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Best Famous Knot Poems

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

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Written by James Tate | Create an image from this poem

Dream On

 Some people go their whole lives
without ever writing a single poem.
Extraordinary people who don't hesitate
to cut somebody's heart or skull open.
They go to baseball games with the greatest of ease.
and play a few rounds of golf as if it were nothing.
These same people stroll into a church 
as if that were a natural part of life. 
Investing money is second nature to them. 
They contribute to political campaigns 
that have absolutely no poetry in them 
and promise none for the future.
They sit around the dinner table at night 
and pretend as though nothing is missing. 
Their children get caught shoplifting at the mall 
and no one admits that it is poetry they are missing. 
The family dog howls all night, 
lonely and starving for more poetry in his life. 
Why is it so difficult for them to see
that, without poetry, their lives are effluvial.
Sure, they have their banquets, their celebrations, 
croquet, fox hunts, their sea shores and sunsets, 
their cocktails on the balcony, dog races,
and all that kissing and hugging, and don't 
forget the good deeds, the charity work, 
nursing the baby squirrels all through the night,
filling the birdfeeders all winter,
helping the stranger change her tire.
Still, there's that disagreeable exhalation
from decaying matter, subtle but everpresent.
They walk around erect like champions.
They are smooth-spoken and witty.
When alone, rare occasion, they stare
into the mirror for hours, bewildered.
There was something they meant to say, but didn't: 
"And if we put the statue of the rhinoceros
next to the tweezers, and walk around the room three times,
learn to yodel, shave our heads, call 
our ancestors back from the dead--" 
poetrywise it's still a bust, bankrupt.
You haven't scribbled a syllable of it.
You're a nowhere man misfiring
the very essence of your life, flustering
nothing from nothing and back again.
The hereafter may not last all that long.
Radiant childhood sweetheart,
secret code of everlasting joy and sorrow, 
fanciful pen strokes beneath the eyelids:
all day, all night meditation, knot of hope,
kernel of desire, pure ordinariness of life 
seeking, through poetry, a benediction
or a bed to lie down on, to connect, reveal,
explore, to imbue meaning on the day's extravagant labor. 
And yet it's cruel to expect too much. 
It's a rare species of bird 
that refuses to be categorized.
Its song is barely audible.
It is like a dragonfly in a dream--
here, then there, then here again,
low-flying amber-wing darting upward
then out of sight.
And the dream has a pain in its heart
the wonders of which are manifold,
or so the story is told.


Written by John Donne | Create an image from this poem

Holy Sonnet XIV: Batter My Heart Three Person'd God

Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurped town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but Oh, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy:
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
Written by Edgar Allan Poe | Create an image from this poem

A Valentine

 For her this rhyme is penned, whose luminous eyes,
Brightly expressive as the twins of Leda,
Shall find her own sweet name, that nestling lies
Upon the page, enwrapped from every reader.
Search narrowly the lines!- they hold a treasure
Divine- a talisman- an amulet
That must be worn at heart. Search well the measure-
The words- the syllables! Do not forget
The trivialest point, or you may lose your labor
And yet there is in this no Gordian knot
Which one might not undo without a sabre,
If one could merely comprehend the plot.
Enwritten upon the leaf where now are peering
Eyes scintillating soul, there lie perdus
Three eloquent words oft uttered in the hearing
Of poets, by poets- as the name is a poet's, too,
Its letters, although naturally lying
Like the knight Pinto- Mendez Ferdinando-
Still form a synonym for Truth- Cease trying!
You will not read the riddle, though you do the best you can do.
Written by Rudyard Kipling | Create an image from this poem

The Ballad of the Red Earl

 (It is not for them to criticize too minutely
the methods the Irish followed, though they might deplore some of
their results. During the past few years Ireland had been going
through what was tantamount to a revolution. -- EARL SPENCER)



Red Earl, and will ye take for guide
 The silly camel-birds,
That ye bury your head in an Irish thorn,
 On a desert of drifting words?

Ye have followed a man for a God, Red Earl,
 As the Lod o' Wrong and Right;
But the day is done with the setting sun
 Will ye follow into the night?

He gave you your own old words, Red Earl,
 For food on the wastrel way;
Will ye rise and eat in the night, Red Earl,
 That fed so full in the day?

Ye have followed fast, ye have followed far,
 And where did the wandering lead?
From the day that ye praised the spoken word
 To the day ye must gloss the deed.

And as ye have given your hand for gain,
 So must ye give in loss;
And as ye ha' come to the brink of the pit,
 So must ye loup across.

For some be rogues in grain, Red Earl,
 And some be rogues in fact,
And rogues direct and rogues elect;
 But all be rogues in pact.

