Famous Colored Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Colored poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous colored poems. These examples illustrate what a famous colored poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...bloom—
You would waste words
It is clearer to me than if the pink
were on the branch. It would be a searching in
a colored cloud to reveal that which now, huskless,
shows the very reason for their being.
And these the orange-trees, in blossom—no need
to tell with this weight of perfume in the air.
If it were not so dark in this shed one could better
see the white.
It is that very perfume
has drawn the darkness down among the leaves.
Do I speak clearly enough?
...Read more of this...
by
Williams, William Carlos (WCW)
...; and books that told me everything about the wasp,
except why."
"Go on the Useless Presents."
"Bags of moist and many-colored jelly babies and a folded flag and a false nose and a tram-conductor's cap and
a machine that punched tickets and rang a bell; never a catapult; once, by mistake that no one could explain, a
little hatchet; and a celluloid duck that made, when you pressed it, a most unducklike sound, a mewing moo that
an ambitious cat might make who wished to be a co...Read more of this...
by
Thomas, Dylan
...f thought; its music long,
Like woven sounds of streams and breezes, held
His inmost sense suspended in its web
Of many-colored woof and shifting hues.
Knowledge and truth and virtue were her theme,
And lofty hopes of divine liberty,
Thoughts the most dear to him, and poesy,
Herself a poet. Soon the solemn mood
Of her pure mind kindled through all her frame
A permeating fire; wild numbers then
She raised, with voice stifled in tremulous sobs
Subdued by its own pathos; her fa...Read more of this...
by
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...nce shall I scorn -- so Hygelac stay,
king of my kindred, kind to me! --
brand or buckler to bear in the fight,
gold-colored targe: but with gripe alone
must I front the fiend and fight for life,
foe against foe. Then faith be his
in the doom of the Lord whom death shall take.
Fain, I ween, if the fight he win,
in this hall of gold my Geatish band
will he fearless eat, -- as oft before, --
my noblest thanes. Nor need’st thou then
to hide my head; {6c} for his shall...Read more of this...
by
Anonymous,
...ts 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 fire and
After speaking to no one,
Stretch myself over the world,
Over roofs and landscapes,
With a passionate desire
To hunt the rats in my dreams.
I have seen how the cat asleep
Would undulate, how the night flowed
Through it lik...Read more of this...
by
Neruda, Pablo
...ss arm
of a boy in dowtown Houston. You were the rain rolling off the
waxy leaves of a magnolia tree. A lock of straw-colored hair
wedged between the mottled pages of a Victor Hugo novel. A
crescent of soap. A spider the color of a fingernail. The black nets
beneath the sea of olive trees. A skein of blue wool. A tea saucer
wrapped in newspaper. An empty cracker tin. A bowl of blueber-
ries in heavy cream. White wine in a green-stemmed glass.
And when you opened y...Read more of this...
by
Cisneros, Sandra
...ean knows this, that life in its
jewel boxes
is endless as the sand, impossible to count, pure,
and among the blood-colored grapes time has made the
petal
hard and shiny, made the jellyfish full of light
and untied its knot, letting its musical threads fall
from a horn of plenty made of infinite mother-of-pearl.
I am nothing but the empty net which has gone on ahead
of human eyes, dead in those darknesses,
of fingers accustomed to the triangle, longitudes
on the...Read more of this...
by
Neruda, Pablo
...very human being-
Else it had no meaning for anyone.
Then a man said:
BETTER TO DIE FREE
THAN TO LIVE SLAVES
He was a colored man who had been a slave
But had run away to freedom.
And the slaves knew
What Frederick Douglass said was true.
With John Brown at Harper's Ferry, ******* died.
John Brown was hung.
Before the Civil War, days were dark,
And nobody knew for sure
When freedom would triumph
"Or if it would," thought some.
But others new it had to triumph.
In those dar...Read more of this...
by
Hughes, Langston
...that have slipped
beneath my body without leaving any memory.
And how empty you went through the world
like a wheat-colored jar
without air, without sound, without substance!
I vainly sought in you
depth for my arms
that dig, without cease, beneath the earth:
beneath your skin, beneath your eyes,
nothing,
beneath your double breast scarcely
raised
a current of crystalline order
that does not know why it flows singing.
Why, why, why,
my love, why?...Read more of this...
by
Neruda, Pablo
...Thousand minstrels woke within me,
"Our music's in the hills; "—
Gayest pictures rose to win me,
Leopard-colored rills.
Up!—If thou knew'st who calls
To twilight parks of beech and pine,
High over the river intervals,
Above the ploughman's highest line,
Over the owner's farthest walls;—
Up!—where the airy citadel
O'erlooks the purging landscape's swell.
Let not unto the stones the day
Her lily and rose, her sea and land display;
Read the celestial sign!
Lo! the...Read more of this...
by
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
...same to everybody
But this confusion drains away as one
Is always cresting into one's present.
Yet the "poetic," straw-colored space
Of the long corridor that leads back to the painting,
Its darkening opposite--is this
Some figment of "art," not to be imagined
As real, let alone special? Hasn't it too its lair
In the present we are always escaping from
And falling back into, as the waterwheel of days
Pursues its uneventful, even serene course?
I think it is trying to say it ...Read more of this...
by
Ashbery, John
...animals.
Eyes that were pierced,
little nail heads,
light blue gunshots.
And once with
a mouth like a cup,
clay colored or blood colored,
open like the breakwater
for the lost ocean
and open like the noose
for the first head.
Once upon a time
my hunger was for Jesus.
O my hunger! My hunger!
Before he grew old
he rode calmly into Jerusalem
in search of death.
This time
I certainly
do not ask for understanding
and yet I hope everyone else
will turn thei...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...he words of things entangle and confuse.
409 The plum survives its poems. It may hang
410 In the sunshine placidly, colored by ground
411 Obliquities of those who pass beneath,
412 Harlequined and mazily dewed and mauved
413 In bloom. Yet it survives in its own form,
414 Beyond these changes, good, fat, guzzly fruit.
415 So Crispin hasped on the surviving form,
416 For him, of shall or ought to be in is.
417 Was he to bray this in profoundest brass
418 A...Read more of this...
by
Stevens, Wallace
...ondrous plain,
The hamlet sites where settling smoke lay curled,
The poplar-bordered roads, and far away
Fair snowpeaks colored with the sun's last ray.
Waves of faint sound would pulsate from afar
Faint song and preludes of the summer night;
Deep in the cloudless west the evening star
Hung 'twixt the orange and the emerald light;
From the dark vale where shades crepuscular
Dimmed the old grove-girt belfry glimmering white,
Throbbing, as gentlest breezes rose or fell,
Came t...Read more of this...
by
Seeger, Alan
...r breath, she screams . . .
And then by degrees her breath grows quiet and slow,
She dreams of an evening, long ago:
Of colored lanterns balancing under trees,
Some of them softly catching afire;
And beneath the lanterns a motionless face she sees,
Golden with lamplight, smiling, serene . . .
The leaves are a pale and glittering green,
The sound of horns blows over the trampled grass,
Shadows of dancers pass . . .
The face smiles closer to hers, she tries to lean
Backward, aw...Read more of this...
by
Aiken, Conrad
...nging, an epochal content.
And there were, like old wedding lace in an attic,
among the boas and parasols and the tea-colored
daguerreotypes, hints of an epochal happiness
as ordered and infinite to the child
as the great house road to the Great House
down a perspective of casuarinas plunging green manes
in time to the horses, an orderly life
reduced by lorgnettes day and night, one disc the sun,
the other the moon, reduced into a pier glass:
nannies diminished to d...Read more of this...
by
Walcott, Derek
...out my thumb as if it were a bunch of bananas and then sit
back down on the rock again.
The old shack had a tin roof colored reddish by years of
wear, like a hat worn under the guillotine. A corner of the
roof was loose and a hot wind blew down the river and the
loose corner clanged in the wind.
A car went by. An old couple. The car almost swerved off
the road and into the river. I guess they didn't see many
hitchhikers up there. The car went around the corner
with...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...e window,
into shoeshops that smell like vinegar,
and certain streets hideous as cracks in the skin.
There are sulphur-colored birds, and hideous intestines
hanging over the doors of houses that I hate,
and there are false teeth forgotten in a coffeepot,
there are mirrors
that ought to have wept from shame and terror,
there are umbrellas everywhere, and venoms, and umbilical
cords.
I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes,
my rage, forgetting everything,
I walk by, ...Read more of this...
by
Neruda, Pablo
...us, fearful and tender,
He loved me like God's only light,
And that she not sing of the past times
He killed my bird colored white.
He said, in the lighthouse at sundown:
"Love me, laugh and write poetry!"
And I buried the joyous songbird
Behind a round well near a tree.
I promised that I would not mourn her.
But my heart turned to stone without choice,
And it seems to me that everywhere
And always I'll hear her sweet voice.
x x x
True love's memory...Read more of this...
by
Akhmatova, Anna
...Oil brown smog over Denver
Oil red dung colored smoke
level to level across the horizon
blue tainted sky above
Oil car smog gasoline
hazing red Denver's day
December bare trees
sticking up from housetop streets
Plane lands rumbling, planes rise over
radar wheels, black smoke
drifts from tailfins
Oil millions of cars speeding the cracked plains
Oil from Texas, Ba...Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
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