Best Famous Stemmed Poems

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

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• All Famous Stemmed Poems

Written by Sandra Cisneros | Cloud If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. -Thich Nhat Hanh Before you became a cloud, you were an ocean, roiled and murmuring like a mouth. You were the shadows of a cloud cross- ing over a field of tulips. You were the tears of a man who cried into a plaid handkerchief. You were the sky without a hat. Your heart puffed and flowered like sheets drying on a line. And when you were a tree, you listened to the trees and the tree things trees told you. You were the wind in the wheels of a red bicycle. You were the spidery Mariatattooed on the hairless arm of a boy in dowtown Houston. You were the rain rolling off the waxy leaves of a magnolia tree. A lock of straw-colored hair wedged between the mottled pages of a Victor Hugo novel. A crescent of soap. A spider the color of a fingernail. The black nets beneath the sea of olive trees. A skein of blue wool. A tea saucer wrapped in newspaper. An empty cracker tin. A bowl of blueber- ries in heavy cream. White wine in a green-stemmed glass. And when you opened your wings to wind, across the punched- tin sky above a prison courtyard, those condemned to death and those condemned to life watched how smooth and sweet a white cloud glides.

Written by Dylan Thomas | Poem On His Birthday In the mustardseed sun, By full tilt river and switchback sea Where the cormorants scud, In his house on stilts high among beaks And palavers of birds This sandgrain day in the bent bay's grave He celebrates and spurns His driftwood thirty-fifth wind turned age; Herons spire and spear. Under and round him go Flounders, gulls, on their cold, dying trails, Doing what they are told, Curlews aloud in the congered waves Work at their ways to death, And the rhymer in the long tongued room, Who tolls his birthday bell, Toils towards the ambush of his wounds; Herons, steeple stemmed, bless. In the thistledown fall, He sings towards anguish; finches fly In the claw tracks of hawks On a seizing sky; small fishes glide Through wynds and shells of drowned Ship towns to pastures of otters. He In his slant, racking house And the hewn coils of his trade perceives Herons walk in their shroud, The livelong river's robe Of minnows wreathing around their prayer; And far at sea he knows, Who slaves to his crouched, eternal end Under a serpent cloud, Dolphins dive in their turnturtle dust, The rippled seals streak down To kill and their own tide daubing blood Slides good in the sleek mouth. In a cavernous, swung Wave's silence, wept white angelus knells. Thirty-five bells sing struck On skull and scar where his loves lie wrecked, Steered by the falling stars. And to-morrow weeps in a blind cage Terror will rage apart Before chains break to a hammer flame And love unbolts the dark And freely he goes lost In the unknown, famous light of great And fabulous, dear God. Dark is a way and light is a place, Heaven that never was Nor will be ever is always true, And, in that brambled void, Plenty as blackberries in the woods The dead grow for His joy. There he might wander bare With the spirits of the horseshoe bay Or the stars' seashore dead, Marrow of eagles, the roots of whales And wishbones of wild geese, With blessed, unborn God and His Ghost, And every soul His priest, Gulled and chanter in young Heaven's fold Be at cloud quaking peace, But dark is a long way. He, on the earth of the night, alone With all the living, prays, Who knows the rocketing wind will blow The bones out of the hills, And the scythed boulders bleed, and the last Rage shattered waters kick Masts and fishes to the still quick starts, Faithlessly unto Him Who is the light of old And air shaped Heaven where souls grow wild As horses in the foam: Oh, let me midlife mourn by the shrined And druid herons' vows The voyage to ruin I must run, Dawn ships clouted aground, Yet, though I cry with tumbledown tongue, Count my blessings aloud: Four elements and five Senses, and man a spirit in love Tangling through this spun slime To his nimbus bell cool kingdom come And the lost, moonshine domes, And the sea that hides his secret selves Deep in its black, base bones, Lulling of spheres in the seashell flesh, And this last blessing most, That the closer I move To death, one man through his sundered hulks, The louder the sun blooms And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults; And every wave of the way And gale I tackle, the whole world then, With more triumphant faith That ever was since the world was said, Spins its morning of praise, I hear the bouncing hills Grow larked and greener at berry brown Fall and the dew larks sing Taller this thunderclap spring, and how More spanned with angles ride The mansouled fiery islands! Oh, Holier then their eyes, And my shining men no more alone As I sail out to die.

