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Best Famous Annunciation Poems

Here is a collection of the all-time best famous Annunciation poems. This is a select list of the best famous Annunciation poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Annunciation poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of annunciation poems.

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Written by Sylvia Plath | Create an image from this poem

A Birthday Present

 What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful?
It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges?

I am sure it is unique, I am sure it is what I want.
When I am quiet at my cooking I feel it looking, I feel it thinking

'Is this the one I am too appear for,
Is this the elect one, the one with black eye-pits and a scar?

Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus,
Adhering to rules, to rules, to rules.

Is this the one for the annunciation?
My god, what a laugh!'

But it shimmers, it does not stop, and I think it wants me.
I would not mind if it were bones, or a pearl button.

I do not want much of a present, anyway, this year.
After all I am alive only by accident.

I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way.
Now there are these veils, shimmering like curtains,

The diaphanous satins of a January window
White as babies' bedding and glittering with dead breath. O ivory!

It must be a tusk there, a ghost column.
Can you not see I do not mind what it is.

Can you not give it to me?
Do not be ashamed--I do not mind if it is small.

Do not be mean, I am ready for enormity.
Let us sit down to it, one on either side, admiring the gleam,

The glaze, the mirrory variety of it.
Let us eat our last supper at it, like a hospital plate.

I know why you will not give it to me,
You are terrified

The world will go up in a shriek, and your head with it,
Bossed, brazen, an antique shield,

A marvel to your great-grandchildren.
Do not be afraid, it is not so.

I will only take it and go aside quietly.
You will not even hear me opening it, no paper crackle,

No falling ribbons, no scream at the end.
I do not think you credit me with this discretion.

If you only knew how the veils were killing my days.
To you they are only transparencies, clear air.

But my god, the clouds are like cotton.
Armies of them. They are carbon monoxide.

Sweetly, sweetly I breathe in,
Filling my veins with invisibles, with the million

Probable motes that tick the years off my life.
You are silver-suited for the occasion. O adding machine-----

Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole?
Must you stamp each piece purple,

Must you kill what you can?
There is one thing I want today, and only you can give it to me.

It stands at my window, big as the sky.
It breathes from my sheets, the cold dead center

Where split lives congeal and stiffen to history.
Let it not come by the mail, finger by finger.

Let it not come by word of mouth, I should be sixty
By the time the whole of it was delivered, and to numb to use it.

Only let down the veil, the veil, the veil.
If it were death

I would admire the deep gravity of it, its timeless eyes.
I would know you were serious.

There would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday.
And the knife not carve, but enter

Pure and clean as the cry of a baby,
And the universe slide from my side.


Written by Adrienne Rich | Create an image from this poem

Cartographies of Silence

 1.

A conversation begins
with a lie. and each 

speaker of the so-called common language feels
the ice-floe split, the drift apart 

as if powerless, as if up against
a force of nature 

A poem can being
with a lie. And be torn up. 

A conversation has other laws
recharges itself with its own 

false energy, Cannot be torn
up. Infiltrates our blood. Repeats itself. 

Inscribes with its unreturning stylus
the isolation it denies. 


2.

The classical music station
playing hour upon hour in the apartment 

the picking up and picking up
and again picking up the telephone 

The syllables uttering
the old script over and over 

The loneliness of the liar
living in the formal network of the lie 

twisting the dials to drown the terror
beneath the unsaid word 


3.

The technology of silence
The rituals, etiquette 

the blurring of terms
silence not absence 

of words or music or even
raw sounds 

Silence can be a plan
rigorously executed 

the blueprint of a life 

It is a presence
it has a history a form 

Do not confuse it
with any kind of absence 


4.

How calm, how inoffensive these words
begin to seem to me 

though begun in grief and anger
Can I break through this film of the abstract 

without wounding myself or you
there is enough pain here 

This is why the classical of the jazz music station plays?
to give a ground of meaning to our pain? 


5.

The silence strips bare:
In Dreyer's Passion of Joan 

Falconetti's face, hair shorn, a great geography
mutely surveyed by the camera 

If there were a poetry where this could happen
not as blank space or as words 

stretched like skin over meaningsof a night through which two people
have talked till dawn. 


6.

The scream
of an illegitimate voice 

It has ceased to hear itself, therefore
it asks itself 

How do I exist? 

This was the silence I wanted to break in you
I had questions but you would not answer 

I had answers but you could not use them
The is useless to you and perhaps to others 


7.

It was an old theme even for me:
Language cannot do everything- 

chalk it on the walls where the dead poets
lie in their mausoleums 

If at the will of the poet the poem
could turn into a thing 

a granite flank laid bare, a lifted head
alight with dew 

If it could simply look you in the face
with naked eyeballs, not letting you turn 

till you, and I who long to make this thing,
were finally clarified together in its stare 


8.

No. Let me have this dust,
these pale clouds dourly lingering, these words 

moving with ferocious accuracy
like the blind child's fingers 

or the newborn infant's mouth
violent with hunger 

No one can give me, I have long ago
taken this method 

whether of bran pouring from the loose-woven sack
or of the bunsen-flame turned low and blue 

If from time to time I envy
the pure annunciation to the eye 

the visio beatifica
if from time to time I long to turn 

like the Eleusinian hierophant
holding up a single ear of grain 

for the return to the concrete and everlasting world
what in fact I keep choosing 

are these words, these whispers, conversations
from which time after time the truth breaks moist and green.
Written by Michael Ondaatje | Create an image from this poem

To A Sad Daughter

 All night long the hockey pictures
gaze down at you
sleeping in your tracksuit.
Belligerent goalies are your ideal.
Threats of being traded
cuts and wounds
--all this pleases you.
O my god! you say at breakfast
reading the sports page over the Alpen
as another player breaks his ankle
or assaults the coach.

