Get Your Premium Membership

Best Famous Mural Poems

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

Search and read the best famous Mural poems, articles about Mural poems, poetry blogs, or anything else Mural poem related using the PoetrySoup search engine at the top of the page.

See Also:
Written by Mark Doty | Create an image from this poem

The Ancient World

 Today the Masons are auctioning 
their discarded pomp: a trunk of turbans, 
gemmed and ostrich-plumed, and operetta costumes 
labeled inside the collar "Potentate" 
and "Vizier." Here their chairs, blazoned 
with the Masons' sign, huddled 
like convalescents, lean against one another 

on the grass. In a casket are rhinestoned poles 
the hierophants carried in parades; 
here's a splendid golden staff some ranking officer waved, 
topped with a golden pyramid and a tiny, 
inquisitive sphinx. No one's worn this stuff 
for years, and it doesn't seem worth buying; 
where would we put it? Still, 

I want that staff. I used to love 
to go to the library -- the smalltown brick refuge 
of those with nothing to do, really, 
'Carnegie' chiseled on the pediment 
above columns that dwarfed an inconsequential street. 
Embarrassed to carry the same book past 
the water fountain's plaster centaurs 

up to the desk again, I'd take 
The Wonders of the World to the Reading Room 
where Art and Industry met in the mural 
on the dome. The room smelled like two decades 
before I was born, when the name 
carved over the door meant something. 
I never read the second section, 

"Wonders of the Modern World"; 
I loved the promise of my father's blueprints, 
the unfulfilled turquoise schemes, 
but in the real structures 
you could hardly imagine a future. 
I wanted the density of history, 
which I confused with the smell of the book: 

Babylon's ziggurat tropical with ferns, 
engraved watercourses rippling; 
the Colossus of Rhodes balanced 
over the harbormouth on his immense ankles. 
Athena filled one end of the Parthenon, 
in an "artist's reconstruction", 
like an adult in a dollhouse. 

At Halicarnassus, Mausolus remembered himself 
immensely, though in the book 
there wasn't even a sketch, 
only a picture of huge fragments. 
In the pyramid's deep clockworks, 
did the narrow tunnels mount toward 
the eye of God? That was the year 

photos were beamed back from space; 
falling asleep I used to repeat a new word 
to myself, telemetry, liking the way 
it seemed to allude to something storied. 
The earth was whorled marble, 
at that distance. Even the stuck-on porticoes 
and collonades downtown were narrative, 

somehow, but the buildings my father engineered 
were without stories. All I wanted 
was something larger than our ordinary sadness -- 
greater not in scale but in context, 
memorable, true to a proportioned, 
subtle form. Last year I knew a student, 
a half mad boy who finally opened his arms 

with a razor, not because he wanted to die 
but because he wanted to design something grand 
on his own body. Once he said, When a child 
realizes his parents aren't enough,
he turns to architecture. 
I think I know what he meant. 
Imagine the Masons parading, 

one of them, in his splendid get-up, 
striding forward with the golden staff, 
above his head Cheops' beautiful shape -- 
a form we cannot separate 
from the stories about the form, 
even if we hardly know them, 
even if it no longer signifies, if it only shines.


Written by Randall Jarrell | Create an image from this poem

Children Selecting Books In A Library

 With beasts and gods, above, the wall is bright.
The child's head, bent to the book-colored shelves,
Is slow and sidelong and food-gathering,
Moving in blind grace ... yet from the mural, Care
The grey-eyed one, fishing the morning mist,
Seizes the baby hero by the hair
And whispers, in the tongue of gods and children,
Words of a doom as ecumenical as dawn
But blanched like dawn, with dew.
The children's cries
Are to men the cries of crickets, dense with warmth
-- But dip a finger into Fafnir, taste it,
And all their words are plain as chance and pain.
Their tales are full of sorcerers and ogres
Because their lives are: the capricious infinite
That, like parents, no one has yet escaped
Except by luck or magic; and since strength
And wit are useless, be kind or stupid, wait
Some power's gratitude, the tide of things.
Read meanwhile ... hunt among the shelves, as dogs do, grasses,
And find one cure for Everychild's diseases
Beginning: Once upon a time there was
A wolf that fed, a mouse that warned, a bear that rode
A boy. Us men, alas! wolves, mice, bears bore.
And yet wolves, mice, bears, children, gods and men
In slow preambulation up and down the shelves
Of the universe are seeking ... who knows except themselves?
What some escape to, some escape: if we find Swann's
Way better than our own, an trudge on at the back
Of the north wind to -- to -- somewhere east
Of the sun, west of the moon, it is because we live
By trading another's sorrow for our own; another's
Impossibilities, still unbelieved in, for our own ...
"I am myself still?" For a little while, forget:
The world's selves cure that short disease, myself,
And we see bending to us, dewy-eyed, the great
CHANGE, dear to all things not to themselves endeared.
Written by Sharon Olds | Create an image from this poem