Ye have cast your lot with these, Red Earl;
 Take heed to where ye stand.
Ye have tied a knot with your tongue, Red Earl,
 That ye cannot loose with your hand.

Ye have travelled fast, ye have travelled far,
 In the grip of a tightening tether,
Till ye find at the end ye must take for friend
 The quick and their dead together.

Ye have played with the Law between your lips,
 And mouthed it daintilee;
But the gist o' the speech is ill to teach,
 For ye say: "Let wrong go free."

Red Earl, ye wear the Garter fair,
 And gat your place from a King:
Do ye make Rebellion of no account,
 And Treason a little thing?

And have ye weighed your words, Red Earl,
 That stand and speak so high?
And is it good that the guilt o' blood,
 Be cleared at the cost of a sigh?

And is it well for the sake of peace,
 Our tattered Honour to sell,
And higgle anew with a tainted crew --
 Red Earl, and is it well?

Ye have followed fast, ye have followed far,
 On a dark and doubtful way,
 And the road is hard, is hard, Red Earl,
 And the price is yet to pay.

Ye shall pay that price as ye reap reward
 For the toil of your tongue and pen --
In the praise of the blamed and the thanks of the shamed,
 And the honour o' knavish men.

They scarce shall veil their scorn, Red Earl,
 And the worst at the last shall be,
When you tell your heart that it does not know
 And your eye that it does not see.
Written by Robert Lowell | Create an image from this poem

Eye and Tooth

My whole eye was sunset red,
the old cut cornea throbbed,
I saw things darkly,
as through an unwashed goldfish globe.

I lay all day on my bed.
I chain-smoked through the night,
learning to flinch
at the flash of the matchlight.

Outside, the summer rain,
a simmer of rot and renewal,
fell in pinpricks.
Even new life is fuel.

My eyes throb.
Nothing can dislodge
the house with my first tooth
noosed in a knot to the doorknob.

Nothing can dislodge
the triangular blotch
of rot on the red roof,
a cedar hedge, or the shade of a hedge.

No ease from the eye
of the sharp-shinned hawk in the birdbook there,
with reddish-brown buffalo hair
on its shanks, one asectic talon

clasping the abstract imperial sky.
It says:
an eye for an eye,
a tooth for a tooth.

No ease for the boy at the keyhole,
his telescope,
when the women's white bodies flashed
in the bathroom. Young, my eyes began to fail.

Nothing! No oil
for the eye, nothing to pour
on those waters or flames.
I am tired. Everyone's tired of my turmoil.


Written by Edward Taylor | Create an image from this poem

Dream On

 Some people go their whole lives
without ever writing a single poem.
Extraordinary people who don't hesitate
to cut somebody's heart or skull open.
They go to baseball games with the greatest of ease.
and play a few rounds of golf as if it were nothing.
These same people stroll into a church 
as if that were a natural part of life. 
Investing money is second nature to them. 
They contribute to political campaigns 
that have absolutely no poetry in them 
and promise none for the future.
They sit around the dinner table at night 
and pretend as though nothing is missing. 
Their children get caught shoplifting at the mall 
and no one admits that it is poetry they are missing. 
The family dog howls all night, 
lonely and starving for more poetry in his life. 
Why is it so difficult for them to see
that, without poetry, their lives are effluvial.
Sure, they have their banquets, their celebrations, 
croquet, fox hunts, their sea shores and sunsets, 
their cocktails on the balcony, dog races,
and all that kissing and hugging, and don't 
forget the good deeds, the charity work, 
nursing the baby squirrels all through the night,
filling the birdfeeders all winter,
helping the stranger change her tire.
Still, there's that disagreeable exhalation
from decaying matter, subtle but everpresent.
They walk around erect like champions.
They are smooth-spoken and witty.
When alone, rare occasion, they stare
into the mirror for hours, bewildered.
There was something they meant to say, but didn't: 
"And if we put the statue of the rhinoceros
next to the tweezers, and walk around the room three times,
learn to yodel, shave our heads, call 
our ancestors back from the dead--" 
poetrywise it's still a bust, bankrupt.
You haven't scribbled a syllable of it.
You're a nowhere man misfiring
the very essence of your life, flustering
nothing from nothing and back again.
The hereafter may not last all that long.
Radiant childhood sweetheart,
secret code of everlasting joy and sorrow, 
fanciful pen strokes beneath the eyelids:
all day, all night meditation, knot of hope,
kernel of desire, pure ordinariness of life 
seeking, through poetry, a benediction
or a bed to lie down on, to connect, reveal,
explore, to imbue meaning on the day's extravagant labor. 
And yet it's cruel to expect too much. 
It's a rare species of bird 
that refuses to be categorized.
Its song is barely audible.
It is like a dragonfly in a dream--
here, then there, then here again,
low-flying amber-wing darting upward
then out of sight.
And the dream has a pain in its heart
the wonders of which are manifold,
or so the story is told.
Written by Anne Bradstreet | Create an image from this poem

The Prologue

1

To sing of wars, of captains, and of kings,
Of cities founded, commonwealths begun,
For my mean pen, are too superior things,
And how they all, or each, their dates have run
Let poets, and historians set these forth,
My obscure verse shall not so dim their worth.