When I thought of daughters
I wasn't expecting this
but I like this more.
I like all your faults
even your purple moods
when you retreat from everyone
to sit in bed under a quilt.
And when I say 'like'
I mean of course 'love'
but that embarrasses you.
You who feel superior to black and white movies
(coaxed for hours to see Casablanca)
though you were moved
by Creature from the Black Lagoon.

One day I'll come swimming
beside your ship or someone will
and if you hear the siren
listen to it. For if you close your ears
only nothing happens. You will never change.

I don't care if you risk
your life to angry goalies
creatures with webbed feet.
You can enter their caves and castles
their glass laboratories. Just
don't be fooled by anyone but yourself.

This is the first lecture I've given you.
You're 'sweet sixteen' you said.
I'd rather be your closest friend
than your father. I'm not good at advice
you know that, but ride
the ceremonies
until they grow dark.

Sometimes you are so busy
discovering your friends
I ache with loss
--but that is greed.
And sometimes I've gone
into my purple world
and lost you.

One afternoon I stepped
into your room. You were sitting
at the desk where I now write this.
Forsythia outside the window
and sun spilled over you
like a thick yellow miracle
as if another planet
was coaxing you out of the house
--all those possible worlds!--
and you, meanwhile, busy with mathematics.

I cannot look at forsythia now
without loss, or joy for you.
You step delicately
into the wild world
and your real prize will be
the frantic search.
Want everything. If you break
break going out not in.
How you live your life I don't care
but I'll sell my arms for you,
hold your secrets forever.

If I speak of death
which you fear now, greatly,
it is without answers.
except that each
one we know is
in our blood.
Don't recall graves.
Memory is permanent.
Remember the afternoon's
yellow suburban annunciation.
Your goalie
in his frightening mask
dreams perhaps
of gentleness.
Written by Kathleen Raine | Create an image from this poem

Transit of the Gods

 Strange that the self’s continuum should outlast 
The Virgin, Aphrodite, and the Mourning Mother, 
All loves and griefs, successive deities 
That hold their kingdom in the human breast. 
Abandoned by the gods, woman with an ageing body 
That half remembers the Annunciation 
The passion and the travail and the grief 
That wore the mask of my humanity, 
I marvel at the soul’s indifference. 
For in her theatre the play is done, 
The tears are shed; the actors, the immortals 
In their ceaseless manifestation, elsewhere gone, 
And I who have been Virgin and Aphrodite, 
The mourning Isis and the queen of corn 
Wait for the last mummer, dread Persephone 
To dance my dust at last into the tomb.
Written by Joyce Kilmer | Create an image from this poem

The Annunciation

 (For Helen Parry Eden)

"Hail Mary, full of grace," the Angel saith.
Our Lady bows her head, and is ashamed;
She has a Bridegroom Who may not be named,
Her mortal flesh bears Him Who conquers death.
Now in the dust her spirit grovelleth;
Too bright a Sun before her eyes has flamed,
Too fair a herald joy too high proclaimed,
And human lips have trembled in God's breath.
O Mother-Maid, thou art ashamed to cover
With thy white self, whereon no stain can be,
Thy God, Who came from Heaven to be thy Lover,
Thy God, Who came from Heaven to dwell in thee.
About thy head celestial legions hover,
Chanting the praise of thy humility.


Written by Helen Hunt Jackson | Create an image from this poem

A Calendar of Sonnets: March

 Month which the warring ancients strangely styled 
The month of war,--as if in their fierce ways 
Were any month of peace!--in thy rough days 
I find no war in Nature, though the wild 
Winds clash and clang, and broken boughs are piled 
As feet of writhing trees. The violets raise 
Their heads without affright, without amaze, 
And sleep through all the din, as sleeps a child. 
And he who watches well may well discern 
Sweet expectation in each living thing. 
Like pregnant mother the sweet earth doth yearn; 
In secret joy makes ready for the spring; 
And hidden, sacred, in her breast doth bear 
Annunciation lilies for the year.
Written by William Strode | Create an image from this poem

On The Bible

 Behold this little volume here inrolde:
'Tis the Almighty's present to the world:
Hearken earth's earth; each sencelesse thing can heare
His Maker's thunder, though it want an eare:
God's word is senior to his works, nay rather
If rightly weigh'd the world may call it father;
God spake, 'twas done; this great foundation
Is the Creator's Exhalation
Breath'd out in speaking. The best work of man
Is better than his word; but if wee scanne
God's word aright, his works far short doe fall;
The word is God, the works are creatures all.
The sundry peeces of this generall frame
Are dimmer letters, all which spell the same
Eternal word; But these cannot expresse
His greatnesse with such easy readinesse,
And therefore yeild. The Heavens shall pass away,
The sun and moone and stars shall all obey
To light one general bonfire; but his word,
His builder-upp, his all-destroying sworde,
That still survives; no jott of that can dye,
Each tittle measures immortalitie.


The word's owne mother, on whose breast did hang
The world's upholder drawne into a span,
Shee, shee was not so blest because she bare him
As cause herselfe was new-born, and did hear him.
Before she had brought forth she heard her Son
First speaking in the Annunciation:
And then, even then, before she brought forth child,
By name of Blessed shee herselfe instilde.


Once more this mighty word his people greets,
Thus lapt and thus swath'd upp in paper sheets:
Read here God's Image with a zealous eye,
The legible and written Deity.

Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry