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Best Famous Windowed Poems

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

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Written by William Butler Yeats | Create an image from this poem

Ego Dominus Tuus

 Hic.
On the grey sand beside the shallow stream Under your old wind-beaten tower, where still A lamp burns on beside the open book That Michael Robartes left, you walk in the moon, And, though you have passed the best of life, still trace, Enthralled by the unconquerable delusion, Magical shapes.
Ille.
By the help of an image I call to my own opposite, summon all That I have handled least, least looked upon.
Hic.
And I would find myself and not an image.
Ille.
That is our modern hope, and by its light We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind And lost the old nonchalance of the hand; Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush, We are but critics, or but half create, Timid, entangled, empty and abashed, Lacking the countenance of our friends.
Hic.
And yet The chief imagination of Christendom, Dante Alighieri, so utterly found himself That he has made that hollow face of his More plain to the mind's eye than any face But that of Christ.
Ille.
And did he find himself Or was the hunger that had made it hollow A hunger for the apple on the bough Most out of reach? and is that spectral image The man that Lapo and that Guido knew? I think he fashioned from his opposite An image that might have been a stony face Staring upon a Bedouin's horse-hair roof From doored and windowed cliff, or half upturned Among the coarse grass and the camel-dung.
He set his chisel to the hardest stone.
Being mocked by Guido for his lecherous life, Derided and deriding, driven out To climb that stair and eat that bitter bread, He found the unpersuadable justice, he found The most exalted lady loved by a man.
Hic.
Yet surely there are men who have made their art Out of no tragic war, lovers of life, Impulsive men that look for happiness And sing when t"hey have found it.
Ille.
No, not sing, For those that love the world serve it in action, Grow rich, popular and full of influence, And should they paint or write, still it is action: The struggle of the fly in marmalade.
The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours, The sentimentalist himself; while art Is but a vision of reality.
What portion in the world can the artist have Who has awakened from the common dream But dissipation and despair? Hic.
And yet No one denies to Keats love of the world; Remember his deliberate happiness.
Ille.
His art is happy, but who knows his mind? I see a schoolboy when I think of him, With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window, For certainly he sank into his grave His senses and his heart unsatisfied, And made - being poor, ailing and ignorant, Shut out from all the luxury of the world, The coarse-bred son of a livery-stable keeper -- Luxuriant song.
Hic.
Why should you leave the lamp Burning alone beside an open book, And trace these characters upon the sands? A style is found by sedentary toil And by the imitation of great masters.
Ille.
Because I seek an image, not a book.
Those men that in their writings are most wise, Own nothing but their blind, stupefied hearts.
I call to the mysterious one who yet Shall walk the wet sands by the edge of the stream And look most like me, being indeed my double, And prove of all imaginable things The most unlike, being my anti-self, And, standing by these characters, disclose All that I seek; and whisper it as though He were afraid the birds, who cry aloud Their momentary cries before it is dawn, Would carry it away to blasphemous men.


