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Famous Conch Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Aiken, Conrad
...e Milky Way;
and, if we question one, must question all.
What is this ‘man'? How far from him is ‘me'?
Who, in this conch-shell, locked the sound of sea?
We are the tree, yet sit beneath the tree,
among the leaves we are the hidden bird,
we are the singer and are what is heard.
What is this ‘world'? Not Li Po's Gorge alone,
and yet, this too might be. ‘The wind was high
north of the White King City, by the fields
of whistling barley under cuckoo sky,'
where, as th...Read more of this...



by Crowley, Aleister
...r Mars P Moon
VENEZIA, "May" 19"th", 1910.


Jupiter's foursquare blaze of gold and blue
Rides on the moon, a lilac conch of pearl,
As if the dread god, charioted anew
Came conquering, his amazing disk awhirl
To war down all the stars. I see him through
The hair of this mine own Italian girl,
Adela
That bends her face on mine in the gondola!


There is scarce a breath of wind on the lagoon.
Life is absorbed in its beatitude,
A meditative mage beneath the moon
Ah! ...Read more of this...

by Kipling, Rudyard
...temple to the local God,
And burnt all manner of unsavoury things
Upon his altar, and created priests,
And blew into a conch and banged a bell,
And told the story of the Gauri flood
With circumstance and much embroidery. . . .
So hi, the whiskified Objectionable,
Unclean, abominable, out-at-heels,
Became the tutelary Deity
Of all the Gauri valley villages,
And may in time become a Solar Myth....Read more of this...

by Keats, John
...ng 
By sweet enforcement and remembrance dear, 
And pardon that thy secrets should be sung 
Even into thine own soft-conch¨¨d ear: 
Surely I dream'd to-day, or did I see 5 
The wing¨¨d Psyche with awaken'd eyes? 
I wander'd in a forest thoughtlessly, 
And, on the sudden, fainting with surprise, 
Saw two fair creatures, couch¨¨d side by side 
In deepest grass, beneath the whisp'ring roof 10 
Of leaves and trembled blossoms, where there ran 
A brooklet, scarce espied...Read more of this...

by Doolittle, Hilda
...the boulders: 

your stalk has caught root 
among wet pebbles 
and drift flung by the sea 
and grated shells 
and split conch-shells. 

Beautiful, wide-spread, 
fire upon leaf, 
what meadow yields 
so fragrant a leaf 
as your bright leaf?...Read more of this...



by Whittier, John Greenleaf
...h as chase
Bacchus round some antique vase,
Brief of skirt, with ankles bare,
Loose of kerchief and loose of hair,
With conch-shells blowing and fish-horns' twang,
Over and over the Maenads sang:
'Here's Flud Oirson, fur his horrd horrt,
Torr'd an' futherr'd an' corr'd in a corrt
By the women o' Morble'ead!'

Small pity for him! - He sailed away
From a leaking ship in Chaleur Bay, -
Sailed away from a sinking wreck,
With his own town's-people on her deck!
'Lay by! lay by!' th...Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...ts many fingers on the shore, 
again and again 
and they know me, 
they help me unravel, 
they listen with ears made of conch shells, 
they speak back with the wine of the best region. 
They are my staff. 
They comfort me. 

They hear how 
the artery of my soul has been severed 
and soul is spurting out upon them, 
bleeding on them, 
messing up their clothes, 
dirtying their shoes. 
And God is filling me, 
though there are times of doubt 
as hollow as the Gran...Read more of this...

by Tagore, Rabindranath
...your banner
before you, and will not the night be
on fire with your red torch-lights,
O Death, my Death?
Come with your conch-shells sound-
ing, come in the sleepless night.
Dress me with a crimson mantle,
grasp my hand and take me.
Let your chariot be ready at my
door with your horses neighing impatiently.
Raise my veil and look at my face
proudly, O Death, my Death!...Read more of this...

by García Lorca, Federico
...the tall white towers
of the English consulate.
And gypsies of the water
for their pleasure erect
little castles of conch shells
and arbors of greening pine.

Playing her parchment moon
Precosia comes.
The wind sees her and rises,
the wind that never slumbers.
Naked Saint Christopher swells,
watching the girl as he plays
with tongues of celestial bells
on an invisible bagpipe.

Gypsy, let me lift your skirt
and have a look at you.
Open in my ancient fi...Read more of this...

by Kipling, Rudyard
...have we nothing to offer
 Who ruled them so long--
In the fume of incense, the clash of the cymbals, the blare of 
 the conch and the gong?
Over the strife of the schools
 Low the day burns--
Back with the kine from the pools
 Each one returns
To the life that he knows where the altar-flame glows and the
 tulsi is trimmed in the urns....Read more of this...

by Plath, Sylvia
...All summer we moved in a villa brimful of echos,
Cool as the pearled interior of a conch.
Bells, hooves, of the high-stipping black goats woke us.
Around our bed the baronial furniture
Foundered through levels of light seagreen and strange.
Not one leaf wrinkled in the clearing air.
We dreamed how we were perfect, and we were.

Against bare, whitewashed walls, the furniture
Anchored itself, griffin-legged and darkly gra...Read more of this...

by Yeats, William Butler
...pty eyeballs knew
That knowledge increases unreality, that
Mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show.
When gong and conch declare the hour to bless
Grimalkin crawls to Buddha's emptiness.

When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side.
What stalked through the post Office? What intellect,
What calculation, number, measurement, replied?
We Irish, born into that ancient sect
But thrown upon this filthy modern tide
And by its formless spawning fury wrecked,
Climb to our...Read more of this...

by Browning, Robert
...such foam-bows flash
On the horses with curling fish-tails, that prance and paddle and pash
Round the lady atop in her conch—fifty gazers do not abash,
Though all that she wears is some weeds round her waist in a sort of sash!

VIII

All the year long at the villa, nothing to see though you linger,
Except yon cypress that points like Death's lean lifted forefinger.
Some think fireflies pretty, when they mix in the corn and mingle,
Or thrid the stinking hemp till the stal...Read more of this...

by Kipling, Rudyard
...ar Rao!

Thrice thirty thousand men were we before the mists had cleared,
 The low white mists of morning heard the war-conch scream and bray;
We called upon Bhowani and we gripped them by the beard,
 We rolled upon them like a flood and washed their ranks away.

The children of the hills of Khost before our lances ran,
 We drove the black Rohillas back as cattle to the pen;
'Twas then we needed Mulhar Rao to end what we began,
 A thousand men had saved the charge; he fle...Read more of this...

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