Written by Robert William Service | My Son I must not let my boy Dick down, Knight of the air. With wings of light he won renown Then crashed somewhere. To fly to France from London town I do not dare. Oh he was such a simple lad Who loved the sky; A modern day Sir Galahad, No need to die: Earthbound he might have been so glad, Yet chose to fly. I ask from where his courage stemmed? I've never flown; Air-travel I have oft condemned,-- Now I'm alone, Yet somehow hold the bright belief God gave his brief. So now I must live up to him Who won on high A lustre time will never dim; Though coward I, Let me revere till life be done My hero son.

Written by Mac Hammond | Halloween The butcher knife goes in, first, at the top And carves out the round stemmed lid, The hole of which allows the hand to go In to pull the gooey mess inside, out - The walls scooped clean with a spoon. A grim design decided on, that afternoon, The eyes are the first to go, Isosceles or trapezoid, the square nose, The down-turned mouth with three Hideous teeth and, sometimes, Round ears. At dusk it's Lighted, the room behind it dark. Outside, looking in, it looks like a Pumpkin, it looks like ripeness Is all. Kids come, beckoned by Fingers of shadows on leaf-strewn lawns To trick or treat. Standing at the open Door, the sculptor, a warlock, drops Penny candies into their bags, knowing The message of winter: only the children, Pretending to be ghosts, are real.

Written by Robert Frost | Ghost House I DWELL in a lonely house I know That vanished many a summer ago, And left no trace but the cellar walls, And a cellar in which the daylight falls, And the purple-stemmed wild raspberries grow. O'er ruined fences the grape-vines shield The woods come back to the mowing field; The orchard tree has grown one copse Of new wood and old where the woodpecker chops; The footpath down to the well is healed. I dwell with a strangely aching heart In that vanished abode there far apart On that disused and forgotten road That has no dust-bath now for the toad. Night comes; the black bats tumble and dart; The whippoorwill is coming to shout And hush and cluck and flutter about: I hear him begin far enough away Full many a time to say his say Before he arrives to say it out. It is under the small, dim, summer star. I know not who these mute folk are Who share the unlit place with me-- Those stones out under the low-limbed tree Doubtless bear names that the mosses mar. They are tireless folk, but slow and sad, Though two, close-keeping, are lass and lad,-- With none among them that ever sings, And yet, in view of how many things, As sweet companions as might be had.

