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Famous Bleach Poems by Famous Poets

These are examples of famous Bleach poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous bleach poems. These examples illustrate what a famous bleach poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry
...ure’s fled,
 Willie’s awa!


May I be Slander’s common speech;
A text for Infamy to preach;
And lastly, streekit out to bleach
 In winter snaw;
When I forget thee, Willie Creech,
 Tho’ far awa!


May never wicked Fortune touzle him!
May never wicked men bamboozle him!
Until a pow as auld’s Methusalem
 He canty claw!
Then to the blessed new Jerusalem,
 Fleet wing awa!


 Note 1. Edinburgh. [back]...Read more of this...
by Burns, Robert



...,
While nightly breezes sweep the vines,
 Her griefs will tell!


In gowany glens thy burnie strays,
Where bonie lasses bleach their claes,
Or trots by hazelly shaws and braes,
 Wi’ hawthorns gray,
Where blackbirds join the shepherd’s lays,
 At close o’ day.


Thy rural loves are Nature’s sel’;
Nae bombast spates o’ nonsense swell;
Nae snap conceits, but that sweet spell
 O’ witchin love,
That charm that can the strongest quell,
 The sternest move....Read more of this...
by Burns, Robert
...at high Midsummer blot
Half the sun's disk with a spot;
'Twill not now avail to tan
Orange cheek, or skin of man:
Roses bleach, the goats are dry,
Lisbon quakes, the people cry.
Yon pale scrawny fisher fools,
Gaunt as bitterns in the pools,
Are no brothers of my blood,—
They discredit Adamhood.

Eyes of gods! ye must have seen,
O'er your ramparts as ye lean,
The general debility,
Of genius the sterility,
Mighty projects countermanded,
Rash ambition broken-handed,
Puny man and...Read more of this...
by Emerson, Ralph Waldo
...ear him strides,
Love laughs, and on a lion rides.
But Cupid wears another face
Born into Dæmons less divine,
His roses bleach apace,
His nectar smacks of wine.
The Dæmon ever builds a wall,
Himself incloses and includes,
Solitude in solitudes:
In like sort his love doth fall.
He is an oligarch,
He prizes wonder, fame, and mark,
He loveth crowns,
He scorneth drones;
He doth elect
The beautiful and fortunate,
And the sons of intellect,
And the souls of ample fate,
Who the Futu...Read more of this...
by Emerson, Ralph Waldo
...that I really love
Is the rain that flattens on the bay,
And the eel-grass in the cove;
The jingle-shells that lie and bleach
At the tide-line, and the trace
Of higher tides along the beach:
Nothing in this place....Read more of this...
by St. Vincent Millay, Edna



...dead and abandoned,
As the emigrant's way o'er the Western desert is marked by
Camp-fires long consumed, and bones that bleach in the sunshine.
Something there was in her life incomplete, imperfect, unfinished;
As if a morning of June, with all its music and sunshine,
Suddenly paused in the sky, and, fading, slowly descended
Into the east again, from whence it late had arisen.
Sometimes she lingered in towns, till, urged by the fever within her,
Urged by a restless longing, t...Read more of this...
by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...in the Sludge
 out of the Mediterranean basin & make it azure again,
Put some blueing back into the sky over the Rhine, bleach the little
 Clouds so snow return white as snow,
Cleanse the Hudson Thames & Neckar, Drain the Suds out of Lake Erie
Then I'd throw big Asia in one giant Load & wash out the blood &
 Agent Orange,
Dump the whole mess of Russia and China in the wringer, squeeze out
 the tattletail Gray of U.S. Central American police state,
 & put the planet in the dri...Read more of this...
by Ginsberg, Allen
...And stranded jelly-fish melt soft upon
The sun-baked pebbles, far beyond their reach
Sparkles a wet, reviving sea. Here bleach
The skeletons of fishes, every bone
Polished and stark, like traceries of stone,
The joints and knuckles hardened each to each.
And they are dead while waiting for the sea,
The moon-pursuing sea, to come again.
Their hearts are blown away on the hot breeze.
Only the shells and stones can wait to be
Washed bright. For living things, who suffer pain,
Ma...Read more of this...
by Lowell, Amy
...ame. Your dreams ran 
with bright colors like Mexican cottons 
that bled onto the drab sheets of the day 
and would not bleach with scrubbing. 

My dear, what you said was one thing 
but what you sang was another, sweetly 
subversive and dark as blackberries 
and I became the daughter of your dream. 