Written by Amy Clampitt | Create an image from this poem

A Hedge Of Rubber Trees

 The West Village by then was changing; before long
the rundown brownstones at its farthest edge
would have slipped into trendier hands.
She lived, impervious to trends, behind a potted hedge of rubber trees, with three cats, a canary—refuse from whose cage kept sifting down and then germinating, a yearning seedling choir, around the saucers on the windowsill—and an inexorable cohort of roaches she was too nearsighted to deal with, though she knew they were there, and would speak of them, ruefully, as of an affliction that might once, long ago, have been prevented.
Unclassifiable castoffs, misfits, marginal cases: when you're one yourself, or close to it, there's a reassurance in proving you haven't quite gone under by taking up with somebody odder than you are.
Or trying to.
"They're my friends," she'd say of her cats—Mollie, Mitzi and Caroline, their names were, and she was forever taking one or another in a cab to the vet—as though she had no others.
The roommate who'd become a nun, the one who was Jewish, the couple she'd met on a foliage tour, one fall, were all people she no longer saw.
She worked for a law firm, said all the judges were alcoholic, had never voted.
But would sometimes have me to dinner—breaded veal, white wine, strawberry Bavarian—and sometimes, from what she didn't know she was saying, I'd snatch a shred or two of her threadbare history.
Baltic cold.
Being sent home in a troika when her feet went numb.
In summer, carriage rides.
A swarm of gypsy children driven off with whips.
An octogenarian father, bishop of a dying schismatic sect.
A very young mother who didn't want her.
A half-brother she met just once.
Cousins in Wisconsin, one of whom phoned her from a candy store, out of the blue, while she was living in Chicago.
What had brought her there, or when, remained unclear.
As did much else.
We'd met in church.
I noticed first a big, soaring soprano with a wobble in it, then the thickly wreathed and braided crimp in the mouse- gold coiffure.
Old? Young? She was of no age.
Through rimless lenses she looked out of a child's, or a doll's, globular blue.
Wore Keds the year round, tended otherwise to overdress.
Owned a mandolin.
Once I got her to take it down from the mantel and plink out, through a warm fuddle of sauterne, a lot of giddy Italian airs from a songbook whose pages had started to crumble.
The canary fluffed and quivered, and the cats, amazed, came out from under the couch and stared.
What could the offspring of the schismatic age and a reluctant child bride expect from life? Not much.
Less and less.
A dream she'd had kept coming back, years after.
She'd taken a job in Washington with some right-wing lobby, and lived in one of those bow-windowed mansions that turn into roominghouses, and her room there had a full-length mirror: oval, with a molding, is the way I picture it.
In her dream something woke her, she got up to look, and there in the glass she'd had was covered over—she gave it a wondering emphasis—with gray veils.
The West Village was changing.
I was changing.
The last time I asked her to dinner, she didn't show.
Hours— or was it days?—later, she phoned to explain: she hadn't been able to find my block; a patrolman had steered her home.
I spent my evenings canvassing for Gene McCarthy.
Passing, I'd see her shades drawn, no light behind the rubber trees.
She wasn't out, she didn't own a TV.
She was in there, getting gently blotto.
What came next, I wasn't brave enough to know.
Only one day, passing, I saw new shades, quick-chic matchstick bamboo, going up where the waterstained old ones had been, and where the seedlings— O gray veils, gray veils—had risen and gone down.
Written by Robert William Service | Create an image from this poem

My Library

 Like prim Professor of a College
I primed my shelves with books of knowledge;
And now I stand before them dumb,
Just like a child that sucks its thumb,
And stares forlorn and turns away,
With dolls or painted bricks to play.
They glour at me, my tomes of learning.
"You dolt!" they jibe; "you undiscerning Moronic oaf, you make a fuss, With highbrow swank selecting us; Saying: "I'll read you all some day' - And now you yawn and turn away.
"Unwanted wait we with our store Of facts and philosophic lore; The scholarship of all the ages Snug packed within our uncut pages; The mystery of all mankind In part revealed - but you are blind.
"You have no time to read, you tell us; Oh, do not think that we are jealous Of all the trash that wins your favour, The flimsy fiction that you savour: We only beg that sometimes you Will spare us just an hour or two.
"For all the minds that went to make us Are dust if folk like you forsake us, And they can only live again By virtue of your kindling brain; In magice print they packed their best: Come - try their wisdom to digest.
.
.
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" Said I: "Alas! I am not able; I lay my cards upon the table, And with deep shame and blame avow I am too old to read you now; So I will lock you in glass cases And shun your sad, reproachful faces.
" * * * * * * * * * My library is noble planned, Yet in it desolate I stand; And though my thousand books I prize, Feeling a witling in their eyes, I turn from them in weariness To wallow in the Daily Press.
For, oh, I never, never will The noble field of knowledge till: I pattern words with artful tricks, As children play with painted bricks, And realize with futile woe, Nothing I know - nor want to know.
My library has windowed nooks; And so I turn from arid books To vastitude of sea and sky, And like a child content am I With peak and plain and brook and tree, Crying: "Behold! the books for me: Nature, be thou my Library!"
Written by Federico García Lorca | Create an image from this poem

Little Viennese Waltz

 In Vienna there are ten little girls,
a shoulder for death to cry on,
and a forest of dried pigeons.
There is a fragment of tomorrow in the museum of winter frost.
There is a thousand-windowed dance hall.
Ay, ay, ay, ay! Take this close-mouthed waltz.
Little waltz, little waltz, little waltz, of itself of death, and of brandy that dips its tail in the sea.
I love you, I love you, I love you, with the armchair and the book of death, down the melancholy hallway, in the iris's darkened garret, Ay, ay, ay, ay! Take this broken-waisted waltz.
In Vienna there are four mirrors in which your mouth and the ehcoes play.
There is a death for piano that paints little boys blue.
There are beggars on the roof.
There are fresh garlands of tears.
Ay, ay, ay, ay! Take this waltz that dies in my arms.
Because I love you, I love you, my love, in the attic where the children play, dreaming ancient lights of Hungary through the noise, the balmy afternoon, seeing sheep and irises of snow through the dark silence of your forehead Ay, ay, ay, ay! Take this " I will always love you" waltz In Vienna I will dance with you in a costume with a river's head.
See how the hyacinths line my banks! I will leave my mouth between your legs, my soul in a photographs and lilies, and in the dark wake of your footsteps, my love, my love, I will have to leave violin and grave, the waltzing ribbons
Written by Siegfried Sassoon | Create an image from this poem

