Famous Curiously Poems by Famous Poets

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

See also:

The Second Elegy

by Rainer Maria Rilke
Every angel is terrifying. And yet alas
I invoked you almost deadly birds of the soul
knowing about you. Where are the days of Tobias
when one of you veiling his radiance stood at the front door  
slightly disguised for the journey no longer appalling;
(a young man like the one who curiously peeked through the window).
But if the archangel now perilous from...Read more of this...

Age

by Robert Creeley
 Most explicit--
the sense of trap

as a narrowing
cone one's got

stuck into and
any movement

forward simply
wedges once more--

but where
or quite when,

even with whom,
since now there is no one

quite with you--Quite? Quiet?
English expression: Quait?

Language of singular
impedance? A dance? An

involuntary gesture to
others not there? What's

wrong here? How
reach out to the

other side all
others live on as

now you see the
two doctors, behind

you, in mind's eye,
probe into...Read more of this...

Tease

by D. H. Lawrence
 I will give you all my keys, 
You shall be my ch?telaine, 
You shall enter as you please, 
As you please shall go again. 

When I hear you jingling through 
All the chambers of my soul, 
How I sit and laugh at you 
In your vain housekeeping r?le. 

Jealous of the smallest cover, 
Angry at the simplest door; 
Well,...Read more of this...

With Antecedents

by Walt Whitman
 1
WITH antecedents; 
With my fathers and mothers, and the accumulations of past ages; 
With all which, had it not been, I would not now be here, as I am: 
With Egypt, India, Phenicia, Greece and Rome; 
With the Kelt, the Scandinavian, the Alb, and the Saxon;
With antique maritime ventures,—with laws, artizanship, wars and journeys; 
With the poet, the skald,...Read more of this...

agapanthus - african lily

by Rg Gregory
 [from agape (love); anthus (flower)]

you may not be willing to notice me
i have an awkward sense of myself
my name can be hard on the tongue
i do not grow easily in places
where the sun only fitfully appears

i've come a long way northwards
gardens do not flatter my needs
i am a shy sheltered plant - my leaves
first come above the earth slowly
serpenting...Read more of this...

There was a Child went Forth

by Walt Whitman
 THERE was a child went forth every day; 
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became; 
And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of the day, or for many
 years, or
 stretching cycles of years. 

The early lilacs became part of this child, 
And grass, and white and red...Read more of this...

Sparkles from The Wheel

by Walt Whitman
 1
WHERE the city’s ceaseless crowd moves on, the live-long day, 
Withdrawn, I join a group of children watching—I pause aside with them. 

By the curb, toward the edge of the flagging, 
A knife-grinder works at his wheel, sharpening a great knife; 
Bending over, he carefully holds it to the stone—by foot and knee,
With measur’d tread, he turns rapidly—As he...Read more of this...

Merlin

by Edwin Arlington Robinson
 “Gawaine, Gawaine, what look ye for to see, 
So far beyond the faint edge of the world? 
D’ye look to see the lady Vivian, 
Pursued by divers ominous vile demons 
That have another king more fierce than ours?
Or think ye that if ye look far enough 
And hard enough into the feathery west 
Ye’ll have a glimmer of the...Read more of this...

Condolence

by Dorothy Parker
 They hurried here, as soon as you had died,
Their faces damp with haste and sympathy,
And pressed my hand in theirs, and smoothed my knee,
And clicked their tongues, and watched me, mournful-eyed.
Gently they told me of that Other Side-
How, even then, you waited there for me,
And what ecstatic meeting ours would be.
Moved by the lovely tale, they broke, and cried.

And...Read more of this...

Sonnet XXX: Those Priests

by Michael Drayton
 To the Vestals

Those priests which first the Vestal fire begun, 
Which might be borrow'd from no earthly flame, 
Devis'd a vessel to receive the Sun, 
Being steadfastly opposed to the same; 
Where, with sweet wood, laid curiously by art, 
On which the Sun might by reflection beat, 
Receiving strength from every secret part, 
The fuel kindled with celestial heat....Read more of this...

Flight Of Stairs

by A S J Tessimond
 Stairs fly as straight as hawks;
Or else in spirals, curve out of curve, pausing
At a ledge to poise their wings before relaunching. 
Stairs sway at the height of their flight
Like a melody in Tristan;
Or swoop to the ground with glad spread of their feathers
Before they close them.

They curiously investigate
The shells of buildings,
A hollow core,
Shell in a shell.

Useless to produce...Read more of this...

Prothalamion

by Edmund Spenser
CALM was the day, and through the trembling air 
Sweet-breathing Zephyrus did softly play¡ª 
A gentle spirit, that lightly did delay 
Hot Titan's beams, which then did glister fair; 
When I, (whom sullen care, 5 
Through discontent of my long fruitless stay 
In princes' court, and expectation vain 
Of idle hopes, which still do fly away 
Like empty shadows, did...Read more of this...

The Man Who Could Write

by Rudyard Kipling
 Boanerges Blitzen, servant of the Queen,
Is a dismal failure -- is a Might-have-been.
In a luckless moment he discovered men
Rise to high position through a ready pen.

Boanerges Blitzen argued therefore -- "I,
With the selfsame weapon, can attain as high."
Only he did not possess when he made the trial,
Wicked wit of C-lv-n, irony of L--l.

[Men who spar with Government need, to...Read more of this...

Fragment

by Amy Lowell
 What is poetry? Is it a mosaic
Of coloured stones which curiously are wrought
Into a pattern? Rather glass that's taught
By patient labor any hue to take
And glowing with a sumptuous splendor, make
Beauty a thing of awe; where sunbeams caught,
Transmuted fall in sheafs of rainbows fraught
With storied meaning for religion's sake....Read more of this...

The Building

by Philip Larkin
 Higher than the handsomest hotel
The lucent comb shows up for miles, but see,
All round it close-ribbed streets rise and fall
Like a great sigh out of the last century.
The porters are scruffy; what keep drawing up
At the entrance are not taxis; and in the hall
As well as creepers hangs a frightening smell.

There are paperbacks, and tea at so much a...Read more of this...

A Broadway Pageant

by Walt Whitman
 1
OVER the western sea, hither from Niphon come, 
Courteous, the swart-cheek’d two-sworded envoys, 
Leaning back in their open barouches, bare-headed, impassive, 
Ride to-day through Manhattan. 

Libertad!
I do not know whether others behold what I behold, 
In the procession, along with the nobles of Asia, the errand-bearers, 
Bringing up the rear, hovering above, around, or in the ranks marching; 
But...Read more of this...

Lilacs

by Amy Lowell
Lilacs,
False blue,
White,
Purple,
Color of lilac,
Your great puffs of flowers
Are everywhere in this my New England.
Among your heart-shaped leaves
Orange orioles hop like music-box birds and sing
Their little weak soft songs;
In the crooks of your branches
The bright eyes of song sparrows sitting on spotted eggs
Peer restlessly through the light and shadow
Of all Springs.
Lilacs in dooryards
Holding quiet conversations with an early moon;
Lilacs watching a...Read more of this...

Fragment

by Amy Lowell
 What is poetry? Is it a mosaic
Of coloured stones which curiously are wrought
Into a pattern? Rather glass that's taught
By patient labor any hue to take
And glowing with a sumptuous splendor, make
Beauty a thing of awe; where sunbeams caught,
Transmuted fall in sheafs of rainbows fraught
With storied meaning for religion's sake....Read more of this...

La Solitude de St. Amant

by Katherine Philips
 1

O! Solitude, my sweetest choice
Places devoted to the night,
Remote from tumult, and from noise,
How you my restless thoughts delight!
O Heavens! what content is mine,
To see those trees which have appear'd
From the nativity of Time,
And which hall ages have rever'd,
To look to-day as fresh and green,
As when their beauties first were seen!


2

A cheerful wind does court them so,
And with such...Read more of this...

Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances

by Walt Whitman
 OF the terrible doubt of appearances, 
Of the uncertainty after all—that we may be deluded, 
That may-be reliance and hope are but speculations after all, 
That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful fable only, 
May-be the things I perceive—the animals, plants, men, hills, shining and flowing
 waters,
The skies of day and night—colors, densities, forms—May-be these are, (as
...Read more of this...

Unnamed Lands

by Walt Whitman
 NATIONS ten thousand years before These States, and many times ten thousand years before
 These
 States; 
Garner’d clusters of ages, that men and women like us grew up and travel’d their
 course, and pass’d on; 
What vast-built cities—what orderly republics—what pastoral tribes and nomads; 
What histories, rulers, heroes, perhaps transcending all others; 
What laws, customs, wealth, arts, traditions;
What sort...Read more of this...

The Haunted Oak

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
 Pray why are you so bare, so bare, 
Oh, bough of the old oak-tree;
And why, when I go through the shade you throw,
Runs a shudder over me?
My leaves were green as the best, I trow,
And sap ran free in my veins,
But I say in the moonlight dim and weird
A guiltless victim's pains.

They'd charged him with the old, old crime,
And...Read more of this...

To Think of Time

by Walt Whitman
 1
TO think of time—of all that retrospection! 
To think of to-day, and the ages continued henceforward! 

Have you guess’d you yourself would not continue? 
Have you dreaded these earth-beetles? 
Have you fear’d the future would be nothing to you?

Is to-day nothing? Is the beginningless past nothing? 
If the future is nothing, they are just as surely nothing. 

To think...Read more of this...

The Whitsun Weddings

by Philip Larkin
 That Whitsun, I was late getting away:
 Not till about
One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday 
Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,
All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense
Of being in a hurry gone. We ran 
Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street
Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence 
The river's level drifting breadth began, 
Where sky and Lincolnshire and...Read more of this...

Smile Smile Smile

by Wilfred Owen
 Head to limp head, the sunk-eyed wounded scanned
Yesterday's Mail; the casualties (typed small)
And (large) Vast Booty from our Latest Haul.
Also, they read of Cheap Homes, not yet planned;
For, said the paper, "When this war is done
The men's first instinct will be making homes.
Meanwhile their foremost need is aerodromes,
It being certain war has just begun.
Peace would do wrong to our...Read more of this...

Dont forget to view our wonderful member Curiously poems.

Get a Premium Membership
Turn off ads, get more exposure for your poetry, and get more features with a Premium Membership.
Book: Diverse Voices: The Poetry of Human Rights and the Pursuit of Peace