Famous Drifted Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Drunk As Drunk

by Pablo Neruda
 Drunk as drunk on turpentine
From your open kisses,
Your wet body wedged
Between my wet body and the strake
Of our boat that is made of flowers,
Feasted, we guide it - our fingers
Like tallows adorned with yellow metal -
Over the sky's hot rim,
The day's last breath in our sails.

Pinned by the sun between solstice
And equinox, drowsy and tangled together
We drifted for months...Read more of this...

Behind the Arras

by Bliss Carman
 I like the old house tolerably well, 
Where I must dwell 
Like a familiar gnome; 
And yet I never shall feel quite at home. 
I love to roam. 
Day after day I loiter and explore 
From door to door; 
So many treasures lure 
The curious mind. What histories obscure 
They must immure! 

I hardly know which room I care...Read more of this...

Your Riches -- taught me -- Poverty

by Emily Dickinson
 Your Riches -- taught me -- Poverty.
Myself -- a Millionaire
In little Wealths, as Girls could boast
Till broad as Buenos Ayre --

You drifted your Dominions --
A Different Peru --
And I esteemed All Poverty
For Life's Estate with you --

Of Mines, I little know -- myself --
But just the names, of Gems --
The Colors of the Commonest --
And scarce of Diadems --

So...Read more of this...

The Trail Of Ninety-Eight

by Robert William Service
 Gold! We leapt from our benches. Gold! We sprang from our stools.
Gold! We wheeled in the furrow, fired with the faith of fools.
Fearless, unfound, unfitted, far from the night and the cold,
Heard we the clarion summons, followed the master-lure--Gold!

Men from the sands of the Sunland; men from the woods of the West;
Men from the farms and the cities, into...Read more of this...

In The Virgins

by Derek Walcott
 You can't put in the ground swell of the organ
from the Christiansted, St.Croix, Anglican Church
behind the paratrooper's voice: "Turned cop
after Vietnam. I made thirty jumps."
Bells punish the dead street and pigeons lurch
from the stone belfry, opening their chutes,
circling until the rings of ringing stop.
"Salud!" The paratrooper's glass is raised.
The congregation rises to its feet
like a patrol, with scuffling shoes...Read more of this...

In Answer to a Request

by Amy Lowell
 You ask me for a sonnet. Ah, my Dear,
Can clocks tick back to yesterday at noon?
Can cracked and fallen leaves recall last June
And leap up on the boughs, now stiff and sere?
For your sake, I would go and seek the year,
Faded beyond the purple ranks of dune,
Blown sands of drifted hours, which the moon
Streaks with a ghostly finger, and...Read more of this...

To The Man Of The High North

by Robert William Service
 My rhymes are rough, and often in my rhyming
 I've drifted, silver-sailed, on seas of dream,
Hearing afar the bells of Elfland chiming,
 Seeing the groves of Arcadie agleam.

I was the thrall of Beauty that rejoices
 From peak snow-diademed to regal star;
Yet to mine aerie ever pierced the voices,
 The pregnant voices of the Things That Are.

The Here, the Now,...Read more of this...

The White Mans Foot

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 In his lodge beside a river,
Close beside a frozen river,
Sat an old man, sad and lonely.
White his hair was as a snow-drift;
Dull and low his fire was burning,
And the old man shook and trembled,
Folded in his Waubewyon,
In his tattered white-skin-wrapper,
Hearing nothing but the tempest
As it roared along the forest,
Seeing nothing but the snow-storm,
As it whirled and hissed and drifted.
All...Read more of this...

Among Children

by Philip Levine
 I walk among the rows of bowed heads--
the children are sleeping through fourth grade
so as to be ready for what is ahead,
the monumental boredom of junior high
and the rush forward tearing their wings
loose and turning their eyes forever inward.
These are the children of Flint, their fathers
work at the spark plug factory or truck
bottled water in 5 gallon sea-blue jugs
to...Read more of this...

To Elizabeth Ward Perkins

by Amy Lowell
 Dear Bessie, would my tired rhyme
Had force to rise from apathy,
And shaking off its lethargy
Ring word-tones like a Christmas chime.
But in my soul's high belfry, chill
The bitter wind of doubt has blown,
The summer swallows all have flown,
The bells are frost-bound, mute and still.
Upon the crumbling boards the snow
Has drifted deep, the clappers hang
Prismed with icicles, their clang
Unheard since ages...Read more of this...

Metonymy as an Approach to a Real World

by William Bronk
 Whether what we sense of this world
is the what of this world only, or the what 
of which of several possible worlds
--which what?--something of what we sense 
may be true, may be the world, what it is, what we sense.
For the rest, a truce is possible, the tolerance
of travelers, eating foreign foods, trying words
that twist the tongue, to feel...Read more of this...

Ode To The Lemon

by Pablo Neruda
 From blossoms
released
by the moonlight,
from an
aroma of exasperated
love,
steeped in fragrance,
yellowness
drifted from the lemon tree,
and from its plantarium
lemons descended to the earth.

Tender yield!
The coasts,
the markets glowed
with light, with
unrefined gold;
we opened
two halves
of a miracle,
congealed acid
trickled
from the hemispheres
of a star,
the most intense liqueur
of nature,
unique, vivid,
concentrated,
born of the cool, fresh
lemon,
of its fragrant house,
its acid, secret symmetry.

Knives
sliced a small
cathedral
in the lemon,
the concealed apse, opened,
revealed acid...Read more of this...

The Captain

by John McCrae
 Here all the day she swings from tide to tide,
Here all night long she tugs a rusted chain,
A masterless hulk that was a ship of pride,
Yet unashamed: her memories remain.

It was Nelson in the `Captain', Cape St. Vincent far alee,
With the `Vanguard' leading s'uth'ard in the haze --
Little Jervis and the Spaniards and the fight that was to be,
Twenty-seven...Read more of this...

Supernatural Songs

by William Butler Yeats
 I. Ribh at the Tomb of Baile and Aillinn

Because you have found me in the pitch-dark night
With open book you ask me what I do.
Mark and digest my tale, carry it afar
To those that never saw this tonsured head
Nor heard this voice that ninety years have cracked.
Of Baile and Aillinn you need not speak,
All know their tale, all know...Read more of this...

A Winter Day

by Lucy Maud Montgomery
 I 

The air is silent save where stirs 
A bugling breeze among the firs; 
The virgin world in white array 
Waits for the bridegroom kiss of day; 
All heaven blooms rarely in the east 
Where skies are silvery and fleeced, 
And o'er the orient hills made glad 
The morning comes in wonder clad; 
Oh, 'tis a time most fit...Read more of this...

The Death Of Kwasind

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 Far and wide among the nations
Spread the name and fame of Kwasind;
No man dared to strive with Kwasind,
No man could compete with Kwasind.
But the mischievous Puk-Wudjies,
They the envious Little People,
They the fairies and the pygmies,
Plotted and conspired against him.
"If this hateful Kwasind," said they,
"If this great, outrageous fellow
Goes on thus a little longer,
Tearing everything he touches,
Rending everything to pieces,
Filling...Read more of this...

King Trisanku

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 Viswamitra the Magician,
By his spells and incantations,
Up to Indra's realms elysian
Raised Trisanku, king of nations. 

Indra and the gods offended
Hurled him downward, and descending
In the air he hung suspended,
With these equal powers contending. 

Thus by aspirations lifted,
By misgivings downward driven,
Human hearts are tossed and drifted
Midway between earth and heaven....Read more of this...

The Ballad of the Bolivar

by Rudyard Kipling
 Seven men from all the world, back to Docks again,
Rolling down the Ratcliffe Road drunk and raising Cain:
Give the girls another drink 'fore we sign away --
We that took the Bolivar out across the Bay!

We put out from Sunderland loaded down with rails;
 We put back to Sunderland 'cause our cargo shifted;
We put out from Sunderland -- met the...Read more of this...

One to Four

by Omer Tarin
I

One quarter of a century has elapsed
the diurnal movement of a life-cycle
rotating on its own axis
turned inwards and away from
hung by a nail upon the casement 

II

Two of the nine lives have drifted 
sinking somewhere near the embankment
while out prowling the empty streets at night
digging in this corner and that
poking here and there
in the trashcans lining the alley

III

Three horsemen have...Read more of this...

The Wreck of the Abercrombie Robinson

by William Topaz McGonagall
 Twas in the year of 1842 and on the 27th of May
That six Companies of the 91st Regiment with spirits light and gay,
And forming the Second Battalion, left Naas without delay,
Commanded by Captain Bertie Gordon, to proceed to the Cape straightaway. 

And on the second of June they sailed for the Cape of Good Hope
On board the "Abercrombie Robinson,"...Read more of this...

Arcadian Winter

by Willa Cather
 WOE is me to tell it thee, 
Winter winds in Arcady! 
Scattered is thy flock and fled 
From the glades where once it fed, 
And the snow lies drifted white 
In the bower of our delight, 
Where the beech threw gracious shade 
On the cheek of boy and maid: 
And the bitter blasts make roar 
Through the fleshless sycamore....Read more of this...

Winter Landscape

by John Betjeman
 The three men coming down the winter hill
In brown, with tall poles and a pack of hounds
At heel, through the arrangement of the trees,
Past the five figures at the burning straw,
Returning cold and silent to their town,
Returning to the drifted snow, the rink
Lively with children, to the older men,
The long companions they can never reach,
The blue light, men with...Read more of this...

The Suicide

by Edna St. Vincent Millay
 "Curse thee, Life, I will live with thee no more!
Thou hast mocked me, starved me, beat my body sore!
And all for a pledge that was not pledged by me,
I have kissed thy crust and eaten sparingly
That I might eat again, and met thy sneers
With deprecations, and thy blows with tears,—
Aye, from thy glutted lash, glad, crawled away,
As if spent...Read more of this...

Written among the Euganean Hills North Italy

by Percy Bysshe Shelley
MANY a green isle needs must be 
In the deep wide sea of Misery, 
Or the mariner, worn and wan, 
Never thus could voyage on 
Day and night, and night and day, 5 
Drifting on his dreary way, 
With the solid darkness black 
Closing round his vessel's track; 
Whilst above, the sunless sky 
Big with clouds, hangs heavily, 10 
And...Read more of this...

Shelley

by Henry Van Dyke
 Knight-errant of the Never-ending Quest, 
And Minstrel of the Unfulfilled Desire; 
For ever tuning thy frail earthly lyre
To some unearthly music, and possessed
With painful passionate longing to invest
The golden dream of Love's immortal fire
In mortal robes of beautiful attire, 
And fold perfection to thy throbbing breast!

What wonder, Shelley, if the restless wave
Should claim thee and the leaping flame consume
Thy...Read more of this...

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