The Redeemer

 Darkness: the rain sluiced down; the mire was deep; 
It was past twelve on a mid-winter night, 
When peaceful folk in beds lay snug asleep; 
There, with much work to do before the light, 
We lugged our clay-sucked boots as best we might 
Along the trench; sometimes a bullet sang, 
And droning shells burst with a hollow bang; 
We were soaked, chilled and wretched, every one; 
Darkness; the distant wink of a huge gun.
I turned in the black ditch, loathing the storm; A rocket fizzed and burned with blanching flare, And lit the face of what had been a form Floundering in mirk.
He stood before me there; I say that He was Christ; stiff in the glare, And leaning forward from His burdening task, Both arms supporting it; His eyes on mine Stared from the woeful head that seemed a mask Of mortal pain in Hell's unholy shine.
No thorny crown, only a woollen cap He wore--an English soldier, white and strong, Who loved his time like any simple chap, Good days of work and sport and homely song; Now he has learned that nights are very long, And dawn a watching of the windowed sky.
But to the end, unjudging, he'll endure Horror and pain, not uncontent to die That Lancaster on Lune may stand secure.
He faced me, reeling in his weariness, Shouldering his load of planks, so hard to bear.
I say that He was Christ, who wrought to bless All groping things with freedom bright as air, And with His mercy washed and made them fair.
Then the flame sank, and all grew black as pitch, While we began to struggle along the ditch; And someone flung his burden in the muck, Mumbling: 'O Christ Almighty, now I'm stuck!'


Written by Siegfried Sassoon | Create an image from this poem

Morning-Glory

 In this meadow starred with spring 
Shepherds kneel before their king.
Mary throned, with dreaming eyes, Gowned in blue like rain-washed skies, Lifts her tiny son that he May behold their courtesy.
And green-smocked children, awed and good, Bring him blossoms from the wood.
Clear the sunlit steeples chime Mary’s coronation-time.
Loud the happy children quire To the golden-windowed morn; While the lord of their desire Sleeps below the crimson thorn.
Written by Conrad Aiken | Create an image from this poem

The House Of Dust: Part 01: 05: The snow floats down upon us mingled with rain

 The snow floats down upon us, mingled with rain .
.
.
It eddies around pale lilac lamps, and falls Down golden-windowed walls.
We were all born of flesh, in a flare of pain, We do not remember the red roots whence we rose, But we know that we rose and walked, that after a while We shall lie down again.
The snow floats down upon us, we turn, we turn, Through gorges filled with light we sound and flow .
.
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One is struck down and hurt, we crowd about him, We bear him away, gaze after his listless body; But whether he lives or dies we do not know.
One of us sings in the street, and we listen to him; The words ring over us like vague bells of sorrow.
He sings of a house he lived in long ago.
It is strange; this house of dust was the house I lived in; The house you lived in, the house that all of us know.
And coiling slowly about him, and laughing at him, And throwing him pennies, we bear away A mournful echo of other times and places, And follow a dream .
.
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a dream that will not stay.
Down long broad flights of lamplit stairs we flow; Noisy, in scattered waves, crowding and shouting; In broken slow cascades.
The gardens extend before us .
.
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We spread out swiftly; Trees are above us, and darkness.
The canyon fades .
.
.
And we recall, with a gleaming stab of sadness, Vaguely and incoherently, some dream Of a world we came from, a world of sun-blue hills .
.
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A black wood whispers around us, green eyes gleam; Someone cries in the forest, and someone kills.
We flow to the east, to the white-lined shivering sea; We reach to the west, where the whirling sun went down; We close our eyes to music in bright cafees.
We diverge from clamorous streets to streets that are silent.
We loaf where the wind-spilled fountain plays.
And, growing tired, we turn aside at last, Remember our secret selves, seek out our towers, Lay weary hands on the banisters, and climb; Climbing, each, to his little four-square dream Of love or lust or beauty or death or crime.
Written by Laurence Binyon | Create an image from this poem