A Week Later

 A week later, I said to a friend: I don't
think I could ever write about it.
Maybe in a year I could write something.
There is something in me maybe someday
to be written; now it is folded, and folded,
and folded, like a note in school. And in my dream
someone was playing jacks, and in the air there was a
huge, thrown, tilted jack
on fire. And when I woke up, I found myself
counting the days since I had last seen
my husband-only two years, and some weeks,
and hours. We had signed the papers and come down to the
ground floor of the Chrysler Building,
the intact beauty of its lobby around us
like a king's tomb, on the ceiling the little
painted plane, in the mural, flying. And it
entered my strictured heart, this morning,
slightly, shyly as if warily,
untamed, a greater sense of the sweetness
and plenty of his ongoing life,
unknown to me, unseen by me,
unheard, untouched-but known, seen,
heard, touched. And it came to me,
for moments at a time, moment after moment,
to be glad for him that he is with the one
he feels was meant for him. And I thought of my
mother, minutes from her death, eighty-five
years from her birth, the almost warbler
bones of her shoulder under my hand, the
eggshell skull, as she lay in some peace
in the clean sheets, and I could tell her the best
of my poor, partial love, I could sing her
out with it, I saw the luck
and luxury of that hour.
Written by Vachel Lindsay | Create an image from this poem

Yankee Doodle

 This poem is intended as a description of a sort of Blashfield mural painting on the sky. To be sung to the tune of Yankee Doodle, yet in a slower, more orotund fashion. It is presumably an exercise for an entertainment on the evening of Washington's Birthday.


Dawn this morning burned all red
Watching them in wonder.
There I saw our spangled flag
Divide the clouds asunder.
Then there followed Washington.
Ah, he rode from glory,
Cold and mighty as his name
And stern as Freedom's story.
Unsubdued by burning dawn
Led his continentals.
Vast they were, and strange to see
In gray old regimentals:—
Marching still with bleeding feet,
Bleeding feet and jesting—
Marching from the judgment throne
With energy unresting.
How their merry quickstep played—
Silver, sharp, sonorous,
Piercing through with prophecy
The demons' rumbling chorus—
Behold the ancient powers of sin
And slavery before them!—
Sworn to stop the glorious dawn,
The pit-black clouds hung o'er them.
Plagues that rose to blast the day
Fiend and tiger faces,
Monsters plotting bloodshed for
The patient toiling races.
Round the dawn their cannon raged,
Hurling bolts of thunder,
Yet before our spangled flag
Their host was cut asunder.
Like a mist they fled away. . . .
Ended wrath and roaring.
Still our restless soldier-host
From East to West went pouring.

High beside the sun of noon
They bore our banner splendid.
All its days of stain and shame
And heaviness were ended.
Men were swelling now the throng
From great and lowly station—
Valiant citizens to-day
Of every tribe and nation.
Not till night their rear-guard came,
Down the west went marching,
And left behind the sunset-rays
In beauty overarching.
War-god banners lead us still,
Rob, enslave and harry
Let us rather choose to-day
The flag the angels carry—
Flag we love, but brighter far—
Soul of it made splendid:
Let its days of stain and shame
And heaviness be ended.
Let its fifes fill all the sky,
Redeemed souls marching after,
Hills and mountains shake with song,
While seas roll on in laughter.
Written by Du Fu | Create an image from this poem

In Abbot Zan's Room at Dayun Temple: Four Poems (2)

Thin soft green silk shoe Shine bright white cotton scarf Deep store for old elder Fetch use for my body Self look change without interest Friendship how still new Daolin talent not age Huiyuan virtue surpass man Rain pour dusk eaves bamboo Wind blow green well celery Heaven dark face picture Most feel moist dragon scale
Fine green silk shoes, Bright white cotton scarves, Deep in storage for the elders, Fetched to wear upon my body. I see myself as old and dull, How can our friendship stay so fresh? Daolin's talents exceed the age, Huiyuan's virtue's superhuman. Rain-drenched bamboo by the eaves at dusk; Wind in green celery at the well; The sky dark, I face a mural, Most feeling the damp of the dragon's scales.


Written by Thomas Hardy | Create an image from this poem

Rome: On the Palatine

 We walked where Victor Jove was shrined awhile, 
And passed to Livia's rich red mural show, 
Whence, thridding cave and Criptoportico, 
We gained Caligula's dissolving pile. 

And each ranked ruin tended to beguile 
The outer sense, and shape itself as though 
It wore its marble hues, its pristine glow 
Of scenic frieze and pompous peristyle. 

When lo, swift hands, on strings nigh over-head, 
Began to melodize a waltz by Strauss: 
It stirred me as I stood, in Caesar's house, 
Raised the old routs Imperial lyres had led, 

And blended pulsing life with lives long done, 
Till Time seemed fiction, Past and Present one.
Written by Thomas Hardy | Create an image from this poem

Rom: On the Palatine

 We walked where Victor Jove was shrined awhile, 
And passed to Livia's rich red mural show, 
Whence, thridding cave and Criptoportico, 
We gained Caligula's dissolving pile. 

And each ranked ruin tended to beguile 
The outer sense, and shape itself as though 
It wore its marble hues, its pristine glow 
Of scenic frieze and pompous peristyle. 

When lo, swift hands, on strings nigh over-head, 
Began to melodize a waltz by Strauss: 
It stirred me as I stood, in Caesar's house, 
Raised the old routs Imperial lyres had led, 

And blended pulsing life with lives long done, 
Till Time seemed fiction, Past and Present one.

Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry