Famous Carved Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Carved poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous carved poems. These examples illustrate what a famous carved poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Vachel Lindsay
O you who lose the art of hope,
Whose temples seem to shrine a lie,
Whose sidewalks are but stones of fear,
Who weep that Liberty must die,
Turn to the little prairie towns,
Your higher hope shall yet begin.
On every side awaits you there
Some gate where glory enters in.
Yet when I see the flocks of...Read more of this...
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...
by
Adam Lindsay Gordon
They are rhymes rudely strung with intent less
Of sound than of words,
In lands where bright blossoms are scentless,
And songless bright birds;
Where, with fire and fierce drought on her tresses,
Insatiable Summer oppresses
Sere woodlands and sad wildernesses,
And faint flocks and herds.
Where in drieariest days, when all dews end,
And all winds are warm,
Wild Winter's large floodgates are loosen'd,
And floods, freed...Read more of this...
by
Amy Lowell
Slowly, without force, the rain drops into the
city. It stops a moment
on the carved head of Saint John, then slides on again, slipping
and trickling
over his stone cloak. It splashes from the lead conduit
of a gargoyle,
and falls from it in turmoil on the stones in the Cathedral square.
Where are the people, and why does the fretted steeple...Read more of this...
by
Robert Herrick
Ye silent shades, whose each tree here
Some relique of a saint doth wear;
Who for some sweet-heart's sake, did prove
The fire and martyrdom of Love:--
Here is the legend of those saints
That died for love, and their complaints;
Their wounded hearts, and names we find
Encarved upon the leaves and rind.
Give way, give way to me, who come
Scorch'd with the self-same martyrdom!
And have...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
I HAVE lived in many half-worlds myself … and so I know you.
I leaned at a deck rail watching a monotonous sea, the same circling birds and the same plunge of furrows carved by the plowing keel.
I leaned so … and you fluttered struggling between two waves in the air now … and then under the water and out...Read more of this...
by
A S J Tessimond
We expected the violin's finger on the upturned nerve;
Its importunate cry, too laxly curved:
And you drew us an oboe-outline, clean and acute;
Unadorned statement, accurately carved.
We expected the screen, the background for reverie
Which cloudforms usefully weave:
And you built the immaculate, adamant, blue-green steel
Arch of a balanced wave.
We expected a pool with flowers to diffuse and break
The child-round face of the...Read more of this...
by
Rossy Evelin Lima
I carve mockingbirds and quetzals,
my saliva sends the tones to its wings.
Seawater sprouts from my throat,
the orange sun, the green jade;
I hand them over
after chewing them for five centuries.
Once carved I let them free,
...Read more of this...
by
Victor Hugo
("Celui-ci, des Silvas, c'est l'aîné.")
{HERNANI, Act III.}
In that reverend face
Behold the father of De Silva's race,
Silvius; in Rome he filled the consul's place
Three times (your patience for such honored names).
This second was Grand Master of St. James
And Calatrava; his strong limbs sustained
Armor...Read more of this...
by
Annie Finch
HLF, August 8, 1918—August 22, 1997
“Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal’s wide spindrift gaze towards paradise.”
—Hart Crane, “Voyages”
“If a lion could talk, we couldn’t understand it”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Under the ocean that stretches out wordlessly
past the long edge of the last human shore,
there are deep windows the waves haven't opened,
where night is...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
Read here:
This is the story of Evarra -- man --
Maker of Gods in lands beyond the sea.
Because the city gave him of her gold,
Because the caravans brought turquoises,
Because his life was sheltered by the King,
So that no man should maim him, none should steal,
Or break his rest with babble in the streets
When he...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Hardy
They sing their dearest songs --
He, she, all of them -- yea,
Treble and tenor and bass,
And one to play;
With the candles mooning each face....
Ah, no; the years O!
How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!
They clear the creeping moss --
Elders and juniors -- aye,
Making the pathways neat
And the garden gay;
And they build a shady seat....
Ah, no; the years, the...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
(May I lie in peace)
Let there be grass and trees to blow
And fold me in their shadow
Branches to shake and leaves
Turn brown, fall and lie fallow.
Let there be moorlands swept by wind
And raked by rain, purple splashes of heather
In autumn and sturdy boulders our forefathers
Carved their names on, emerald and slippery with moss
And pebble-strewn sheep-tracks crossing ditch and dyke
Where...Read more of this...
by
Robert Lowell
1
Only today and just for this minute,
when the sunslant finds its true angle,
you can see yellow and pinkish leaves spangle
our gentle, fluffy tree—
suddenly the green summer is momentary...
Autumn is my favorite season—
why does it change clothes and withdraw?
This week the house went on the market—
suddenly I woke up among strangers;
when I go into a room, it moves
with embarrassment, and...Read more of this...
by
Sylvia Plath
How the elements solidify! ---
The moonlight, that chalk cliff
In whose rift we lie
Back to back. I here an owl cry
From its cold indigo.
Intolerable vowels enter my heart.
The child in the white crib revolves and sighs,
Opens its mouth now, demanding.
His little face is carved in pained, red wood.
Then there are the stars - ineradicable, hard.
One touch : it burns and sickens.
I...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Hardy
THREE captains went to Indian wars,
And only one returned:
Their mate of yore, he singly wore
The laurels all had earned.
At home he sought the ancient aisle
Wherein, untrumped of fame,
The three had sat in pupilage,
And each had carved his name.
The names, rough-hewn, of equal size,
Stood on the panel still;
Unequal since.--"'Twas theirs to aim,
Mine was it to fulfil!"
--"Who saves his life shall...Read more of this...
by
Czeslaw Milosz
Your hand, my wonder, is now icy cold.
The purest light of the celestial dome
has burned me through. And now we are
as two still plams lying in darlmess,
as two black banks of a frozen stream
in the chasm of the world.
Our hair combed back is carved in wood,
the moon walks over our ebony shoulders.
A distant cockcrow, the night goes by, silent.
Rich...Read more of this...
by
Maxine Kumin
Up attic, Lucas Harrison, God rest
his frugal bones, once kept a tidy account
by knifecut of some long-gone harvest.
The wood was new. The pitch ran down to blunt
the year: 1811, the score: 10, he carved
into the center rafter to represent
his loves, beatings, losses, hours, or maybe
the butternuts that taxed his back and starved
the red squirrels higher up each scabbed...Read more of this...
by
Pablo Neruda
How neatly a cat sleeps,
Sleeps with its paws and its posture,
Sleeps with its wicked claws,
And with its unfeeling blood,
Sleeps with ALL the rings a series
Of burnt circles which have formed
The odd geology of its sand-colored tail.
I should like to sleep like a cat,
With all the fur of time,
With a tongue rough as flint,
With the dry sex of...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Lee Masters
Who carved this shattered harp on my stone?
I died to you, no doubt. But how many harps and pianos
Wired I and tightened and disentangled for you,
Making them sweet again -- with tuning fork or without?
Oh well! A harp leaps out of the ear of a man, you say,
But whence the ear that orders the length of the strings
To a...Read more of this...
by
Ben Jonson
XII. — EPISTLE TO ELIZABETH COUNTESS OF RUTLAND. That which, to boot with hell, is thought worth heaven, And for it, life, conscience, yea souls are given, Toils, by grave custom, up and down the court, To every squire, or groom, that will report Well or ill, only all the following year, Just to the weight their this day's presents...Read more of this...
by
Sara Teasdale
Oh in the deep blue night
The fountain sang alone;
It sang to the drowsy heart
Of a satyr carved in stone.
The fountain sang and sang
But the satyr never stirred--
Only the great white moon
In the empty heaven heard.
The fountain sang and sang
And on the marble rim
The milk-white peacocks slept,
Their dreams were strange and dim.
Bright dew was on the grass,
And on the ilex...Read more of this...
by
William Butler Yeats
I, the poet William Yeats,
With old mill boards and sea-green slates,
And smithy work from the Gort forge,
Restored this tower for my wife George;
And may these characters remain
When all is ruin once again....Read more of this...
by
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
You shall hear how Pau-Puk-Keewis,
How the handsome Yenadizze
Danced at Hiawatha's wedding;
How the gentle Chibiabos,
He the sweetest of musicians,
Sang his songs of love and longing;
How Iagoo, the great boaster,
He the marvellous story-teller,
Told his tales of strange adventure,
That the feast might be more joyous,
That the time might pass more gayly,
And...Read more of this...
by
Edwin Arlington Robinson
“The sea is everywhere the sea.”
I
Gone—faded out of the story, the sea-faring friend I remember?
Gone for a decade, they say: never a word or a sign.
Gone with his hard red face that only his laughter could wrinkle,
Down where men go to be still, by the old way of the sea.
Never again will he come, with...Read more of this...
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