The House That Was

 Of the old house, only a few, crumbled 
Courses of brick, smothered in nettle and dock, 
Or a shaped stone lying mossy where it tumbled! 
Sprawling bramble and saucy thistle mock 
What once was fire-lit floor and private charm, 
Whence, seen in a windowed picture, were hills fading 
At night, and all was memory-coloured and warm, 
And voices talked, secure of the wind's invading.
Of the old garden, only a stray shining Of daffodil flames among April's Cuckoo-flowers Or clustered aconite, mixt with weeds entwining! But, dark and lofty, a royal cedar towers By homelier thorns; and whether the rain drifts Or sun scortches, he holds the downs in ken, The western vales; his branchy tiers he lifts, Older than many a generation of men.
Written by Ben Jonson | Create an image from this poem

Piccolo Valzer Viennese

 A Vienna ci sono dieci ragazze,
una spalla dove piange la morte
e un bosco di colombe disseccate.
C'e' un frammento del mattino nel museo della brina.
C'è un salone con mille vetrate.
Ahi! Ahi! Ahi! Ahi! Prendi questo valzer con la bocca chiusa.
Questo valzer, questo valzer, questo valzer, di sì, di morte e di cognac che si bagna la coda nel mare.
Io ti amo, io ti amo, io ti amo con la poltrona e con il libro morto, nel malinconico corridoio, nell'oscura soffitta del giglio, nel nostro letto della luna, nella danza che sogna la tartaruga.
Ahi! Ahi! Ahi! Ahi! Prendi questo valzer dalla spezzata cintura.
A Vienna ci sono quattro specchi, vi giocano la tua bocca e gli echi.
C'è una morte per pianoforte che tinge d'azzurro i giovanotti.
Ci sono mendichi sui terrazzi.
E fresche ghirlande di pianto.
Ahi! Ahi! Ahi! Ahi! Prendi questo valzer che spira fra le mie braccia.
Perchè io ti amo, ti amo, amore mio, nella soffitta dove giocano i bambini, sognando vecchie luci d'Ungheria nel mormorio di una sera mite, vedendo agnelli e gigli di neve nell'oscuro silenzio delle tue tempie.
Ahi! Ahi! Ahi! Ahi! Prendi questo valzer del "Ti amo per sempre".
A Vienna ballerò con te con un costume che abbia la testa di fiume.
Guarda queste mie rive di giacinti! Lascerò la mia bocca tra le tue gambe, la mia anima in foto e fiordalisi, e nelle onde oscure del tuo passo io voglio, amore mio, amore mio, lasciare, violino e sepolcro, i nastri del valzer.
English Translation Little Viennese Waltz In Vienna there are ten little girls a shoulder for death to cry on and a forest of dried pigeons.
There is a fragment of tomorrow in the museum of winter frost.
There is a thousand-windowed dance hall.
Ay, ay, ay, ay! Take this close-mouthed waltz.
Little waltz, little waltz, little waltz, of itself, of death, and of brandy that dips its tail in the sea.
I love you, I love you, I love you, with the armchair and the book of death down the melancholy hallway, in the iris's dark garret, in our bed that was once the moon's bed, and in that dance the turtle dreamed of.
Ay, ay, ay, ay! Take this broken-waisted waltz In Vienna there are four mirrors in which your mouth and the echoes play.
There is a death for piano that paints the little boys blue.
There are beggars on the roof.
There are fresh garlands of tears.
Aye, ay, ay, ay! Take this waltz that dies in my arms.
Because I love you, I love you, my love, in the attic where children play, dreaming ancient lights of Hungary through the noise, the balmy afternoon, seeing sheep and irises of snow through the dark silence of your forehead.
Ay, ay, ay ay! Take this "I will always love you" waltz.
In Vienna I will dance with you in a costume with a river's head.
See how the hyacinths line my banks! I will leave my mouth between your legs, my soul in photographs and lilies, and in the dark wake of your footsteps, my love, my love, I will have to leave violin and grave, the waltzing ribbons.
Written by Siegfried Sassoon | Create an image from this poem

In Barracks

 The barrack-square, washed clean with rain, 
Shines wet and wintry-grey and cold.
Young Fusiliers, strong-legged and bold, March and wheel and march again.
The sun looks over the barrack gate, Warm and white with glaring shine, To watch the soldiers of the Line That life has hired to fight with fate.
Fall out: the long parades are done.
Up comes the dark; down goes the sun.
The square is walled with windowed light.
Sleep well, you lusty Fusiliers; Shut your brave eyes on sense and sight, And banish from your dreamless ears The bugle’s dying notes that say, ‘Another night; another day.