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Famous Contours Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry
...well excavated grave.
The firs stand in a procession, each with an emerald turkey—
 foot at the top,
reserved as their contours, saying nothing;
repression, however, is not the most obvious characteristic of
 the sea;
the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look.
There are others besides you who have worn that look—
whose expression is no longer a protest; the fish no longer
 investigate them
for their bones have not lasted:
men lower nets, unconscious of the fac...Read more of this...
by Moore, Marianne



...winks and dies.

Try as she will, the trackless world delivers
No way, the wilderness of light no sign;
Immense,complex contours of hills and rivers
Mock her small wisdom with their vast design.

The darkness rises from the eastern valleys,
And the winds buffet her with their hungry breath,
And the great earth, with neither grief nor malice,
Receives the tiny burden of her death....Read more of this...
by Hope, Alec Derwent (A D)
...e, a ground of contrast
is prepared, painfully, so that we may see.
For they are most exact with us. We do not know
the contours of our feelings. We only know 
what shapes them from the outside. 

Who has not sat, afraid, before his own heart's
curtain? It lifted and displayed the scenery
of departure. Easy to understand. The well-known
garden swaying just a little. Then came the dancer.
Not he! Enough! However lightly he pretends to move:
he is just disguised, costumed, an o...Read more of this...
by Rilke, Rainer Maria
...llen softly back? 
No, these shores and caverns are all silent, 
Dead in the moonlight; only, far above, 
On the smooth contours of these headlands, 
White amid the eternal black, 
One by one in the moonlight there 
Neighing far off on the haunted air 
The unicorns come down to the sea.

4

Senlin, walking before us in the sunlight, 
Bending his small legs in a peculiar way, 
Goes to his work with thoughts of the universe. 
His hands are in his pockets, he smokes his pipe, 
H...Read more of this...
by Aiken, Conrad
...So much I gazed on beauty,
that my vision is replete with it.

Contours of the body. Red lips. Voluptuous limbs.
Hair as if taken from greek statues;
always beautiful, even when uncombed,
and it falls, slightly, over white foreheads.
Faces of love, as my poetry
wanted them.... in the nights of my youth,
in my nights, secretly, met.......Read more of this...
by Cavafy, Constantine P



...ting all this, even
Bearing in mind that regrets are always late, too late!
To which Orpheus, a bluish cloud with white contours,
Replies that these are of course not regrets at all,
Merely a careful, scholarly setting down of
Unquestioned facts, a record of pebbles along the way.
And no matter how all this disappeared,
Or got where it was going, it is no longer
Material for a poem. Its subject
Matters too much, and not enough, standing there helplessly
While the poem streake...Read more of this...
by Ashbery, John
...
Wide tracts of sunny midland charm the eye,
Frequent with hamlet grove, and lucent lake
Where the blue hills' inverted contours lie;
Far to the east where billowy mountains break
In surf of snow against a sapphire sky,
Huge thunderheads loom up behind the ranges,
Changing from gold to pink as deepening sunset changes;

And over plain and far sierra spread
The fulgent rays of fading afternoon,
Showing each utmost peak and watershed
All clarified, each tassel and festoon
Of fl...Read more of this...
by Seeger, Alan
...Among the hills a meteorite
Lies huge; and moss has overgrown,
And wind and rain with touches light
Made soft, the contours of the stone.

Thus easily can Earth digest
A cinder of sidereal fire,
And make her translunary guest
The native of an English shire.

Nor is it strange these wanderers
Find in her lap their fitting place,
For every particle that's hers
Came at the first from outer space.

All that is Earth has once been sky;
Down from the sun of old she came,
Or fr...Read more of this...
by Lewis, C S
...ly the praise of his.
Breathe with the final freedom,
Because love is this.
The sky has flown up high,
The objects' contours are light,
And the body does not celebrate any longer
The anniversary of its plight.



x x x

I myself have freely chosen
Fate of the friend of my heart:
To the freedom under gospel
I allowed him to depart.
And the pigeon came back, beating
On the window with all might
Like from shine of divine restments,
In the room it became ligh...Read more of this...
by Akhmatova, Anna

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry