10 Best Famous Monet Poems

Here is a collection of the top 10 all-time best famous Monet poems. This is a select list of the best famous Monet poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Monet poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of monet poems.

• All Famous Monet Poems

At gauzy dusk, thin haze like cigarette smoke 
ribbons past Chrysler Building's silver fins 
tapering delicately needletopped, Empire State's 
taller antenna filmed milky lit amid blocks 
black and white apartmenting veil'd sky over Manhattan, 
offices new built dark glassed in blueish heaven--The East 
50's & 60's covered with castles & watertowers, seven storied 
tar-topped house-banks over York Avenue, late may-green trees 
surrounding Rockefellers' blue domed medical arbor-- 
Geodesic science at the waters edge--Cars running up 
East River Drive, & parked at N.Y. Hospital's oval door 
where perfect tulips flower the health of a thousand sick souls 
trembling inside hospital rooms. Triboro bridge steel-spiked 
penthouse orange roofs, sunset tinges the river and in a few 
Bronx windows, some magnesium vapor brilliances're 
spotted five floors above E 59th St under grey painted bridge 
trestles. Way downstream along the river, as Monet saw Thames 
100 years ago, Con Edison smokestacks 14th street, 
& Brooklyn Bridge's skeined dim in modern mists-- 
Pipes sticking up to sky nine smokestacks huge visible-- 
U.N. Building hangs under an orange crane, & red lights on 
vertical avenues below the trees turn green at the nod 
of a skull with a mild nerve ache. Dim dharma, I return 
to this spectacle after weeks of poisoned lassitude, my thighs 
belly chest & arms covered with poxied welts, 
head pains fading back of the neck, right eyebrow cheek 
mouth paralyzed--from taking the wrong medicine, sweated 
too much in the forehead helpless, covered my rage from 
gorge to prostate with grinding jaw and tightening anus 
not released the weeping scream of horror at robot Mayaguez 
World self ton billions metal grief unloaded 
Pnom Penh to Nakon Thanom, Santiago & Tehran. 
Fresh warm breeze in the window, day's release 
>from pain, cars float downside the bridge trestle 
and uncounted building-wall windows multiplied a mile 
deep into ash-delicate sky beguile 
my empty mind. A seagull passes alone wings 
spread silent over roofs. 

- May 20, 1975 Mayaguez Crisis 

 Mornings like this I awaken and wonder

How I have moved so far, how I have moved so little

And yet in essence stayed the same

Always passionate for the unattainable

For Joan Baez to make me her analyst,

To tour Ireland with Eddie and Finbar Furey

To be made a Chevalier des Palmes for translating Milosz.

I remember one road, many roads I did not take

And my heart lurches and my stomach turns

At the vertigo of mystery

At the simplicity of childhood

And its melancholy

At the silence of the moors

Beckoning, unreachable, tormenting me

As I lie helpless at the border of infirmity

With my soul burning and brimming over

With adolescent passion.

Only analysis with its symmetries and asymmetries

Exactness and paradox, scientific as Heisenberg's

Principle of Uncertainty, yet various as the shades of Monet,

Eases me.

I think of those I have known and know no longer,

Who have died needlessly, disappeared irrevocably

Or changed beyond recognition.

I think of the bridge, river and streets

Of my Montmartre, gone under and made over

Into the grey utilities of trade, the empty road,

Sad as telegraph poles, my Sacr? Coeur silent and boarded up.

My Seine empty of the barges of D?rain

My Sorbonne absorbed, its students gone

Mornings like this, I awaken and wonder.

 Aye, Montecelli, that's the name.
You may have heard of him perhaps.
Yet though he never savoured fame,
Of those impressionistic chaps,
Monet and Manet and Renoir
 He was the avatar.

He festered in a Marseilles slum,
A starving genius, god-inspired.
You'd take him for a lousy bum,
Tho' poetry of paint he lyred,
In dreamy pastels each a gem: . . .
 How people laughed at them!

He peddled paint from bar to bar;
From sordid rags a jewel shone,
A glow of joy and colour far
From filth of fortune woe-begone.
'Just twenty francs,' he shyly said,
 'To take me drunk to bed.'

Of Van Gogh and Cezanne a peer;
In dreams of ecstasy enskied,
A genius and a pioneer,
Poor, paralysed and mad he died:
Yet by all who hold Beauty dear
 May he be glorified!

 Why is it that in dreams I have visited -

As teacher or pupil - almost every college and school

In our once so green and pleasant land?

Hardly a subject from art to anthropology I have not

In dream seminar or floating spinning classroom

Studied or tried my prentice hand at, or learned

At the sandalled feet of some guru; as this minute

I returned from an easeled art room with the title

Of my weekly essay, ‘Discuss the links between the work

Of any symbolist poet and Monet.’

O, how slowly I drifted back to consciousness

Probing delightedly the dizzying whitenesses of Mallarm?

Strolling along an avenue of linden trees

Under a Provencal sky of azure

Wet with the scent of jasmine and lavender.

Yet in reality, things could hardly have been more different:

Watching our children grow from their first tottering steps,

Helping to tend them in sickness, learning the basics

Of the healer’s art, taking an old man to a ward,

Listening, listening to how many troubled lives

And to my own, perhaps; seeking to tease a meaning

Or find a thread in the jumbled maze of sorrows

Souls in their turbulence and grief have wandered through.

I even wrote a novel, ‘A Gone World’ I called it,

And helped another with the birth-pangs of her own.

Trying my hand at translation I puzzled the subtle

Metaphors of Reverdy, wandering his midnight landscapes

Of windmills and cross-roads where faith meets fate

And neither will succumb.

I sat in a packed lecture hall while a Lacanian

Misread early Freud through a crooked lens

And for a year turned every seminar to war

To make him see his vision’s fatal flaw.

I poured over cabinets of case histories,

Tried living here and there and met an amah,

Teaching her Auden and Empson. Her tears mingled

With my own at our last hurried meeting

In a crowded tea room, teaching her Klein.

I sat through many a summer watching the children play,

Feeling a hermit’s contentment in his cave,

Contemplating Plato and envisioning that cave

Of his where shadows move against the wall;

And turn to see or fail to see

The need to turn at all.

 Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolves
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair 
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands 
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.