Famous Caress Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The Garden by the Bridge

by Adela Florence Cory Nicolson
   The Desert sands are heated, parched and dreary,
     The tigers rend alive their quivering prey
   In the near Jungle; here the kites rise, weary,
     Too gorged with living food to fly away.

   All night the hungry jackals howl together
     Over the...Read more of this...

Dana

by George William Russell
 I AM the tender voice calling “Away,”
Whispering between the beatings of the heart,
And inaccessible in dewy eyes
I dwell, and all unkissed on lovely lips,
Lingering between white breasts inviolate,
And fleeting ever from the passionate touch,
I shine afar, till men may not divine
Whether it is the stars or the beloved
They follow with rapt spirit. And I weave
My spells at evening, folding...Read more of this...

Ode To Conger Chowder

by Pablo Neruda
 In the storm-tossed
Chilean
sea
lives the rosy conger,
giant eel
of snowy flesh.
And in Chilean
stewpots,
along the coast,
was born the chowder,
thick and succulent,
a boon to man.
You bring the conger, skinned,
to the kitchen
(its mottled skin slips off
like a glove,
leaving the
grape of the sea
exposed to the world),
naked,
the tender eel
glistens,
prepared
to serve our appetites.
Now
you take
garlic,
first, caress
that precious
ivory,
smell
its irate fragrance,
then
blend the minced garlic
with onion
and tomato
until the onion
is the color...Read more of this...

My Tails

by Robert William Service
 I haven't worn my evening dress
 For nearly twenty years;
Oh I'm unsocial, I confess,
 A hermit, it appears.
So much moth-balled it's but away,
 And though wee wifie wails,
Never unto my dimmest day
 I'll don my tails.

How slim and trim I looked in them,
 Though I was sixty old;
And now their sleekness I condemn
 To lie in rigid fold.
I have...Read more of this...

To love with our eyes

by Emile Verhaeren
To love with our eyes, let us lave our gaze of the gaze of those whose glances we have crossed, by thousands, in life that is evil and enthralled.
The dawn is of flowers and dew and the mildest sifted light; soft plumes of silver and sun seem through the mists to brush and caress the mosses in the garden.
Our blue...Read more of this...

Book Lover

by Robert William Service
 I keep collecting books I know
I'll never, never read;
My wife and daughter tell me so,
And yet I never head.
"Please make me," says some wistful tome,
"A wee bit of yourself."
And so I take my treasure home,
And tuck it in a shelf.

And now my very shelves complain;
They jam and over-spill.
They say: "Why don't you ease our strain?"
"some day," I say, "I...Read more of this...

Kyrenaikos

by Alan Seeger
 Lay me where soft Cyrene rambles down 
In grove and garden to the sapphire sea; 
Twine yellow roses for the drinker's crown; 
Let music reach and fair heads circle me, 
Watching blue ocean where the white sails steer 
Fruit-laden forth or with the wares and news 
Of merchant cities seek our harbors here, 
Careless how Corinth fares, how Syracuse;...Read more of this...

To Lady Jane

by Vachel Lindsay
 Romance was always young.
You come today
Just eight years old
With marvellous dark hair.
Younger than Dante found you
When you turned
His heart into the way
That found the heavenly stair.

Perhaps we must be strangers.
I confess
My soul this hour is Dante's,
And your care
Should be for dolls
Whose painted hands caress
Your marvellous dark hair.

Romance, with moonflower face
And morning eyes,
And lips whose thread of scarlet prophesies
The canticles...Read more of this...

A New World

by George William Russell
 I WHO had sought afar from earth
 The faery land to meet,
Now find content within its girth
 And wonder nigh my feet.


To-day a nearer love I choose
 And seek no distant sphere;
For aureoled by faery dews
 The dear brown breasts appear.


With rainbow radiance come and go
 The airy breaths of day;
And eve is all a pearly glow
 With moonlit...Read more of this...

Epilogue

by Robert Lowell
Those blessed structures plot and rhyme-
why are they no help to me now
i want to make
something imagined not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens 
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything i write
With the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot 
lurid rapid garish grouped 
heightened from life 
yet paralyzed by...Read more of this...

Unrecorded

by Fannie Isabelle Sherrick
The splendors of a southern sun
  Caress the glowing sky;
O'er crested waves, the colors glance
  And gleaming, softly die.
A gentle calm from heaven falls
  And weaves a mystic spell;
A glowing grace that charms the soul—
  Whose glory none can tell.
Oh, warm sweet treasures of a sun
  Of endless fire and love;
Those dying embers are the...Read more of this...

Song of Faiz Ulla

by Adela Florence Cory Nicolson
   Just at the time when Jasmins bloom, most sweetly in the summer weather,
   Lost in the scented Jungle gloom, one sultry night we spent together
   We, Love and Night, together blent, a Trinity of tranced content.

   Yet, while your lips were wholly mine, to kiss, to drink from, to caress,
 ...Read more of this...

In The Small Hours

by Wole Soyinka
Blue diaphane, tobacco smoke
Serpentine on wet film and wood glaze,
Mutes chrome, wreathes velvet drapes,
Dims the cave of mirrors. Ghost fingers
Comb seaweed hair, stroke acquamarine veins
Of marooned mariners, captives
Of Circe's sultry notes. The barman
Dispenses igneous potions ?
Somnabulist, the band plays on.

