Famous Concert Poems by Famous Poets

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

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My Felisberto

by James Tate
 My felisberto is handsomer than your mergotroid,
although, admittedly, your mergotroid may be the wiser of the two. 
Whereas your mergotroid never winces or quails, 
my felisberto is a titan of inconsistencies.
For a night of wit and danger and temptation 
my felisberto would be the obvious choice.
However, at dawn or dusk when serenity is desired 
your mergotroid cannot be ignored.
Merely...Read more of this...

My Felisberto

by Edward Taylor
 My felisberto is handsomer than your mergotroid,
although, admittedly, your mergotroid may be the wiser of the two. 
Whereas your mergotroid never winces or quails, 
my felisberto is a titan of inconsistencies.
For a night of wit and danger and temptation 
my felisberto would be the obvious choice.
However, at dawn or dusk when serenity is desired 
your mergotroid cannot be ignored.
Merely...Read more of this...

The Corn-stalk Fiddle

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
When the corn 's all cut and the bright stalks shine
Like the burnished spears of a field of gold;
When the field-mice rich on the nubbins dine,
And the frost comes white and the wind blows cold;
Then it's heigho! fellows and hi-diddle-diddle,
For the time is ripe for the corn-stalk fiddle.
And you take a stalk that is straight and long,
With an expert eye...Read more of this...

Take This Waltz

by Leonard Cohen
 (After Lorca) 

Now in Vienna there are ten pretty women.
There's a shoulder where death comes to cry.
There's a lobby with nine hundred windows.
There's a tree where the doves go to die.
There's a piece that was torn from the morning,
and it hangs in the Gallery of Frost—
Ay, ay ay ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz,
take this waltz with the clamp...Read more of this...

Room 5: The Concert Singer

by Robert William Service
 I'm one of these haphazard chaps
Who sit in cafes drinking;
A most improper taste, perhaps,
Yet pleasant, to my thinking.
For, oh, I hate discord and strife;
I'm sadly, weakly human;
And I do think the best of life
Is wine and song and woman.

Now, there's that youngster on my right
Who thinks himself a poet,
And so he toils from morn to night
And vainly hopes to...Read more of this...

Give me my cup in hand, and sing a glee

by Omar Khayyam
Give me my cup in hand, and sing a glee
In concert with the bulbul's symphony;
Wine would not gurgle as it leaves the flask,
If drinking mute were right for thee and me!...Read more of this...

Band Concert

by Carl Sandburg
 BAND concert public square Nebraska city. Flowing and circling dresses, summer-white dresses. Faces, flesh tints flung like sprays of cherry blossoms. And gigglers, God knows, gigglers, rivaling the pony whinnies of the Livery Stable Blues.

Cowboy rags and ****** rags. And boys driving sorrel horses hurl a cornfield laughter at the girls in dresses, summer-white dresses. Amid the cornet staccato...Read more of this...

Pleasure

by Charlotte Bronte
 A Short Poem or Else Not Say I

True pleasure breathes not city air, 
Nor in Art's temples dwells, 
In palaces and towers where 
The voice of Grandeur dwells.

No! Seek it where high Nature holds 
Her court 'mid stately groves, 
Where she her majesty unfolds, 
And in fresh beauty moves;

Where thousand birds of sweetest song, 
The wildly rushing storm 
And...Read more of this...

Bath

by Carl Sandburg
 A MAN saw the whole world as a grinning skull and
cross-bones. The rose flesh of life shriveled from all
faces. Nothing counts. Everything is a fake. Dust to
dust and ashes to ashes and then an old darkness and a
useless silence. So he saw it all. Then he went to a
Mischa Elman concert. Two hours waves of sound beat
on his eardrums....Read more of this...

Hiawathas photographing ( Part V )

by Lewis Carroll
 Last, the youngest son was taken:
Very rough and thick his hair was,
Very round and red his face was,
Very dusty was his jacket,
Very fidgety his manner.
And his overbearing sisters
Called him names he disapproved of:
Called him Johnny, 'Daddy's Darling,'
Called him Jacky, 'Scrubby School-boy.'
And, so awful was the picture,
In comparison the others
Seemed, to one's bewildered fancy,
To have partially succeeded.


Finally my Hiawatha
Tumbled all...Read more of this...

Self-Portrait At 28

by David Berman
 I know it's a bad title
but I'm giving it to myself as a gift
on a day nearly canceled by sunlight
when the entire hill is approaching
the ideal of Virginia
brochured with goldenrod and loblolly
and I think "at least I have not woken up
with a bloody knife in my hand"
by then having absently wandered
one hundred yards from the house
while still seated in...Read more of this...

Portrait of a Lady

by T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
 Thou hast committed—
Fornication: but that was in another country,
And besides, the wench is dead.

The Jew of Malta.


I

AMONG the smoke and fog of a December afternoon
You have the scene arrange itself—as it will seem to do—
With “I have saved this afternoon for you”;
And four wax candles in the darkened room,
Four rings of light upon the ceiling overhead,
An atmosphere of Juliet’s...Read more of this...

The Concert

by Edna St. Vincent Millay
 In memory of Dimitri Mitropoulos


The harpist believes there is music
in the skeletons of fish

The French horn player believes
in enormous golden snails

The piano believes in nothing
and grins from ear to ear

Strings are scratching their bellies
openly, enjoying it

Flutes and oboes complain
in dialects of the same tongue

Drumsticks rattle a calfskin
from the sleep of another life

because the supernatural crow
on the podium flaps his...Read more of this...

True Story

by Charles Bukowski
 they found him walking along the freeway
all red in
front
he had taken a rusty tin can
and cut off his sexual
machinery
as if to say --
see what you've done to
me? you might as well have the
rest.

and he put part of him
in one pocket and
part of him in
another
and that's how they found him,
walking
along.

they gave him over to the
doctors
who tried to sew the parts
back
on
but...Read more of this...

Christs Nativity

by Henry Vaughan
 1 Awake, glad heart! get up and sing!
2 It is the birth-day of thy King.
3 Awake! awake!
4 The Sun doth shake
5 Light from his locks, and all the way
6 Breathing perfumes, doth spice the day.

7 Awake, awake! hark how th' wood rings;
8 Winds whisper, and the busy springs
9 A concert make;
10 Awake! awake!
11 Man is their high-priest, and should...Read more of this...

Little Pierres Song

by William Topaz McGonagall
 In a humble room in London sat a pretty little boy,
By the bedside of his sick mother her only joy,
Who was called Little Pierre, and who's father was dead;
There he sat poor boy, hungry and crying for bread. 

There he sat humming a little song, which was his own,
But to the world it was entirely unknown,
And as he sang...Read more of this...

Concert Party

by Siegfried Sassoon
 (EGYPTIAN BASE CAMP)


They are gathering round.... 
Out of the twilight; over the grey-blue sand, 
Shoals of low-jargoning men drift inward to the sound— 
The jangle and throb of a piano ... tum-ti-tum... 
Drawn by a lamp, they come 
Out of the glimmering lines of their tents, over the shuffling sand. 

O sing us the songs, the songs of our...Read more of this...

Mary

by Edgar Bowers
 The angel of self-discipline, her guardian
Since she first knew and had to go away
From home that spring to have her child with strangers,
Sustained her, till the vanished boy next door
And her ordeal seemed fiction, and the true
Her mother’s firm insistence she was the mother
And the neighbors’ acquiescence. So she taught school,
Walking a mile each way to ride the street...Read more of this...

The Concert

by Edna St. Vincent Millay
 No, I will go alone.
I will come back when it's over.
Yes, of course I love you.
No, it will not be long.
Why may you not come with me?—
You are too much my lover.
You would put yourself
Between me and song.

If I go alone,
Quiet and suavely clothed,
My body will die in its chair,
And over my head a flame,
A mind that is twice...Read more of this...

Sonnet CCXXI

by Francesco Petrarch
SONNET CCXXI. Cercato ho sempre solitaria vita. THINKING ALWAYS OF LAURA, IT PAINS HIM TO REMEMBER WHERE SHE IS LEFT.  Still have I sought a life of solitude;The streams, the fields, the forests know my mind;That I might 'scape the sordid and the blind,Who paths forsake trod by the wise and good:Read more of this...

Musketaquid

by Ralph Waldo Emerson
 Because I was content with these poor fields, 
Low, open meads, slender and sluggish streams, 
And found a home in haunts which others scorned, 
The partial wood-gods overpaid my love, 
And granted me the freedom of their state, 
And in their secret senate have prevailed 
With the dear, dangerous lords that rule our life, 
Made moon and planets parties...Read more of this...

Eudaemon

by Alan Seeger
 O happiness, I know not what far seas, 
Blue hills and deep, thy sunny realms surround, 
That thus in Music's wistful harmonies 
And concert of sweet sound 
A rumor steals, from some uncertain shore, 
Of lovely things outworn or gladness yet in store: 


Whether thy beams be pitiful and come, 
Across the sundering of vanished years, 
From childhood and...Read more of this...

Happy As The Day Is Long

by James Tate
 I take the long walk up the staircase to my secret room.
Today's big news: they found Amelia Earhart's shoe, size 9.
1992: Charlie Christian is bebopping at Minton's in 1941.
Today, the Presidential primaries have failed us once again.
We'll look for our excitement elsewhere, in the last snow
that is falling, in tomorrow's Gospel Concert in Springfield.
It's a good day to be...Read more of this...

Sonnet CXXIII

by Francesco Petrarch
SONNET CXXIII. I' vidi in terra angelici costumi. THE EFFECTS OF HER GRIEF.  On earth reveal'd the beauties of the skies,Angelic features, it was mine to hail;[Pg 151]Features, which wake my mingled joy and wail,While all besides like dreams or shadows flies.And fill'd with tears I saw those...Read more of this...

Careers

by Robert William Service
 I knew three sisters,--all were sweet;
 Wishful to wed was I,
And wondered which would mostly meet
 The matrimonial tie.
I asked the first what fate would she
 Wish joy of life to bring to her.
She answered: 'I would like to be
 A concert singer.'

I asked the second, for my mind
 Was set on nuptial noosing,
Unto what lot was she inclined
...Read more of this...

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