Written by Conrad Aiken | The House Of Dust: Part 04: 06: Cinema As evening falls, The walls grow luminous and warm, the walls Tremble and glow with the lives within them moving, Moving like music, secret and rich and warm. How shall we live to-night, where shall we turn? To what new light or darkness yearn? A thousand winding stairs lead down before us; And one by one in myriads we descend By lamplit flowered walls, long balustrades, Through half-lit halls which reach no end. . . . Take my arm, then, you or you or you, And let us walk abroad on the solid air: Look how the organist's head, in silhouette, Leans to the lamplit music's orange square! . . . The dim-globed lamps illumine rows of faces, Rows of hands and arms and hungry eyes, They have hurried down from a myriad secret places, From windy chambers next to the skies. . . . The music comes upon us. . . .it shakes the darkness, It shakes the darkness in our minds. . . . And brilliant figures suddenly fill the darkness, Down the white shaft of light they run through darkness, And in our hearts a dazzling dream unwinds . . . Take my hand, then, walk with me By the slow soundless crashings of a sea Down miles on miles of glistening mirrorlike sand,— Take my hand And walk with me once more by crumbling walls; Up mouldering stairs where grey-stemmed ivy clings, To hear forgotten bells, as evening falls, Rippling above us invisibly their slowly widening rings. . . . Did you once love me? Did you bear a name? Did you once stand before me without shame? . . . Take my hand: your face is one I know, I loved you, long ago: You are like music, long forgotten, suddenly come to mind; You are like spring returned through snow. Once, I know, I walked with you in starlight, And many nights I slept and dreamed of you; Come, let us climb once more these stairs of starlight, This midnight stream of cloud-flung blue! . . . Music murmurs beneath us like a sea, And faints to a ghostly whisper . . . Come with me. Are you still doubtful of me—hesitant still, Fearful, perhaps, that I may yet remember What you would gladly, if you could, forget? You were unfaithful once, you met your lover; Still in your heart you bear that red-eyed ember; And I was silent,—you remember my silence yet . . . You knew, as well as I, I could not kill him, Nor touch him with hot hands, nor yet with hate. No, and it was not you I saw with anger. Instead, I rose and beat at steel-walled fate, Cried till I lay exhausted, sick, unfriended, That life, so seeming sure, and love, so certain, Should loose such tricks, be so abruptly ended, Ring down so suddenly an unlooked-for curtain. How could I find it in my heart to hurt you, You, whom this love could hurt much more than I? No, you were pitiful, and I gave you pity; And only hated you when I saw you cry. We were two dupes; if I could give forgiveness,— Had I the right,—I should forgive you now . . . We were two dupes . . . Come, let us walk in starlight, And feed our griefs: we do not break, but bow. Take my hand, then, come with me By the white shadowy crashings of a sea . . . Look how the long volutes of foam unfold To spread their mottled shimmer along the sand! . . . Take my hand, Do not remember how these depths are cold, Nor how, when you are dead, Green leagues of sea will glimmer above your head. You lean your face upon your hands and cry, The blown sand whispers about your feet, Terrible seems it now to die,— Terrible now, with life so incomplete, To turn away from the balconies and the music, The sunlit afternoons, To hear behind you there a far-off laughter Lost in a stirring of sand among dry dunes . . . Die not sadly, you whom life has beaten! Lift your face up, laughing, die like a queen! Take cold flowers of foam in your warm white fingers! Death's but a change of sky from blue to green . . . As evening falls, The walls grow luminous and warm, the walls Tremble and glow . . . the music breathes upon us, The rayed white shaft plays over our heads like magic, And to and fro we move and lean and change . . . You, in a world grown strange, Laugh at a darkness, clench your hands despairing, Smash your glass on a floor, no longer caring, Sink suddenly down and cry . . . You hear the applause that greets your latest rival, You are forgotten: your rival—who knows?—is I . . . I laugh in the warm bright light of answering laughter, I am inspired and young . . . and though I see You sitting alone there, dark, with shut eyes crying, I bask in the light, and in your hate of me . . . Failure . . . well, the time comes soon or later . . . The night must come . . . and I'll be one who clings, Desperately, to hold the applause, one instant,— To keep some youngster waiting in the wings. The music changes tone . . . a room is darkened, Someone is moving . . . the crack of white light widens, And all is dark again; till suddenly falls A wandering disk of light on floor and walls, Winks out, returns again, climbs and descends, Gleams on a clock, a glass, shrinks back to darkness; And then at last, in the chaos of that place, Dazzles like frozen fire on your clear face. Well, I have found you. We have met at last. Now you shall not escape me: in your eyes I see the horrible huddlings of your past,— All you remember blackens, utters cries, Reaches far hands and faint. I hold the light Close to your cheek, watch the pained pupils shrink,— Watch the vile ghosts of all you vilely think . . . Now all the hatreds of my life have met To hold high carnival . . . we do not speak, My fingers find the well-loved throat they seek, And press, and fling you down . . . and then forget. Who plays for me? What sudden drums keep time To the ecstatic rhythm of my crime? What flute shrills out as moonlight strikes the floor? . . What violin so faintly cries Seeing how strangely in the moon he lies? . . . The room grows dark once more, The crack of white light narrows around the door, And all is silent, except a slow complaining Of flutes and violins, like music waning. Take my hand, then, walk with me By the slow soundless crashings of a sea . . . Look, how white these shells are, on this sand! Take my hand, And watch the waves run inward from the sky Line upon foaming line to plunge and die. The music that bound our lives is lost behind us, Paltry it seems . . . here in this wind-swung place Motionless under the sky's vast vault of azure We stand in a terror of beauty, face to face. The dry grass creaks in the wind, the blown sand whispers, The soft sand seethes on the dunes, the clear grains glisten, Once they were rock . . . a chaos of golden boulders . . . Now they are blown by the wind . . . we stand and listen To the sliding of grain upon timeless grain And feel our lives go past like a whisper of pain. Have I not seen you, have we not met before Here on this sun-and-sea-wrecked shore? You shade your sea-gray eyes with a sunlit hand And peer at me . . . far sea-gulls, in your eyes, Flash in the sun, go down . . . I hear slow sand, And shrink to nothing beneath blue brilliant skies . . . * * * * * The music ends. The screen grows dark. We hurry To go our devious secret ways, forgetting Those many lives . . . We loved, we laughed, we killed, We danced in fire, we drowned in a whirl of sea-waves. The flutes are stilled, and a thousand dreams are stilled. Whose body have I found beside dark waters, The cold white body, garlanded with sea-weed? Staring with wide eyes at the sky? I bent my head above it, and cried in silence. Only the things I dreamed of heard my cry. Once I loved, and she I loved was darkened. Again I loved, and love itself was darkened. Vainly we follow the circle of shadowy days. The screen at last grows dark, the flutes are silent. The doors of night are closed. We go our ways.

Written by Martin Armstrong | Honey Harvest Late in March, when the days are growing longer And sight of early green Tells of the coming spring and suns grow stronger, Round the pale willow-catkins there are seen The year's first honey-bees Stealing the nectar: and bee-masters know This for the first sign of the honey-flow. Then in the dark hillsides the Cherry-trees Gleam white with loads of blossom where the gleams Of piled snow lately hung, and richer streams The honey. Now, if chilly April days Delay the Apple-blossom, and the May's First week come in with sudden summer weather, The Apple and the Hawthorn bloom together, And all day long the plundering hordes go round And every overweighted blossom nods. But from that gathered essence they compound Honey more sweet than nectar of the gods. Those blossoms fall ere June, warm June that brings The small white Clover. Field by scented field, Round farms like islands in the rolling weald, It spreads thick-flowering or in wildness springs Short-stemmed upon the naked downs, to yield A richer store of honey than the Rose, The Pink, the Honeysuckle. Thence there flows Nectar of clearest amber, redolent Of every flowery scent That the warm wind upgathers as he goes. In mid-July be ready for the noise Of million bees in old Lime-avenues, As though hot noon had found a droning voice To ease her soul. Here for those busy crews Green leaves and pale-stemmed clusters of green strong flowers Build heavy-perfumed, cool, green-twilight bowers Whence, load by load, through the long summer days They fill their glassy cells With dark green honey, clear as chrysoprase, Which housewives shun; but the bee-master tells This brand is more delicious than all else. In August-time, if moors are near at hand, Be wise and in the evening-twilight load Your hives upon a cart, and take the road By night: that, ere the early dawn shall spring And all the hills turn rosy with the Ling, Each waking hive may stand Established in its new-appointed land Without harm taken, and the earliest flights Set out at once to loot the heathery heights. That vintage of the Heather yields so dense And glutinous a syrup that it foils Him who would spare the comb and drain from thence Its dark, full-flavoured spoils: For he must squeeze to wreck the beautiful Frail edifice. Not otherwise he sacks Those many-chambered palaces of wax. Then let a choice of every kind be made, And, labelled, set upon your storehouse racks — Of Hawthorn-honey that of almond smacks: The luscious Lime-tree-honey, green as jade: Pale Willow-honey, hived by the first rover: That delicate honey culled From Apple-blossom, that of sunlight tastes: And sunlight-coloured honey of the Clover. Then, when the late year wastes, When night falls early and the noon is dulled And the last warm days are over, Unlock the store and to your table bring Essence of every blossom of the spring. And if, when wind has never ceased to blow All night, you wake to roofs and trees becalmed In level wastes of snow, Bring out the Lime-tree-honey, the embalmed Soul of a lost July, or Heather-spiced Brown-gleaming comb wherein sleeps crystallised All the hot perfume of the heathery slope. And, tasting and remembering, live in hope.

