her face,
Not prizing her poor infant's discontent;
So runn'st thou...Read more of this...

Lovers Gifts XLIII: Dying You Have Left Behind

by Rabindranath Tagore
 Dying, you have left behind you the great sadness of the Eternal
in my life. You have painted my thought's horizon with the sunset
colours of your departure, leaving a track of tears across the
earth to love's heaven. Clasped in your dear arms, life and death
united in me in a marriage bond.
I think I can see you watching there in the...Read more of this...

The event was directly behind Him

by Emily Dickinson
 The event was directly behind Him
Yet He did not guess
Fitted itself to Himself like a Robe
Relished His ignorance.
Motioned itself to drill
Loaded and Levelled
And let His Flesh
Centuries from His soul....Read more of this...

The Dust behind I strove to join

by Emily Dickinson
 The Dust behind I strove to join
Unto the Disk before --
But Sequence ravelled out of Sound
Like Balls upon a Floor --...Read more of this...

e Coin Behind Your Ear

by Connie Wanek
 Before you knew you owned it
it was gone, stolen, and you were a fool.
How you never felt it is the wonder,
heavy and thick,
lodged deep in your hair like a burr.
You still see the smile of the magician
as he turned the coin in his long fingers,
which had so disturbed your ear
with their caress. You watched him
lift it into the light,...Read more of this...

Death leaves Us homesick who behind

by Emily Dickinson
 Death leaves Us homesick, who behind,
Except that it is gone
Are ignorant of its Concern
As if it were not born.

Through all their former Places, we
Like Individuals go
Who something lost, the seeking for
Is all that's left them, now --...Read more of this...

City Gent

by Craig Raine
 On my desk, a set of labels
or a synopsis of leeks,
blanched by the sun
and trailing their roots

like a watering can.
Beyond and below,
diminished by distance,
a taxi shivers at the lights:

a shining moorhen
with an orange nodule
set over the beak,
taking a passenger

under its wing.
I turn away, confront
the cuckold hatstand
at bay in the corner,

and eavesdrop (bless you!)
on a hay-fever of brakes.
My Caran d'Ache...Read more of this...

Out from Behind this Mask

by Walt Whitman
 1
OUT from behind this bending, rough-cut Mask, 
(All straighter, liker Masks rejected—this preferr’d,) 
This common curtain of the face, contain’d in me for me, in you for you, in each for
 each,

(Tragedies, sorrows, laughter, tears—O heaven! 
The passionate, teeming plays this curtain hid!)
This glaze of God’s serenest, purest sky, 
This film of Satan’s seething pit, 
This heart’s geography’s map—this...Read more of this...

Behind a Wall

by Amy Lowell
 I own a solace shut within my heart,
A garden full of many a quaint delight
And warm with drowsy, poppied sunshine; bright,
Flaming with lilies out of whose cups dart
Shining things
With powdered wings.
Here terrace sinks to terrace, arbors close
The ends of dreaming paths; a wanton wind
Jostles the half-ripe pears, and then, unkind,
Tumbles a-slumber in a pillar rose,
With content
Grown indolent.
By night my...Read more of this...

A Mans Requirements

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
 I 

Love me Sweet, with all thou art, 
Feeling, thinking, seeing; 
Love me in the lightest part, 
Love me in full being. 

II 

Love me with thine open youth 
In its frank surrender; 
With the vowing of thy mouth, 
With its silence tender. 

III 

Love me with thine azure eyes, 
Made for earnest grantings; 
Taking colour from the skies,...Read more of this...

Giving chapter V

by Kahlil Gibran
 Then said a rich man, "Speak to us of Giving." 

And he answered: 

You give but little when you give of your possessions. 

It is when you give of yourself that you truly give. 

For what are your possessions but things you keep and guard for fear you may need them tomorrow? 

And tomorrow, what shall tomorrow bring to...Read more of this...

to the seaside

by Rg Gregory
 to the seaside
to the seaside
to the change and peace of mind
to the easy la-
zy holiday
the leave-it-all-behind

to the seaside
to the sunshine
to the body-littered sands
to the deckchairs
and the funfairs
and the burst-your-ears brass bands

to the ice-cream
to the wasp-stings
to the sand-in-every-meal
to the castles
and the donkeys
and the plates of jellied eel

to the bosoms
and the bottoms
to the bodies-in-the-raw
to the he-men
and the paunches
to the what-the-butler-saw

(to the...Read more of this...

Behind the Scenes

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 The actor struts his little hour, 
Between the limelight and the band; 
The public feel the actor's power, 
Yet nothing do they understand 
Of all the touches here and there 
That make or mar the actor's part, 
They never see, beneath the glare, 
The artist striving after art. 
To them it seems a labour slight 
Where nought of study...Read more of this...

The Far Field

by Theodore Roethke
 I

I dream of journeys repeatedly:
Of flying like a bat deep into a narrowing tunnel
Of driving alone, without luggage, out a long peninsula,
The road lined with snow-laden second growth,
A fine dry snow ticking the windshield,
Alternate snow and sleet, no on-coming traffic,
And no lights behind, in the blurred side-mirror,
The road changing from glazed tarface to a rubble of stone,
Ending at last...Read more of this...

Behind Me -- dips Eternity --

by Emily Dickinson
 Behind Me -- dips Eternity --
Before Me -- Immortality --
Myself -- the Term between --
Death but the Drift of Eastern Gray,
Dissolving into Dawn away,
Before the West begin --

'Tis Kingdoms -- afterward -- they say --
In perfect -- pauseless Monarchy --
Whose Prince -- is Son of None --
Himself -- His Dateless Dynasty --
Himself -- Himself diversify --
In Duplicate divine --

'Tis...Read more of this...

Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

by Walt Whitman
 1
OUT of the cradle endlessly rocking, 
Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle, 
Out of the Ninth-month midnight, 
Over the sterile sands, and the fields beyond, where the child, leaving his bed, wander’d
 alone, bare-headed, barefoot, 
Down from the shower’d halo,
Up from the mystic play of shadows, twining and twisting as if they were alive, 
Out from the...Read more of this...

No one has access to the secrets of God behind the

by Omar Khayyam
No one has access to the secrets of God behind the
mysterious curtain; no one [even in mind] can penetrate
there; we have no other dwelling than the earthly
mind. Oh, regret! for this also is an enigma not less
difficult to comprehend.
290...Read more of this...

Behind the Arras

by Bliss Carman
 I like the old house tolerably well, 
Where I must dwell 
Like a familiar gnome; 
And yet I never shall feel quite at home. 
I love to roam. 
Day after day I loiter and explore 
From door to door; 
So many treasures lure 
The curious mind. What histories obscure 
They must immure! 

I hardly know which room I care...Read more of this...

Behind The Arras

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
As in some dim baronial hall restrained,
A prisoner sits, engirt by secret doors
And waving tapestries that argue forth
Strange passages into the outer air;
So in this dimmer room which we call life,
Thus sits the soul and marks with eye intent[Pg 95]
That mystic curtain o'er the portal death;
Still deeming that behind the arras lies
The lambent way that leads to lasting...Read more of this...

No one has had access behind the curtain of destiny;

by Omar Khayyam
No one has had access behind the curtain of destiny;
no one has knowledge of the secrets of Providence. For
seventy-two years I have reflected day and night, I have
learned nothing anywhere, and the enigma remains unexplained....Read more of this...

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