Famous Blind Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Blind Man's Buff

by Anonymous
When the win-ter winds are blow-ing,
  And we ga-ther glad and gay,
Where the fire its light is throw-ing,
  For a mer-ry game at play,
There is none that to my know-ing,—
  And I've play-ed at games enough,—
Makes us laugh, and sets us glow-ing
  Like a game at Blind-man's Buff....Read more of this...

Three Blind Mice

by Mother Goose
Three blind mice! See how they run!
They all ran after the farmer's wife,
Who cut off their tails with a carving knife.
Did you ever see such a thing in your life
As three blind mice?...Read more of this...

The Sorrows of the Blind

by William Topaz McGonagall
 Pity the sorrows of the poor blind,
For they can but little comfort find;
As they walk along the street,
They know not where to put their feet.
They are deprived of that earthly joy
Of seeing either man, woman, or boy;
Sad and lonely through the world they go,
Not knowing a friend from a foe:
Nor the difference betwixt day and night,
For the want of...Read more of this...

Blind Jack

by Edgar Lee Masters
 I had fiddled all day at the county fair.
But driving home "Butch" Weldy and Jack McGuire,
Who were roaring full, made me fiddle and fiddle
To the song of Susie Skinner, while whipping the horses
Till they ran away.
Blind as I was, I tried to get out
As the carriage fell in the ditch,
And was caught in the wheels and killed.
There's a blind...Read more of this...

Blind Bartimeus

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 Blind Bartimeus at the gates
Of Jericho in darkness waits;
He hears the crowd;--he hears a breath
Say, "It is Christ of Nazareth!"
And calls, in tones of agony,


The thronging multitudes increase;
Blind Bartimeus, hold thy peace!
But still, above the noisy crowd,
The beggar's cry is shrill and loud;
Until they say, "He calleth thee!"


Then saith the Christ, as silent stands
The crowd, "What wilt thou at...Read more of this...

Christmas Antiphones

by Algernon Charles Swinburne
 I -- In Church

Thou whose birth on earth
Angels sang to men,
While thy stars made mirth,
Saviour, at thy birth,
This day born again;

As this night was bright
With thy cradle-ray,
Very light of light,
Turn the wild world's night
To thy perfect day.

God whose feet made sweet
Those wild ways they trod,
From thy fragrant feet
Staining field and street
With the blood of God;

God whose breast is rest
In...Read more of this...

The Blind Girl

by William Topaz McGonagall
 Kind Christians, pray list to me,
And I'll relate a sad story,
Concerning a little blind girl, only nine years of age,
Who lived with her father in a lonely cottage. 

Poor girl, she had never seen the blessed light of day,
Nor the beautiful fields of corn and hay,
Nor the sparrows, that lifted their heads at early morn
To bright Sol that does...Read more of this...

Blind Mans Buff

by William Blake
 When silver snow decks Susan's clothes,
And jewel hangs at th' shepherd's nose,
The blushing bank is all my care,
With hearth so red, and walls so fair;
`Heap the sea-coal, come, heap it higher,
The oaken log lay on the fire.'
The well-wash'd stools, a circling row,
With lad and lass, how fair the show!
The merry can of nut-brown ale,
The laughing jest, the love-sick tale,
Till,...Read more of this...

The Deaf and Blind

by Paul Eluard
 Do we reach the sea with clocks 
In our pockets, with the noise of the sea 
In the sea, or are we the carriers 
Of a purer and more silent water? 

The water rubbing against our hands sharpens knives. 
The warriors have found their weapons in the waves 
And the sound of their blows is like 
The rocks that...Read more of this...

I Chop Some Parsley While Listening To Art Blakeys Version Of Three Blind Mice

by Billy Collins
 And I start wondering how they came to be blind.
If it was congenital, they could be brothers and sister,
and I think of the poor mother
brooding over her sightless young triplets.

Or was it a common accident, all three caught
in a searing explosion, a firework perhaps?
If not,
if each came to his or her blindness separately,

how did they ever manage to find...Read more of this...

The Country of the Blind

by C S Lewis
 Hard light bathed them-a whole nation of eyeless men, 
Dark bipeds not aware how they were maimed. A long 
Process, clearly, a slow curse,
Drained through centuries, left them thus.

At some transitional stage, then, a luckless few, 
No doubt, must have had eyes after the up-to-date, 
Normal type had achieved snug
Darkness, safe from the guns of heavn;

Whose blind mouths would...Read more of this...

Going Blind

by Rainer Maria Rilke
She sat just like the others as the table.
But on second glance she seemed to hold her cup
a little differently as she picked it up.
She smiled once. It was almost painful.

And when they finished and it was time to stand
and slowly as chance selected them they left
and moved through many rooms (they talked and laughed)
I saw her. She was moving...Read more of this...

Thou Blind Mans Mark

by Sir Philip Sidney
 Thou blind man's mark, thou fool's self chosen snare, 
Fond fancy's scum, and dregs of scatter'd thought, 
Band of all evils, cradle of causeless care, 
Thou web of will,whose end is never wrought. 

