Famous Couch Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Couch poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous couch poems. These examples illustrate what a famous couch poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...e waste wilderness:
A lovely youth,--no mourning maiden decked
With weeping flowers, or votive cypress wreath,
The lone couch of his everlasting sleep:
Gentle, and brave, and generous,--no lorn bard
Breathed o'er his dark fate one melodious sigh:
He lived, he died, he sung in solitude.
Strangers have wept to hear his passionate notes,
And virgins, as unknown he passed, have pined
And wasted for fond love of his wild eyes.
The fire of those soft orbs has ceased to burn,
And S...Read more of this...
by
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...ly
Assumed a blind ascendency of custom
That saw not even itself. When I came in,
Often I’d find him strewn along my couch
Like an amorphous lizard with its clothes on,
Reading a book and waiting for its dinner.
His clothes were always odiously in order,
Yet I should not have thought of him as clean—
Not even if he had washed himself to death
Proving it. There was nothing right about him.
Then he would search, never quite satisfied,
Though always in a measure confide...Read more of this...
by
Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...treme shift
How to regain my severed company,
Compelled me to awake the courteous Echo
To give me answer from her mossy couch.
COMUS: What chance, good lady, hath bereft you thus?
LADY. Dim darkness and this leafy labyrinth.
COMUS. Could that divide you from near-ushering guides?
LADY. They left me weary on a grassy turf.
COMUS. By falsehood, or discourtesy, or why?
LADY. To seek i' the valley some cool friendly spring.
COMUS. And left your fair side all unguarded, Lad...Read more of this...
by
Milton, John
...lent friendly shade.
IX.
Then, by the shelt'ring river's bank at last,
The weary warriors paused for their repast.
A couch of ice and falling shows for spread
Made many a suffering soldier's chilling bed.
They slept to dream of glory and delight,
While the pale fingers of the pitying night
Wove ghostly winding sheets for that doomed score
Who, ere another eve, should sleep to wake no more.
X.
But those who slept not, saw with startled eyes
Far off, athwart dim unprotect...Read more of this...
by
Wilcox, Ella Wheeler
...of centuries did show.
The castle-towers of Corbus in decay
Were girt by weeds and growths that had their way.
Couch-grass and ivy, and wild eglantine
In subtle scaling warfare all combine.
Subject to such attacks three hundred years,
The donjon yields, and ruin now appears,
E'en as by leprosy the wild boars die,
In moat the crumbled battlements now lie;
Around the snake-like bramble twists its rings;
Freebooter sparrows come on daring wings
T...Read more of this...
by
Hugo, Victor
...e night,
And still these two were postured motionless,
Like natural sculpture in cathedral cavern;
The frozen God still couchant on the earth,
And the sad Goddess weeping at his feet:
Until at length old Saturn lifted up
His faded eyes, and saw his kingdom gone,
And all the gloom and sorrow ofthe place,
And that fair kneeling Goddess; and then spake,
As with a palsied tongue, and while his beard
Shook horrid with such aspen-malady:
"O tender spouse of gold Hyperion,
Thea, I f...Read more of this...
by
Keats, John
...d company:
I gazed - and gazed - but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
...Read more of this...
by
Wordsworth, William
...X.
The crowd are gone, the revellers at rest;
The courteous host, and all-approving guest,
Again to that accustom'd couch must creep
Where joy subsides, and sorrow sighs to sleep,
And man, o'erlabour'd with his being's strife,
Shrinks to that sweet forgetfulness of life:
There lie love's feverish hope. and cunning's guile,
Hate's working brain and lull'd ambition's wile;
O'er each vain eye oblivion's pinions wave,
And quench'd existence crouches in a grave.
What b...Read more of this...
by
Byron, George (Lord)
...Waged in the troubled sky, and armies rush
To battle in the clouds; before each van
Prick forth the airy knights, and couch their spears,
Till thickest legions close; with feats of arms
From either end of heaven the welkin burns.
Others, with vast Typhoean rage, more fell,
Rend up both rocks and hills, and ride the air
In whirlwind; Hell scarce holds the wild uproar:--
As when Alcides, from Oechalia crowned
With conquest, felt th' envenomed robe, and tore
Through pa...Read more of this...
by
Milton, John
...ard calm,
Artificer of fraud; and was the first
That practised falsehood under saintly show,
Deep malice to conceal, couched with revenge:
Yet not enough had practised to deceive
Uriel once warned; whose eye pursued him down
The way he went, and on the Assyrian mount
Saw him disfigured, more than could befall
Spirit of happy sort; his gestures fierce
He marked and mad demeanour, then alone,
As he supposed, all unobserved, unseen.