Cocktail mixer, silvery fish
Dances for limpet clients.
Applause is steeped in lassitude,
Tangled in webs of lovers' whispers
And artful eyelash of the androgynous.
The...Read more of this...

Eyes that o'er the landscape fly

by Hafez
Eyes that o’er the landscape fly,
Over dale & wood & stream
To the cloud-realms of the sky;

Eyes that wander still & dream,
Hopes that ever forward press
Seeking lovelier loveliness;

All the world is yours to roam
—Searching eye & swiftling thought—
Nowhere can ye make your home;

Not where peace so vainly sought
Bower’d in the valley lies,
Nor content’s small villages;

Nor can pleasure’s garish dress
Tempt you to...Read more of this...

Atoll

by Robert William Service
 The woes of men beyond my ken
Mean nothing more to me.
Behold my world, and Eden hurled
From Heaven to the Sea;
A jeweled home, in fending foam
Tempestuously tossed;
A virgin isle none dare defile,
Far-flung, forgotten, lost.

And here I dwell, where none may tell
Me tales of mortal strife;
Let millions die, immune am I,
And radiant with life.
No echo comes of evil drums,
To vex my...Read more of this...

Act of Union

by Seamus Heaney
 I

To-night, a first movement, a pulse,
As if the rain in bogland gathered head
To slip and flood: a bog-burst,
A gash breaking open the ferny bed.
Your back is a firm line of eastern coast
And arms and legs are thrown
Beyond your gradual hills. I caress
The heaving province where our past has grown.
I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder
That you would neither...Read more of this...

For The One Who Would Take Mans Life In His Hands

by Delmore Schwartz
 Tiger Christ unsheathed his sword,
Threw it down, became a lamb.
Swift spat upon the species, but
Took two women to his heart.
Samson who was strong as death
Paid his strength to kiss a ****.
Othello that stiff warrior
Was broken by a woman's heart.
Troy burned for a sea-tax, also for
Possession of a charming whore.
What do all examples show?
What must the finished murderer know?

You cannot...Read more of this...

Before you knew you owned it

by Alice Walker
 Expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.
become a stranger
To need of pity
Or, if compassion be freely
Given out
Take only enough
Stop short of urge to plead
Then purge away the need.

Wish for nothing larger
Than your own small heart
Or greater than a star;
Tame wild disappointment
With caress unmoved and cold
Make of it a parka
For your soul.

Discover the reason why
So tiny human midget
Exists at all
So scared unwise
But...Read more of this...

Limits

by Dimitris P Kraniotis
 Fragments of glasses
in the empty room
of the inarticulate whispers,
bleed
our limits,
fill
with sores
the caress of our soul....Read more of this...

Ching Ping Tiao

by Li Po
 Clouds bring back to mind her dress, the flowers her face. 
Winds of spring caress the rail where sparkling dew-drops cluster. 
If you cannot see her by the jewelled mountain top, 
Maybe on the moonlit Jasper Terrance you will meet her...Read more of this...

The Twenty-Third Psalm

by Eugene Field
 My Shepherd is the Lord my God,--
There is no want I know;
His flock He leads in verdant meads,
Where tranquil waters flow.

He doth restore my fainting soul
With His divine caress,
And, when I stray, He points the way
To paths of righteousness.

Yea, though I walk the vale of death,
What evil shall I fear?
Thy staff and rod are mine, O God,
And Thou, my...Read more of this...

The Hands of the Betrothed

by D. H. Lawrence
 Her tawny eyes are onyx of thoughtlessness, 
Hardened they are like gems in ancient modesty; 
Yea, and her mouth’s prudent and crude caress 
Means even less than her many words to me. 

Though her kiss betrays me also this, this only
Consolation, that in her lips her blood at climax clips
Two wild, dumb paws in anguish on the lonely 
Fruit...Read more of this...

The Olympic Girl

by John Betjeman
 The sort of girl I like to see
Smiles down from her great height at me.
She stands in strong, athletic pose
And wrinkles her retrouss? nose.
Is it distaste that makes her frown,
So furious and freckled, down
On an unhealthy worm like me?
Or am I what she likes to see?
I do not know, though much I care,
xxxxxxxx.....would I were
(Forgive me, shade of Rupert...Read more of this...

Zira: in Captivity

by Adela Florence Cory Nicolson
   Love me a little, Lord, or let me go,
   I am so weary walking to and fro
   Through all your lonely halls that were so sweet
   Did they but echo to your coming feet.

   When by the flowered scrolls of lace-like stone
   Our women's windows—I am left...Read more of this...

The Fir-Tree and the Brook

by Helen Hunt Jackson
 The Fir-Tree looked on stars, but loved the Brook! 
"O silver-voiced! if thou wouldst wait, 
My love can bravely woo." All smiles forsook 
The brook's white face. "Too late! 
Too late! I go to wed the sea. 
I know not if my love would curse or bless thee. 
I may not, dare not, tarry to caress thee, 
Oh, do...Read more of this...

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