2

But when my wond'ring eyes, and envious heart,
Great Bartas' sugared lines do but read o'er,
Fool, I do grudge the Muses did not part
'Twixt him and me that overfluent store;
A Bartas can do what a Bartas will,
But simple I, according to my skill.


3

From schoolboy's tongue, no rhetoric we expect,
Nor yet a sweet consort, from broken strings,
Nor perfect beauty, where's a main defect;
My foolish, broken, blemished Muse so sings;
And this to mend, alas, no art is able,
'Cause nature made it so irreparable.


4

Nor can I, like that fluent sweet-tongued Greek
Who lisped at first, speak afterwards more plain.
By art, he gladly found what he did seek,
A full requital of his striving pain:
Art can do much, but this maxim's most sure.
A weak or wounded brain admits no cure.


5

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue,
Who says my hand a needle better fits;
A poet's pen all scorn I should thus wrong;
For such despite they cast on female wits:
If what I do prove well, it won't advance,
They'll say it's stolen, or else it was by chance.


6

But sure the antique Greeks were far more mild,
Else of our sex, why feigned they those nine,
And poesy made Calliope's own child?
So 'mongst the rest they placed the arts divine:
But this weak knot they will full soon untie,
The Greeks did nought, but play the fool and lie.


7

Let Greeks be Greeks, and women what they are,
Men have precedency, and still excel;
It is but vain, unjustly to wage war;
Men can do best, and women know it well;
Preeminence in each and all is yours,
Yet grant some small acknowledgement of ours.


8

And oh, ye high flown quills that soar the skies,
And ever with your prey, still catch your praise,
If e'er you deign these lowly lines your eyes,
Give wholesome parsley wreath, I ask no bays:
This mean and unrefinèd stuff of mine,
Will make your glistering gold but more to shine.
Written by Pablo Neruda | Create an image from this poem

Enigmas

 You've asked me what the lobster is weaving there with 
 his golden feet?
I reply, the ocean knows this.
You say, what is the ascidia waiting for in its transparent 
 bell? What is it waiting for?
I tell you it is waiting for time, like you.
You ask me whom the Macrocystis alga hugs in its arms?
Study, study it, at a certain hour, in a certain sea I know.
You question me about the wicked tusk of the narwhal, 
 and I reply by describing
how the sea unicorn with the harpoon in it dies.
You enquire about the kingfisher's feathers,
which tremble in the pure springs of the southern tides?
Or you've found in the cards a new question touching on 
 the crystal architecture
of the sea anemone, and you'll deal that to me now?
You want to understand the electric nature of the ocean 
 spines?
 The armored stalactite that breaks as it walks?
 The hook of the angler fish, the music stretched out
 in the deep places like a thread in the water?

 I want to tell you the ocean knows this, that life in its 
 jewel boxes
 is endless as the sand, impossible to count, pure,
 and among the blood-colored grapes time has made the 
 petal
 hard and shiny, made the jellyfish full of light
 and untied its knot, letting its musical threads fall
 from a horn of plenty made of infinite mother-of-pearl.

 I am nothing but the empty net which has gone on ahead
 of human eyes, dead in those darknesses,
 of fingers accustomed to the triangle, longitudes
 on the timid globe of an orange.

 I walked around as you do, investigating
 the endless star,
 and in my net, during the night, I woke up naked,
 the only thing caught, a fish trapped inside the wind.
Written by Pablo Neruda | Create an image from this poem

Love

 What's wrong with you, with us, 
what's happening to us? 
Ah our love is a harsh cord 
that binds us wounding us 
and if we want 
to leave our wound, 
to separate, 
it makes a new knot for us and condemns us 
to drain our blood and burn together. 

What's wrong with you? I look at you 
and I find nothing in you but two eyes 
like all eyes, a mouth 
lost among a thousand mouths that I have kissed, more beautiful, 
a body just like those that have slipped 
beneath my body without leaving any memory. 

And how empty you went through the world 
like a wheat-colored jar 
without air, without sound, without substance! 
I vainly sought in you 
depth for my arms 
that dig, without cease, beneath the earth: 
beneath your skin, beneath your eyes, 
nothing, 
beneath your double breast scarcely 
raised 
a current of crystalline order 
that does not know why it flows singing. 
Why, why, why, 
my love, why?
Written by Barry Tebb | Create an image from this poem

To The Sound Of Violins

 Give me life at its most garish

Friday night in the Square, pink sequins dazzle

And dance on clubbers bare to the midriff

Young men in crisp shirts and pressed pants

‘Dress code smart’ gyrate to ‘Sex Bomb, Sex Bomb’

And sing along its lyrics to the throng of which I’m one

My shorts, shoulder bag and white beard

Making me stand out in the teeming swarm

Of teens and twenties this foetid Friday night

On my way from the ward where our son paces

And fulminates I throw myself into the drowning

Tide of Friday to be rescued by sheer normality.

The mill girl with her mates asks anxiously

"Are you on your own? Come and join us

What’s your name?" Age has driven my shyness away 

As I join the crowd beneath the turning purple screens 

Bannered ‘****** lasts for ever’ and sip unending 

Halves of bitter, as I circulate among the crowd, 

Being complete in itself and out for a good night out,

A relief from factory, shop floor and market stall

Running from the reality of the ward where my son 

Pounds the ledge with his fist and seems out to blast

My very existence with words like bullets.

The need to anaesthetise the pain resurfaces 

Again and again. In Leeds City Square where 

Pugin’s church, the Black Prince and the Central Post Office

In its Edwardian grandeur are startled by the arching spumes

Or white water fountains and the steel barricades of Novotel

Rise from the ruins of a sixties office block.

I hurry past and join Boar Lane’s Friday crew

From Keighley and Dewsbury’s mills, hesitating

At the thought of being told I’m past my 

Sell-by-date and turned away by the West Indian

Bouncers, black-suited and city-council badged

Who checked my bag but smiled at ‘The Lights of 

Leeds’ and ‘Poets of Our Time’ tucked away as carefully as condoms-

Was it guns or drugs they were after

I wondered as I crossed the bare boards to the bar.

I stayed near the fruit machine which no-one played,

Where the crowd was thickest, the noise drowned out the pain

‘Sex Bomb, Sex Bomb’ the chorus rang

The girls joined in but the young men knew 

The words no more than me. Dancing as we knew it 

In the sixties has gone, you do your own thing

And follow the beat, hampered by my bag

I just kept going, letting the music and the crowd

Hold me, my camera eye moving in search, in search…

What I’m searching for I don’t know

Searching’s a way of life that has to grow

"All of us who are patients here are searchers after truth"

My son kept saying, his legs shaking from the side effects

Of God-knows- what, pacing the tiny ward kitchen cum smoking room,

Denouncing his ‘illegal section’ and ‘poisonous medication’

To an audience of one.

The prospect of TV, Seroxat and Diazepan fazed me:

I was beyond unravelling Meltzer on differentiation 

Of self and object or Rosine Josef Perelberg on ‘Dreaming and Thinking’

Or even the simpler ‘Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States’ 

So I went out with West Yorkshire on a Friday night.

Nothing dramatic happened; perhaps I’m a little too used

To acute wards or worse where chairs fly across rooms,

Windows disintegrate and double doors are triple locked

And every nurse carries a white panic button and black pager

To pinpoint the moment’s crisis. Normality was a bit of adrenaline,

A wild therapy that drew me in, sanity had won the night.

"Are you on your own, love? Come and join us"

People kept asking if I was alright and why 

I had that damned great shoulder bag. I was introduced

To three young men about to tie the knot, a handsome lothario

In his midforties winked at me constantly,

Dancing with practised ease with sixteen year olds

Who all seemed to know him and determined to show him.

Three hours passed in as many minutes and then the crowds

Disappeared to catch the last bus home. The young aren’t 

As black as they are painted, one I danced with reminded me

Of how Margaret would have been at sixteen

With straw gold hair Yeats would have immortalised.

People seemed to guess I was haunted by an inner demon

I’d tried to leave in the raftered lofts of City Square

But failed to. Girls from sixteen to twenty six kept grabbing me

And making me dance and I found my teenage inhibitions

Gone at sixty-one and wildly gyrated to ‘Sex Bomb, Sex Bomb’

Egged on by the throng by the fruit machine and continuous

Thumbs-up signs from passing men. I had to forgo

A cheerful group of Aussies were intent on taking me clubbing

"I’d get killed or turned into a pumpkin

If I get home after midnight" I quipped to their delight

But being there had somehow put things right.

Book: Reflection on the Important Things