Written by Robert William Service | Work When twenty-one I loved to dream, And was to loafing well inclined; Somehow I couldn't get up steam To welcome work of any kind. While students burned the midnight lamp, With dour ambition as their goad, I longed to be a gayful tramp And greet adventure on the road. But now that sixty years have sped, Behold! I toil from morn to night. The thoughts that teem into my head I pray: God give me time to write. With eager and unflagging pen No drudgery of desk I shirk, And preach to all retiring men The gospel of unceasing work. And yet I do not sadly grieve Such squandering of golden days; For from my dreaming I believe Have stemmed my least unworthy lays. Aye, toil is best when all is said, As age has made me understand . . . So fitly fold, when I am dead, A pencil in my hand.

Written by Les Murray | Cockspur Bush I am lived. I am died. I was two-leafed three times, and grazed, but then I was stemmed and multiplied, sharp-thorned and caned, nested and raised, earth-salt by sun-sugar. I was innerly sung by thrushes who need fear no eyed skin thing. Finched, ant-run, flowered, I am given the years in now fewer berries, now more of sling out over directions of luscious dung. Of water crankshaft, of gases the gears my shape is cattle-pruned to a crown spread sprung above the starve-gut instinct to make prairies of everywhere. My thorns are stuck with caries of mice and rank lizards by the butcher bird. Inches in, baby seed-screamers get supplied. I am lived and died in, vine woven, multiplied.

Written by Robert William Service | Little Puddleton I Let others sing of Empire and of pomp beyond the sea, A song of Little Puddleton is good enough for me, A song of kindly living, and of coming home to tea. I seldom read the papers, so I don't know what goes on. I go to bed at sunset, and I leap alert at dawn, To gossip with my garden, which I'll have you understand, Is the neatest and the sweetest little garden in the land; A span of sunny quietude, with walls so high and stout, They shut me in from all the world, and shut the whole world out, So that its sad bewilderment seems less than true to me: As placid as a pool I live, as tranquil as a tree; And all its glory I would give for glint of linnet's wings; My cabbages are more to me than continents and kings. Dominion have I of my own, where feud and faction cease, A heaven of tranquillity, a paradise of peace. II Let continents be bathed in blood and cities leap in flame; The life of Little Puddleton goes on and on the same; Its ritual we follow, as we play a pleasant game. The village wortkies sit and smoke their long-stemmed pipes of clay. And cheerily they nod to me, and pass the time of day. We talk of pigs and clover, and the prospect of the crops, And the price of eggs and butter - there the conversation drops. For in a doubt-distracted world I keep the rustic touch; I think it better not to think too deeply nor too much; But just to dream and take delight in all I hear and see, The tinker in the tavern, with his trollop on his knee; The ivied church, the anvil clang, the geese upon the green, The drowsy noon, the hush of eve so holy and screne. This is my world, then back again with heart of joy I go To cottage walls of mellow stain, and garden all aglow. III For all I've been and all I've seen I have no vain regret One comes to Little Puddleton, contented to forget; Accepting village values, immemorially set. I did not make this world and so it's not my job to mend; But I have fought for fifty years and now I hear the end; And I am heart-faint from the fight, and claim the right to rest, And dare to hope the last of life will prove to be the best. For there have I four sturdy walls with low and humble thatch, A smiling little orchard and a big potato patch. And so with hoe in hand I stand and mock the dubious sky; let revolution rock the land, serene, secure am I. I grow my simple food, I groom my lettuce and my beans; I feast in colour, form and song, and ask not what it means. Beauty suffiices in itself; then when my strength is spent, like simple hind with empty mind, I cultivate content. Behold then Little Puddleton, the end of all my dreams. Not much to show for life, I know; yet O how sweet it seems! For when defeated day goes down in carnage in the West, How blesses sanctuary is, and peace and love and rest!