Famous Enormous Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Cloud in Trousers

...t has an iron lining. 
At night the self only desires 
to steep its clangour in softness, 
in woman. 

And thus, 
enormous, 
I stood hunched by the window, 
and my brow melted the glass. 
What will it be: love or no-love? 
And what kind of love: 
big or minute? 
How could a body like this have a big love? 
It should be teeny-weeny, 
humble, little love; 
a love that shies at the hooting of cars, 
that adores the bells of horse-trams. 

Again and again 
nuzz...Read more of this...
by Mayakovsky, Vladimir


Alastor: or the Spirit of Solitude

...ream
The boat moved slowly. Where the mountain, riven,
Exposed those black depths to the azure sky,
Ere yet the flood's enormous volume fell
Even to the base of Caucasus, with sound
That shook the everlasting rocks, the mass
Filled with one whirlpool all that ample chasm;
Stair above stair the eddying waters rose, 
Circling immeasurably fast, and laved
With alternating dash the gnarlèd roots
Of mighty trees, that stretched their giant arms
In darkness over it. I' the midst wa...Read more of this...
by Shelley, Percy Bysshe

Beowulf (Modern English)

...ds,
rusty and eaten through, just as they had dwelt there
one thousand winters in the earth’s embrace.
Then was that enormous inheritance,
the gold of ancient men, wound with a spell,
so that no man would be allowed to touch
that hall of rings, unless God himself,
the Truth-King of Victories gave it to them who he wished
—he is the protector of men—to open up the hoard,
even to any human as seemed worthy to him. (ll. 3047-57)

 

XLII.

Then it was apparent tha...Read more of this...
by Anonymous,

Bridge Over The Aire Book 1

...flames is white

Hot in the heat to my

Heart beat as the hob

Swung in and out for

Father Triggear’s pot

Of tea, his enormous red

Calves towered above me

Like a crane, his High

Anglican voice boomed,

“You are a ha’penny short

Of your trip money, what

Am I supposed to do?”



With Father Mulcock

Your alter ego you

Cost me half a lifetime’s faith,

“Not to know who accompanied Christ

Is ignorance worthy of chastisement.”





19



The dray wheels rolled

Over the r...Read more of this...
by Tebb, Barry

Endymion: Book II

...afar past wild magnificence,
Spiral through ruggedest loopholes, and thence
Stretching across a void, then guiding o'er
Enormous chasms, where, all foam and roar,
Streams subterranean tease their granite beds;
Then heighten'd just above the silvery heads
Of a thousand fountains, so that he could dash
The waters with his spear; but at the splash,
Done heedlessly, those spouting columns rose
Sudden a poplar's height, and 'gan to enclose
His diamond path with fretwork, streaming...Read more of this...
by Keats, John


Hyperion

...l upon the flint
He ground severe his skull, with open mouth
And eyes at horrid working. Nearest him
Asia, born of most enormous Caf,
Who cost her mother Tellus keener pangs,
Though feminine, than any of her sons:
More thought than woe was in her dusky face,
For she was prophesying of her glory;
And in her wide imagination stood
Palm-shaded temples, and high rival fanes
By Oxus or in Ganges' sacred isles.
Even as Hope upon her anchor leans,
So leant she, not so fair, upon a t...Read more of this...
by Keats, John

I Ask You

...o
while my heart
thrums under my shirt--
frog at the edge of a pond--
and my thoughts fly off to a province
made of one enormous sky
and about a million empty branches....Read more of this...
by Collins, Billy

Letter In November

...hair.
There is a green in the air,
Soft, delectable.
It cushions me lovingly.

I am flushed and warm.
I think I may be enormous,
I am so stupidly happy,
My Wellingtons
Squelching and squelching through the beautiful red.

This is my property.
Two times a day
I pace it, sniffing
The barbarous holly with its viridian
Scallops, pure iron,

And the wall of the odd corpses.
I love them.
I love them like history.
The apples are golden,
Imagine it ----

My seventy trees
Holding the...Read more of this...
by Plath, Sylvia

Love Is A Parallax

...un
 who insists his playmates run. 

Now you, my intellectual leprechaun,
would have me swallow the entire sun
 like an enormous oyster, down
the ocean in one gulp: you say a mark
of comet hara-kiri through the dark
 should inflame the sleeping town. 

So kiss: the drunks upon the curb and dames
in dubious doorways forget their monday names,
 caper with candles in their heads;
the leaves applaud, and santa claus flies in
scattering candy from a zeppelin,
 playing his prodigal...Read more of this...
by Plath, Sylvia

Paradise Lost: Book 01

...e held 
Gods, yet confessed later than Heaven and Earth, 
Their boasted parents;--Titan, Heaven's first-born, 
With his enormous brood, and birthright seized 
By younger Saturn: he from mightier Jove, 
His own and Rhea's son, like measure found; 
So Jove usurping reigned. These, first in Crete 
And Ida known, thence on the snowy top 
Of cold Olympus ruled the middle air, 
Their highest heaven; or on the Delphian cliff, 
Or in Dodona, and through all the bounds 
Of Doric land;...Read more of this...
by Milton, John

Paradise Lost: Book 05

...re 
Wantoned as in her prime, and played at will 
Her virgin fancies pouring forth more sweet, 
Wild above rule or art, enormous bliss. 
Him through the spicy forest onward come 
Adam discerned, as in the door he sat 
Of his cool bower, while now the mounted sun 
Shot down direct his fervid rays to warm 
Earth's inmost womb, more warmth than Adam needs: 
And Eve within, due at her hour prepared 
For dinner savoury fruits, of taste to please 
True appetite, and not disrelish t...Read more of this...
by Milton, John

Requiem

...thurible,
Tracks from somewhere into nowhere
And, staring me in the face
And threatening me with swift annihilation,
An enormous star.
[1939]

VI

Weeks fly lightly by. Even so,
I cannot understand what has arisen,
How, my son, into your prison
White nights stare so brilliantly.
Now once more they burn,
Eyes that focus like a hawk,
And, upon your cross, the talk
Is again of death.
[1939. Spring]

VII
THE VERDICT

The word landed with a stony thud
Onto my still-beating breast....Read more of this...
by Akhmatova, Anna

Song of Myself

...he arctic sea—it is plenty light enough; 
Through the clear atmosphere I stretch around on the wonderful beauty; 
The enormous masses of ice pass me, and I pass them—the scenery is plain in
 all directions;
The white-topt mountains show in the distance—I fling out my fancies toward
 them; 
(We are approaching some great battle-field in which we are soon to be engaged; 
We pass the colossal outposts of the encampment—we pass with still feet and
 caution; 
Or we are en...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt

The Ballad of the White Horse

...on its brink,
Vast as archangels, gather and drink
The sacrament of the sun.

And men brake out of the northern lands,
Enormous lands alone,
Where a spell is laid upon life and lust
And the rain is changed to a silver dust
And the sea to a great green stone.

And a Shape that moveth murkily
In mirrors of ice and night,
Hath blanched with fear all beasts and birds,
As death and a shock of evil words
Blast a man's hair with white.

And the cry of the palms and the purple moons...Read more of this...
by Chesterton, G K

The Broken Balance

...rils
Spend all to discover the sky, now nothing is good
But only the steel mirrors of discovery . . .
And the beautiful enormous dawns of time, after we perish.

V

Mourning the broken balance, the hopeless prostration of the earth
Under men's hands and their minds,
The beautiful places killed like rabbits to make a city,
The spreading fungus, the slime-threads
And spores; my own coast's obscene future: I remember the farther
Future, and the last man dying
Without succession ...Read more of this...
by Jeffers, Robinson

The Building of the Ship

...heavy hammers and mallets plied, 
Till after many a week, at length, 
Wonderful for form and strength, 
Sublime in its enormous bulk, 
Loomed aloft the shadowy hulk! 
And around it columns of smoke, upwreathing, 
Rose from the boiling, bubbling, seething 
Caldron, that glowed, 
And overflowed 
With the black tar, heated for the sheathing. 
And amid the clamors 
Of clattering hammers, 
He who listened heard now and then 
The song of the Master and his men: 
-- 
"Build me stra...Read more of this...
by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

The Dream Of Wearing Shorts Forever

...To go home and wear shorts forever
in the enormous paddocks, in that warm climate,
adding a sweater when winter soaks the grass, 

to camp out along the river bends
for good, wearing shorts, with a pocketknife,
a fishing line and matches, 

or there where the hills are all down, below the plain,
to sit around in shorts at evening
on the plank verandah - 

If the cardinal points of costume
are Robes,...Read more of this...
by Murray, Les

The House Of Dust: Complete (Long)

...s her eyes, and melts in a seethe of flame . . .
With a smoking ghost of shame . . .

Wind, wind, wind . . . Wind in an enormous brain
Blowing dark thoughts like fallen leaves . . .
The wind shrieks, the wind grieves;
It dashes the leaves on walls, it whirls then again;
And the enormous sleeper vaguely and stupidly dreams
And desires to stir, to resist a ghost of pain.

One, whom the city imprisoned because of his cunning,
Who dreamed for years in a tower,
Seizes this hour
Of...Read more of this...
by Aiken, Conrad

The Hunting Of The Snark

...ds.

A Billiard-marker, whose skill was immense,
 Might perhaps have won more than his share--
But a Banker, engaged at enormous expense,
 Had the whole of their cash in his care.

There was also a Beaver, that paced on the deck,
 Or would sit making lace in the bow:
And had often (the Bellman said) saved them from wreck,
 Though none of the sailors knew how.

There was one who was famed for the number of things
 He forgot when he entered the ship:
His umbrella, his watch, al...Read more of this...
by Carroll, Lewis

Witness

...Against the enormous rocks of a rough coast
The ocean rams itself in pitched assault
And spastic rage to which there is no halt;
Foam-white brigades collapse; but the huge host

Has infinite reserves; at each attack
The impassive cliffs look down in gray disdain
At scenes of sacrifice, unrelieved pain,
Figured in froth, aquamarine and black.

Something in the blood-chem...Read more of this...
by Boland, Eavan

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