So on he fares, and to the bo...Read more of this...
by
Milton, John
...e seised; and to a shady bank,
Thick over-head with verdant roof imbowered,
He led her nothing loth; flowers were the couch,
Pansies, and violets, and asphodel,
And hyacinth; Earth's freshest softest lap.
There they their fill of love and love's disport
Took largely, of their mutual guilt the seal,
The solace of their sin; till dewy sleep
Oppressed them, wearied with their amorous play,
Soon as the force of that fallacious fruit,
That with exhilarating vapour bland ...Read more of this...
by
Milton, John
...d too intricate
532 In the beginning, four blithe instruments
533 Of differing struts, four voices several
534 In couch, four more person?, intimate
535 As buffo, yet divers, four mirrors blue
536 That should be silver, four accustomed seeds
537 Hinting incredible hues, four self-same lights
538 That spread chromatics in hilarious dark,
539 Four questioners and four sure answerers.
540 Crispin concocted doctrine from the rout.
541 The world, a turnip onc...Read more of this...
by
Stevens, Wallace
...our,
A dog that leaps, a hand that clings:
O Titan, turn from pomp and power;
Give all your heart to Little Things.
Go couch you childwise in the grass,
Believing it's some jungle strange,
Where mighty monsters peer and pass,
Where beetles roam and spiders range.
'Mid gloom and gleam of leaf and blade,
What dragons rasp their painted wings!
O magic world of shine and shade!
O beauty land of Little Things!
I sometimes wonder, after all,
Amid this tangled web of fate,
If what...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...all,
'To arms! the foemen storm the wall,'
The antlered monarch of the waste
Sprung from his heathery couch in haste.
But ere his fleet career he took,
The dew-drops from his flanks he shook;
Like crested leader proud and high
Tossed his beamed frontlet to the sky;
A moment gazed adown the dale,
A moment snuffed the tainted gale,
A moment listened to the cry,
That thickened as the chase drew nigh;
Then, a...Read more of this...
by
Scott, Sir Walter
....
3. De par dieux jeo asente: "by God, I agree". It is
characteristic that the somewhat pompous Sergeant of Law
should couch his assent in the semi-barbarous French, then
familiar in law procedure.
4. Ceyx and Alcyon: Chaucer treats of these in the introduction
to the poem called "The Book of the Duchess." It relates to the
death of Blanche, wife of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, the
poet's patron, and afterwards his connexion by marriage.
5. The Saintes Legend of Cupid...Read more of this...
by
Chaucer, Geoffrey
...ge, no solace there at all,
The staff found it odd, my wanting to park my heavy bag and trudge
From room to room. The couch Emily died on, so shabby and so faded,
Patrick’s hat and sticks like stage props, Mrs. Gaskell’s escritoire
So thoroughly bourgeois, Charlotte’s crinoline evoking ‘Ooh’ and ‘Aah’.
I sat outside the tourist shop, watching the families pass,
Still reeling from the news of our son’s loss,
His life-in-death and death-in-life.
The crowds gone, the...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...arker each time
our shadows pass over them.
It is almost as if the room were the world.
We sit beside each other on the couch,
reading about the couch.
We say it is ideal.
It is ideal.
2
We are reading the story of our lives,
as though we were in it,
as though we had written it.
This comes up again and again.
In one of the chapters
I lean back and push the book aside
because the book says
it is what I am doing.
I lean back and begin to write about the book.
I write that I wi...Read more of this...
by
Strand, Mark
...gamy; *charge, reproach
*All were it* good no woman for to touch *though it might be*
(He meant as in his bed or in his couch),
For peril is both fire and tow t'assemble
Ye know what this example may resemble.
This is all and some, he held virginity
More profit than wedding in frailty:
(*Frailty clepe I, but if* that he and she *frailty I call it,
Would lead their lives all in chastity), unless*
I grant it well, I have of none envy
Who maidenhead prefer to bigamy;
It liketh t...Read more of this...
by
Chaucer, Geoffrey
...
Marked by one roof-tree, towering high
Above a farm-stead rude.
Refreshed, erelong, with rustic fare,
We'll seek a couch of dreamless ease;
Courage will guard thy heart from fear,
And Love give mine divinest peace:
To-morrow brings more dangerous toil,
And through its conflict and turmoil
We'll pass, as God shall please....Read more of this...
by
Bronte, Charlotte
...ely wails it over
The same Robinson Crusoe.
The sled, the skies, the horse
He will come by to see,
And later on the couch
He sits and waits for me
And with a short spore
He tears the rug in two.
Now the brief smile of mine
The mirror will not view.
x x x
Bow of moon I see, I see
Through dense canopy of groves,
Level sound I hear, I hear
Of the free horse's hooves.
What? And you don't want to sleep,
In a year could you forget
Me, nor are you used t...Read more of this...
by
Akhmatova, Anna
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