Famous Cage In Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Tears In Sleep

by Louise Bogan
 All night the cocks crew, under a moon like day,
And I, in the cage of sleep, on a stranger's breast,
Shed tears, like a task not to be put away---
In the false light, false grief in my happy bed,
A labor of tears, set against joy's undoing.
I would not wake at your word, I had tears to say.
I clung to the...Read more of this...

Escape

by Robert Graves
 August 6, 1916.—Officer previously reported died of wounds, now reported wounded: Graves, Captain R., Royal Welch Fusiliers.)


…but I was dead, an hour or more. 
I woke when I’d already passed the door 
That Cerberus guards, and half-way down the road 
To Lethe, as an old Greek signpost showed. 
Above me, on my stretcher swinging by,
I saw new stars in...Read more of this...

Madmen

by Billy Collins
 They say you can jinx a poem
if you talk about it before it is done.
If you let it out too early, they warn,
your poem will fly away,
and this time they are absolutely right.

Take the night I mentioned to you
I wanted to write about the madmen,
as the newspapers so blithely call them,
who attack art, not in reviews,
but with breadknives and...Read more of this...

In Memoriam A. H. H.: 16. I Envy not in any Moods

by Alfred Lord Tennyson
 I envy not in any moods 
The captive void of noble rage,
The linnet born within the cage,
That never knew the summer woods:
I envy not the beast that takes
His license in the field of time,
Unfetter'd by the sense of crime,
To whom a conscience never wakes;
Nor, what may count itself as blest,
The heart that never plighted troth
But stagnates in the weeds...Read more of this...

Among Those Killed In The Dawn Raid Was A Man Aged A Hundred

by Dylan Thomas
 When the morning was waking over the war
He put on his clothes and stepped out and he died,
The locks yawned loose and a blast blew them wide,
He dropped where he loved on the burst pavement stone
And the funeral grains of the slaughtered floor.
Tell his street on its back he stopped a sun
And the craters of his eyes grew springshots...Read more of this...

Sir Philip Sidney - Astrophel and Stella: XXIII

by Sir Philip Sidney
 The curious wits, seeing dull pensiveness
Bewray itself in my long-settl'd eyes,
Whence those same fumes of melancholy rise,
With idle pains and missing aim do guess.
Some, that know how my spring I did address,
Deem that my Muse some fruit of knowledge plies;
Others, because the prince my service tries,
Think that I think state errors to redress;
But harder judges judge ambition's rage--
Scourge of...Read more of this...

Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady

by Alexander Pope
 What beck'ning ghost, along the moon-light shade
Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?
'Tis she!--but why that bleeding bosom gor'd,
Why dimly gleams the visionary sword?
Oh ever beauteous, ever friendly! tell,
Is it, in heav'n, a crime to love too well?
To bear too tender, or too firm a heart,
To act a lover's or a Roman's part?
Is there no bright reversion in...Read more of this...

All All And All The Dry Worlds Lever

by Dylan Thomas
 I

All all and all the dry worlds lever,
Stage of the ice, the solid ocean,
All from the oil, the pound of lava.
City of spring, the governed flower,
Turns in the earth that turns the ashen
Towns around on a wheel of fire.

How now my flesh, my naked fellow,
Dug of the sea, the glanded morrow,
Worm in the scalp, the staked and fallow.
All all...Read more of this...

Cliche Came Out of its Cage

by C S Lewis
 1

You said 'The world is going back to Paganism'. 
Oh bright Vision! I saw our dynasty in the bar of the House 
Spill from their tumblers a libation to the Erinyes, 
And Leavis with Lord Russell wreathed in flowers, heralded with flutes, 
Leading white bulls to the cathedral of the solemn Muses 
To pay where due the glory of...Read more of this...

Today

by Billy Collins
 If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw
open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary's cage,
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths
and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight
that you felt like...Read more of this...

Well I Have Lost You

by Edna St. Vincent Millay
 Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly;
In my own way, and with my full consent.
Say what you will, kings in a tumbrel rarely
Went to their deaths more proud than this one went.
Some nights of apprehension and hot weeping
I will confess; but that's permitted me;
Day dried my eyes; I was not one for keeping
Rubbed in a cage...Read more of this...

The Caged Skylark

by Gerard Manley Hopkins
 As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage
 Man's mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells—
 That bird beyond the remembering his free fells;
This in drudgery, day-labouring-out life's age. 
Though aloft on turf or perch or poor low stage,
 Both sing sometímes the sweetest, sweetest spells,
 Yet both droop deadly sómetimes in their cells
Or wring their barriers...Read more of this...

Girl in a Cage

by Carl Sandburg
 HERE in a cage the dollars come down.
 To the click of a tube the dollars tumble.
 And out of a mouth the dollars run.

 I finger the dollars,
 Paper and silver,
 Thousands a day.

 Some days it’s fun
 to finger the dollars.
Some days…
 the dollars keep on
 in a sob or a whisper:
 A flame of rose in...Read more of this...

The Map

by Elizabeth Bishop
 Land lies in water; it is shadowed green.
Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges
showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges
where weeds hang to the simple blue from green.
Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under,
drawing it unperturbed around itself?
Along the fine tan sandy shelf
is the land tugging at the sea from under?

The shadow of...Read more of this...

A Hedge Of Rubber Trees

by Amy Clampitt
 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...Read more of this...

Letter To Michael Horovitz

by Barry Tebb
 It is time after thirty years

We had our Poetry Renaissance

Rise, Children of Albion, rise!

It is time after nightmares of sleep

When we walked the streets of inner cities

Our poems among the burnt-out houses

And cars, whispering compassion

To the addicts shaking and the homeless

Waking and those who have come apart

In the nowhere of today

Begging in stations

Sleeping in boxes.

It is time to find

Our...Read more of this...

Five Ways To Kill A Man

by Andre Breton
 There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man.
You can make him carry a plank of wood
to the top of a hill and nail him to it. To do this
properly you require a crowd of people
wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak
to dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one
man to hammer the nails home.

Or you can take a...Read more of this...

Captivity

by Robert William Service
 O meadow lark, so wild and free,
It cannot be, it cannot be,
That men to merchandise your spell
Do close you in a wicker hell!

O hedgerow thrush so mad with glee,
it cannot be, it cannot be,
They rape you from your hawthorn foam
To make a cell of steel your home!

O blackbird in the orchard tree,
In cannot be, it cannot be,
That devils in...Read more of this...

Song For The Rainy Season

by Elizabeth Bishop
 Hidden, oh hidden 
in the high fog 
the house we live in, 
beneath the magnetic rock, 
rain-, rainbow-ridden, 
where blood-black 
bromelias, lichens, 
owls, and the lint 
of the waterfalls cling, 
familiar, unbidden. 

In a dim age 
of water 
the brook sings loud 
from a rib cage 
of giant fern; vapor 
climbs up the thick growth 
effortlessly, turns back, 
holding...Read more of this...

A Simile

by Matthew Prior
 Dear Thomas, didst thou never pop
Thy head into a tin-man's shop?
There, Thomas, didst thou never see
('Tis but by way of simile)
A squirrel spend his little rage
In jumping round a rolling cage?
The cage, as either side turn'd up,
Striking a ring of bells a-top?--

Mov'd in the orb, pleas'd with the chimes,
The foolish creature thinks he climbs:
But here or there, turn wood...Read more of this...

Christ Crucified

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
 Now ere I slept, my prayer had been that I might see my way
To do the will of Christ, our Lord and Master, day by day; 
And with this prayer upon my lips, I knew not that I dreamed, 
But suddenly the world of night a pandemonium seemed.
From forest, and from slaughter house, from bull ring, and from stall,...Read more of this...

Lyonnesse

by Sylvia Plath
 No use whistling for Lyonnesse! 
Sea-cold, sea-cold it certainly is. 
Take a look at the white, high berg on his forehead- 

There's where it sunk. 
The blue, green, 
Gray, indeterminate gilt 

Sea of his eyes washing over it 
And a round bubble 
Popping upward from the mouths of bells 

People and cows. 
The Lyonians had always thought 
Heaven would...Read more of this...

The Lion and Albert

by Marriott Edgar
 There's a famous seaside place called Blackpool,
That's noted for fresh air and fun,
And Mr and Mrs Ramsbottom
Went there with young Albert, their son.

A grand little lad was young Albert,
All dressed in his best; quite a swell
With a stick with an 'orse's 'ead 'andle,
The finest that Woolworth's could sell.

They didn't think much of the Ocean:
The waves, they were fiddlin' and...Read more of this...

Miss Loo

by Walter de la Mare
 When thin-strewn memory I look through, 
I see most clearly poor Miss Loo, 
Her tabby cat, her cage of birds, 
Her nose, her hair -- her muffled words, 
And how she'd open her green eyes, 
As if in some immense surprise, 
Whenever as we sat at tea, 
She made some small remark to me. 

It's always drowsy summer when...Read more of this...

Lion In An Iron Cage

by Nazim Hikmet
 Look at the lion in the iron cage,
look deep into his eyes:
 like two naked steel daggers
 they sparkle with anger.
But he never loses his dignity
 although his anger
 comes and goes
 goes and comes.

You couldn't find a place for a collar
round his thick, furry mane.
Although the scars of a whip 
 still burn on his yellow back
his long...Read more of this...

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