This body is your body, ashes now 
and roses, but alive in my eyes, my breasts, 
my throat, my thighs. You run in me 
a tang of salt in the creek waters of my blood, 

you sing ...Read more of this...
by Piercy, Marge
...y,
a zebra wish fulfilled in dazing plod,
some sheer green wall of sugarcane.
And look - he's made it through

into the bleach and blaze, rose curdling
over indigo and lard, this granult scar
of dawn. One more dawn nearer the water.
Sky blood-taggled, blood-tufted,

rushes over him like a white bowl
at the end of things, the little safe horizon
of a pilot's dial,
an inventory of therapeutic gems....Read more of this...
by Padel, Ruth
...es,
the bulb's agitations;
while under the subsoil
the carrot
sleeps sound in its
rusty mustaches.
Runner and filaments
bleach in the vineyards,
whereon rise the vines.
The sedulous cabbage
arranges its petticoats;
oregano
sweetens a world;
and the artichoke
dulcetly there in a gardenplot,
armed for a skirmish,
goes proud
in its pomegranate
burnishes.
Till, on a day,
each by the other,
the artichoke moves
to its dream
of a market place
in the big willow
hoppers:
a battle form...Read more of this...
by Neruda, Pablo
...h go by, 
Dear to friends and food for powder, 
Soldiers marching, all to die. 

East and west on fields forgotten
Bleach the bones of comrades slain, 
Lovely lads and dead and rotten; 
None that go return again. 

Far the calling bugles hollo, 
High the screaming fife replies, 
Gay the files of scarlet follow: 
Woman bore me, I will rise.
...Read more of this...
by Housman, A E
...will be like two lovers washing 
their clothes together 
in a laundromat 
If you will bring the soap 
I will bring the bleach....Read more of this...
by Brautigan, Richard
...mber husk 
fluted with gold, 
fruit on the sand 
marked with a rich grain, 

treasure 
spilled near the shrub-pines 
to bleach on the boulders: 

your stalk has caught root 
among wet pebbles 
and drift flung by the sea 
and grated shells 
and split conch-shells. 

Beautiful, wide-spread, 
fire upon leaf, 
what meadow yields 
so fragrant a leaf 
as your bright leaf?...Read more of this...
by Doolittle, Hilda
...r own worth, 
nipped, shrivelled by the frost, 
to fall at last but fair 
with a russet coat. 

Or the melon -- 
let it bleach yellow 
in the winter light, 
even tart to the taste -- 
it is better to taste of frost -- 
the exquisite frost -- 
than of wadding and of dead grass. 

For this beauty, 
beauty without strength, 
chokes out life. 
I want wind to break, 
scatter these pink-stalks, 
snap off their spiced heads, 
fling them about with dead leaves -- 
spread the paths wi...Read more of this...
by Doolittle, Hilda
...thine inmost soul:
Either thou shalt renounce thy vaunt and yield,
Or else thy bones shall strew this sand, till winds
Bleach them, or Oxus with his summer-floods,
Oxus in summer wash them all away." 

He spoke; and Sohrab answer'd, on his feet:--
"Art thou so fierce? Thou wilt not fright me so!
I am no girl, to be made pale by words.
Yet this thou hast said well, did Rustum stand
Here on this field, there were no fighting then.
But Rustum is far hence, and we stand here.
Be...Read more of this...
by Arnold, Matthew
...s pipe on oaten straws, 
And merry larks are ploughmen's clocks, 
When turtles tread, and rooks, and daws, 
And maidens bleach their summer smocks, 
The cuckoo then, on every tree, 
Mocks married men, for thus sings he: 
'Cuckoo! 
Cuckoo, cuckoo!' O word of fear, 
Unpleasing to a married ear....Read more of this...
by Fletcher, John Gould
...edule time; 
For the drought will go on drying while there's anything to dry, 
Then it rains until you'd fancy it would bleach the sunny sky -- 
Then it pelters out of reason, for the downpour day and night 
Nearly sweeps the population to the Great Australian Bight. 
It is up in Northern Queensland that the seasons do their best, 
But it's doubtful if you ever saw a season in the West; 
There are years without an autumn or a winter or a spring, 
There are broiling Junes, and...Read more of this...
by Lawson, Henry
...t deep within a dreary glen,
     Where scattered lay the bones of men
     In some forgotten battle slain,
     And bleached by drifting wind and rain.
     It might have tamed a warrior's heart
     To view  such mockery of his art!
     The knot-grass fettered there the hand
     Which once could burst an iron band;
     Beneath the broad and ample bone,
     That bucklered heart to fear unknown,
     A feeble and a timorous guest,
     The fieldfare framed her ...Read more of this...
by Scott, Sir Walter
...Strong sun, that bleach
The curtains of my room, can you not render
Colourless this dress I wear?—
This violent plaid
Of purple angers and red shames; the yellow stripe
Of thin but valid treacheries; the flashy green of kind deeds done
Through indolence high judgments given here in haste; 
The recurring checker of the serious breach of taste?

No more uncoloured than unmade,...Read more of this...
by St. Vincent Millay, Edna

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry