Famous Filigree Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The Concert

by Edna St. Vincent Millay
 No, I will go alone.
I will come back when it's over.
Yes, of course I love you.
No, it will not be long.
Why may you not come with me?—
You are too much my lover.
You would put yourself
Between me and song.

If I go alone,
Quiet and suavely clothed,
My body will die in its chair,
And over my head a flame,
A mind that is twice...Read more of this...

The Fruit Shop

by Amy Lowell
 Cross-ribboned shoes; a muslin gown,
High-waisted, girdled with bright blue;
A straw poke bonnet which hid the frown
She pluckered her little brows into
As she picked her dainty passage through
The dusty street. "Ah, Mademoiselle,
A dirty pathway, we need rain,
My poor fruits suffer, and the shell
Of this nut's too big for its kernel, lain
Here in the sun it has shrunk again.
The baker down...Read more of this...

The Bride

by D. H. Lawrence
 My love looks like a girl to-night, 
But she is old. 
The plaits that lie along her pillow 
Are not gold, 
But threaded with filigree silver, 
And uncanny cold. 

She looks like a young maiden, since her brow 
Is smooth and fair, 
Her cheeks are very smooth, her eyes are closed. 
She sleeps a rare 
Still winsome sleep, so...Read more of this...

To A Snowflake

by Francis Thompson
 What heart could have thought you? -- 
Past our devisal 
(O filigree petal!) 
Fashioned so purely, 
Fragilely, surely, 
From what Paradisal 
Imagineless metal, 
Too costly for cost? 
Who hammered you, wrought you, 
From argentine vapor? -- 
"God was my shaper. 
Passing surmisal, 
He hammered, He wrought me, 
From curled silver vapor, 
To lust of His mind -- 
Thou could'st...Read more of this...

The Fairy Goldsmith

by Elinor Wylie
 Here's a wonderful thing, 
A humming-bird's wing 
In hammered gold, 
And store well chosen 
Of snowflakes frozen 
In crystal cold.

Black onyx cherries 
And mistletoe berries 
Of chrysoprase, 
Jade buds, tight shut, 
All carven and cut 
In intricate ways.

Here, if you please 
Are little gilt bees 
In amber drops 
Which look like honey, 
Translucent and sunny, 
From clover-tops.

Here's an elfin...Read more of this...

Silver Filigree

by Elinor Wylie
 The icicles wreathing 
On trees in festoon 
Swing, swayed to our breathing: 
They're made of the moon.

She's a pale, waxen taper; 
And these seem to drip 
Transparent as paper 
From the flame of her tip.

Molten, smoking a little, 
Into crystal they pass; 
Falling, freezing, to brittle 
And delicate glass.

Each a sharp-pointed flower, 
Each a brief stalactite 
Which hangs for...Read more of this...

Fog

by Amy Clampitt
 A vagueness comes over everything,
as though proving color and contour
alike dispensable: the lighthouse
extinct, the islands' spruce-tips
drunk up like milk in the
universal emulsion; houses
reverting into the lost
and forgotten; granite
subsumed, a rumor
in a mumble of ocean.
 Tactile
definition, however, has not been
totally banished: hanging
tassel by tassel, panicled
foxtail and needlegrass,
dropseed, furred hawkweed,
and last season's rose-hips
are vested in silenced
chimes of the finest,
clearest sea-crystal.
 Opacity
opens...Read more of this...

Passer-By These Are Words

by Yves Bonnefoy
 Passer-by, these are words. But instead of reading
 I want you to listen: to this frail
 Voice like that of letters eaten by grass.

Lend an ear, hear first of all the happy bee
Foraging in our almost rubbed-out names.
 It flits between two sprays of leaves,
Carrying the sound of branches that are real
 To those that filigree the still unseen.

Then...Read more of this...

The Laboratory

by Robert Browning
 ANCIEN REGIME

I

Now that I, tying thy glass mask tightly,
May gaze through these faint smokes curling whitely,
As thou pliest thy trade in this devil's-smithy— 
Which is the poison to poison her, prithee?

II

He is with her; and they know that I know
Where they are, what they do: they believe my tears flow
While they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to...Read more of this...

The Gardens

by Emile Verhaeren
The landscape now reveals a change;
A stair—that twinèd elm-boughs hold
Enclosed 'mid hedges mystic, strange—
Inaugurates a green and gold
Vision of gardens, range on range.


Each step's a hope, that doth ascend
Stairwise to expectation's height;
A weary way it is to wend
While noonday suns are burning bright.
But rest waits at the evening's end.


Streams, that wash white from sin, flow deep,
And round about the fresh...Read more of this...

The Guardian Angel Of The Private Life

by Jorie Graham
 All this was written on the next day's list.
On which the busyness unfurled its cursive roots,
pale but effective,
and the long stem of the necessary, the sum of events,
built-up its tiniest cathedral...
(Or is it the sum of what takes place? )
If I lean down, to whisper, to them,
down into their gravitational field, there where they head busily on
into the woods,...Read more of this...

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