Desire, desire I have too dearly bought, 
With price of mangled mind thy worthless ware, 
Too long, too long asleep thou hast me brought, 
Who should...Read more of this...

Blind

by Charles Webb
 It's okay if the world goes with Venetian;
Who cares what Italians don't see?--
Or with Man's Bluff (a temporary problem
Healed by shrieks and cheating)--or with date:
Three hours of squirming repaid by laughs for years.

But when an old woman, already deaf,
Wakes from a night of headaches, and the dark
Won't disappear--when doctors call like tedious
Birds, "If only..." up and down hospital halls--
When,...Read more of this...

Blind

by Siegfried Sassoon
HIS headstrong thoughts that once in eager strife
Leapt sure from eye to brain and back to eye 
Weaving unconscious tapestries of life 
Are now thrust inward dungeoned from the sky.
And he who has watched his world and loved it all 5
Starless and old and blind a sight for pity 
With feeble steps and fingers on the wall 
Gropes with his...Read more of this...

To A Friend Going Blind

by Jorie Graham
 Today, because I couldn't find the shortcut through,
I had to walk this town's entire inner
perimeter to find
where the medieval walls break open
in an eighteenth century
arch. The yellow valley flickered on and off
through cracks and the gaps
for guns. Bruna is teaching me
to cut a pattern.
Saturdays we buy the cloth.
She takes it in her hands
like a good idea, feeling
for texture, grain,...Read more of this...

Thought was born blind, but Thought knows what is seeing

by Fernando Pessoa
Thought was born blind, but Thought knows what is seeing.

Its careful touch, deciphering forms from shapes,

Still suggests form as aught whose proper being

Mere finding touch with erring darkness drapes.

Yet whence, except from guessed sight, does touch teach

That touch is but a close and empty sense?

How does mere touch, self-uncontented, reach

For some truer sense's whole intelligence?

The thing once touched, if touch...Read more of this...

To Be Blind

by A S J Tessimond
 Is it sounds
 converging,
Sounds
 nearing,
Infringement,
 impingement,
Impact,
 contact
With surfaces of the sounds
Or surfaces without the sounds:
Diagrams,
 skeletal,
 strange?

Is it winds
 curling round invisible corners?
Polyphony of perfumes?
Antennae discovering an axis,
 erecting the architecture of a world?

Is it
 orchestration of the finger-tips,
 graph of a fugue:
Scaffold for colours:
 colour itself being god?...Read more of this...

Happy the maimed, the halt, the mad, the blind--

by Fernando Pessoa
Happy the maimed, the halt, the mad, the blind--

All who, stamped separate by curtailing birth,

Owe no duty's allegiance to mankind

Nor stand a valuing in their scheme of worth!

But I, whom Fate, not Nature, did curtail,

By no exterior voidness being exempt,

Must bear accusing glances where I fail,

Fixed in the general orbit of contempt.

Fate, less than Nature in being kind to lacking,

Giving...Read more of this...

Two Blind Men

by Robert William Service
 Two blind men met. Said one: "This earth
Has been a blackout from my birth.
Through darkness I have groped my way,
Forlorn, unknowing night from day.
But you - though War destroyed your sight,
Still have your memories of Light,
And to allay your present pain
Can live your golden youth again."

Then said the second: "Aye, it's true,
It must seem magical to you
To know the...Read more of this...

Dream Song 49: Blind

by John Berryman
 Old Pussy-cat if he won't eat, he don't
feel good into his tum', old Pussy-cat.
He wants to have eaten.
Tremor, heaves, he sweaterings. He can't.
A dizzy swims of where is Henry at;
. . . somewhere streng verboten.

How come he sleeps & sleeps and sleeps, waking like death:
locate the restorations of which we hear
as of profound sleep.
From daylight he got maintrackt, from...Read more of this...

Summer Morn in New Hampshire

by Claude McKay
 All yesterday it poured, and all night long 
I could not sleep; the rain unceasing beat 
Upon the shingled roof like a weird song, 
Upon the grass like running children's feet. 
And down the mountains by the dark cloud kissed, 
Like a strange shape in filmy veiling dressed, 
Slid slowly, silently, the wraith-like mist, 
And nestled soft against the...Read more of this...

Sonnet 137: Thou blind fool Love what dost thou to mine eyes

by William Shakespeare
 Thou blind fool, Love, what dost thou to mine eyes
That they behold and see not what they see?
They know what beauty is, see where it lies,
Yet what the best is, take the worst to be.
If eyes corrupt by overpartial looks,
Be anchored in the bay where all men ride,
Why of eyes' falsehood hast thou forgèd hooks,
Whereto the judgment of my...Read more of this...

A Carafe, that is a Blind Glass

by Gertrude Stein
A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading....Read more of this...

The Blind And The Dead

by Robert William Service
 She lay like a saint on her copper couch;
 Like an angel asleep she lay,
In the stare of the ghoulish folks that slouch
 Past the Dead and sneak away.

Then came old Jules of the sightless gaze,
 Who begged in the streets for bread.
Each day he had come for a year of days,
 And groped his way to the Dead.

"What's...Read more of this...

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