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Famous Bleached Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Lanier, Sidney
...lliant cloud of Death o'erhead.

This vine bore many blossoms, which were years.
Their petals, red with joy, or bleached by tears,
Waved to and fro i' the winds of hopes and fears.

Here all men clung, each hanging by his spray.
Anon, one dropped; his neighbor 'gan to pray;
And so they clung and dropped and prayed, alway.

But I did mark one lately-opened bloom,
Wherefrom arose a visible perfume
That wrapped me in a cloud of dainty gloom.

And rose -- ...Read More



by Bishop, Elizabeth
...behind the houses,
set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass,
is an ancient wooden capstan,
cracked, with two long bleached handles
and some melancholy stains, like dried blood,
where the ironwork has rusted.
The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.
He was a friend of my grandfather.
We talk of the decline in the population
and of codfish and herring
while he waits for a herring boat to come in.
There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.
He h...Read More

by Heaney, Seamus
...n red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.Read More

by Gluck, Louise
...h
Your presence and absence, regret
The law, the vocation
That forbid me to keep you, the sea
A sheet of glass, the sun-bleached
Beauty of the Greek ships: how
Could I have power if
I had no wish
To transform you: as
You loved my body,
As you found there
Passion we held above
All other gifts, in that single moment
Over honor and hope, over
Loyalty, in the name of that bond
I refuse you
Such feeling for your wife
As will let you
Rest with her, I refuse you
Sleep again
If I can...Read More

by Kees, Weldon
...cheming and unconquered ghost, still threaten Novgorod.)
--And not far from the pits, these bones of ours, 
Burned, bleached, and splintering, are shoveled, ready for the fields....Read More



by Roethke, Theodore
...nd small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing,
And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw,
Stirring the clearest water.

My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiney shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the l...Read More

by Brodsky, Joseph
...r,
when Pygmalion's vanished. And you are free
to cloud your folds, to bare the navel.
Future at last! That is, bleached debris
of a glacier amid the five-lettered "never."
Hence the routine of a goddess, nee
alabaster, that lets roving pupils gorge on
the heart of color and the temperature of the knee.
That's what it looks like inside a virgin...Read More

by Smart, Christopher
...h being held in an horse's mouth keeps him from hunger. 

Let Cecil, house of Cecil rejoice with Gnaphalium an herb bleached by nature white and soft for the purpose of flax. God bless Lord Salisbury. 

Let Rogers, house of Rogers rejoice with Hypelates a kind of Laurel -- God be gracious to Rogers and Spilsbury with their families. 

Let Cambden, house of Cambden rejoice with Glischromargos a kind of white marl. 

Let Conduit, house of Conduit rejoice wit...Read More

by Marvell, Andrew
...he courtiers fine 
Salute them, smiling at their vain design, 
And Turner gay up to his perch does march 
With face new bleached, smoothened and stiff with starch; 
Tells them he at Whitehall had took a turn 
And for three days thence moves them to adjourn. 
`Not so!' quoth Tomkins, and straight drew his tongue, 
Trusty as steel that always ready hung, 
And so, proceeding in his motion warm, 
The army soon raised, he doth as soon disarm. 
True Trojan! While this town ...Read More

by Zaran, Lisa
...after, when you are driving 
75 miles one way just to get to her 
and her wind-touched hair, 
bleached white by the September 
sun, the gray sky coughing up clouds, 
that is when the doubts surface, 
hard as stones. 

it is late afternoon by the time you arrive, 
the storm has already been through here. 
you are not in your own element. 
you are a runaway. 

but, then she is there, standing right in front 
of you, wet with rain, slend...Read More

by Levine, Philip
...
 a roaring, a sea
sound that goes on and on
 until you lean
forward to place both hands
 -- fingers spread --
into the bleached grasses
 and let your knees
slowly down. Your breath slows
 and you know
you're back in central
 California
on your way to San Francisco
 or the coastal towns
with their damp sea breezes
 you haven't
even a hint of. But first
 you must cross
the Pacheco Pass. People
 expect you, and yet
you remain, still leaning forward
 into the grasses...Read More

by Larkin, Philip
...he sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August bank Holiday lark;

And the shut shops the bleached 
Established names on the sunblinds 
The farthings and sovereigns 
Adn dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens 
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist and the pubs
Wide open all day;

And the countryside ont caring:
The place-names all hazed over
With flowering grasses and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wh...Read More

by Fu, Du
...ghbours, Our sons are merely buried amid the grass. Have you not seen on the border of Qinghai, The ancient bleached bones no man's gathered in? The new ghosts are angered by injustice, the old ghosts weep, Moistening rain falls from dark heaven on the voices' screeching."...Read More

by Baudelaire, Charles
...ey 

Who laugh and name you a Caricature, 
They see not, they whom flesh and blood allure, 
The nameless grace of every bleached, bare bone, 
That is most dear to me, tall skeleton! 

Come you to trouble with your potent sneer 
The feast of Life! or are you driven here, 
To Pleasure's Sabbath, by dead lusts that stir 
And goad your moving corpse on with a spur? 

Or do you hope, when sing the violins, 
And the pale candle-flame lights up our sins, 
To drive some mocking night...Read More

by Scott, Sir Walter
...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

by Blake, William
...the honey bees.

Then the perilous path was planted:
And a river, and a spring
On every cliff and tomb;
And on the bleached bones
Red clay brought forth.

Till the villain left the paths of ease,
To walk in perilous paths, and drive
The just man into barren climes.

Now the sneaking serpent walks
In mild humility.
And the just man rages in the wilds
Where lions roam.

Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burdend air;
Hungry clouds swag on the deep....Read More

by Bishop, Elizabeth
...g rivulets;

on red, gravelly roads,
down rows of sugar maples,
past clapboard farmhouses
and neat, clapboard churches,
bleached, ridged as clamshells,
past twin silver birches,

through late afternoon
a bus journeys west,
the windshield flashing pink,
pink glancing off of metal,
brushing the dented flank
of blue, beat-up enamel;

down hollows, up rises,
and waits, patient, while
a lone traveller gives
kisses and embraces
to seven relatives
and a collie supervises.

Goodb...Read More

by Pinsky, Robert
...I imagined

The ball, a scintilla
High in the black backdrop
Of the sky. Tight red stitches.
Rawlings. The bleached

Horsehide white: the color
Of nothing. Color of the past
And of the future, of the movie screen
At rest and of blank paper.

"I could have." The mind. The black
Backdrop, the white
Fly picked out by the towering
Lights. A few years later

On a blanket in the grass
By the same river
A girl and I came into
Being together
To the fa...Read More

by Akhmatova, Anna
...>
In harsh and youthful anguish
Is her miraculous strength.



x x x

Transparent glass of empty sky
The bleached-out bulky prison building
And churchgoers' solemn singing
Over Volkhov, growing blue with light.

September wind tore leaves birch off
Through branches tossed and screamed with hate
And city recollects its fate:
Here ruled Martha and Arackcheyev.



July 1914

I

Smells like burning. For four weeks now
The dry ground on...Read More

by Browning, Robert
...adence,
They circle their rose on my rose tree.

III.

Dear rose, thy term is reached,
Thy leaf hangs loose and bleached:
Bees pass it unimpeached.

IV.

Stay then, stoop, since I cannot climb,
You, great shapes of the antique time!
How shall I fix you, fire you, freeze you,
Break my heart at your feet to please you?
Oh, to possess and be possessed!
Hearts that beat 'neath each pallid breast!
Once but of love, the poesy, the passion,
Drink but once and die!---...Read More

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