Famous Fishes Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Fishes poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous fishes poems. These examples illustrate what a famous fishes poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
See also:
by
Katharine Tynan
Out upon the sand-dunes thrive the coarse long grasses;
Herons standing knee-deep in the brackish pool;
Overhead the sunset fire and flame amasses
And the moon to eastward rises pale and cool.
Rose and green around her, silver-gray and pearly,
Chequered with the black rooks flying home to bed;
For, to wake at daybreak, birds must couch them early:
And the day's a...Read more of this...
by
John Clare
In the cowslip pips I lie,
Hidden from the buzzing fly,
While green grass beneath me lies,
Pearled with dew like fishes' eyes,
Here I lie, a clock-o'-clay,
Waiting for the time o' day.
While the forest quakes surprise,
And the wild wind sobs and sighs,
My home rocks as like to fall,
On its pillar green and tall;
When the pattering rain drives by
Clock-o'-clay keeps warm and dry.
Day...Read more of this...
by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
MANY a guest I'd see to-day,
Met to taste my dishes!
Food in plenty is prepar'd,
Birds, and game, and fishes.
Invitations all have had,
All proposed attending.
Johnny, go and look around!
Are they hither wending?
Pretty girls I hope to see,
Dear and guileless misses,
Ignorant how sweet it is
Giving tender kisses.
Invitations all have had,
All proposed attending.
Johnny, go and look around!
Are they hither wending?
Women also I expect,
Loving...Read more of this...
by
James Tate
All night a door floated down the river.
It tried to remember little incidents of pleasure
from its former life, like the time the lovers
leaned against it kissing for hours
and whispering those famous words.
Later, there were harsh words and a shoe
was thrown and the door was slammed.
Comings and goings by the thousands,
the early mornings and late nights, years, years.
O they've got...Read more of this...
by
Vachel Lindsay
A Song in Chinese Tapestries
"How, how," he said. "Friend Chang," I said,
"San Francisco sleeps as the dead—
Ended license, lust and play:
Why do you iron the night away?
Your big clock speaks with a deadly sound,
With a tick and a wail till dawn comes round.
While the monster shadows glower and creep,
What can be better for man than sleep?"
"I will tell you...Read more of this...
by
Oscar Wilde
Seven stars in the still water,
And seven in the sky;
Seven sins on the King's daughter,
Deep in her soul to lie.
Red roses are at her feet,
(Roses are red in her red-gold hair)
And O where her bosom and girdle meet
Red roses are hidden there.
Fair is the knight who lieth slain
Amid the rush and reed,
See the lean fishes that are fain
Upon dead...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Chatterton
The Sun revolving on his axis turns,
And with creative fire intensely burns;
Impell'd by forcive air, our Earth supreme,
Rolls with the planets round the solar gleam.
First Mercury completes his transient year,
Glowing, refulgent, with reflected glare;
Bright Venus occupies a wider way,
The early harbinger of night and day;
More distant still our globe terraqueous turns,...Read more of this...
by
Judith Skillman
After they passed beneath us I could tell
more would be coming, beneath the sand,
under the bejeweled sky, under the first
layer of earth where water exists
in flutes and eddies. I lay there with you,
not wanting to leave your side even
for them, the miraculous creatures of sex
and sediment, the ones who obey currents
and ladders, blindly seeking out their own
individual...Read more of this...
by
Isaac Watts
O Lord, our Lord, how wondrous great
Is thine exalted name!
The glories of thy heav'nly state
Let men and babes proclaim.
When I behold thy works on high
The moon that rules the night,
And stars that well adorn the sky,
Those moving worlds of light.
Lord, what is man, or all his race,
Who dwells so far below,
That thou should visit him with grace,
And love his...Read more of this...
by
Marge Piercy
The woman in the ordinary pudgy downcast girl
is crouching with eyes and muscles clenched.
Round and pebble smooth she effaces herself
under ripples of conversation and debate.
The woman in the block of ivory soap
has massive thighs that neigh,
great breasts that blare and strong arms that trumpet.
The woman of the golden fleece
laughs uproariously from the belly
inside the girl who imitates
a Christmas card...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
On the tide you ride head high,
Like a whale 'mid little fishes;
I should envy you as I
Help my wife to wash the dishes.
Yet frock-coat and stove-pipe hat
Cannot hide your folds of fat.
You are reckoned a success,
And the public praise you win;
There's your picture in the Press,
Pouchy eyes and triple chin.
Wealth,--of it you fairly stink;
Health,--what does your Doctor think?
Dignity is...Read more of this...
by
Walter de la Mare
If I were Lord of Tartary,
Myself, and me alone,
My bed should be of ivory,
Of beaten gold my throne;
And in my court should peacocks flaunt,
And in my forests tigers haunt,
And in my pools great fishes slant
Their fins athwart the sun.
If I were Lord of Tartary,
Trumpeters every day
To all my meals should summon me,
And in my courtyards bray;
And in the evening...Read more of this...
by
Arthur Symons
The pool glitters, the fishes leap in the sun
With joyous fins, and dive in the pool again;
I see the corn in sheaves, and the harvestmen,
And the cows coming down to the water one by one.
Dragon-flies mailed in lapis and malachite
Flash through the bending reeds and blaze on the pool;
Sea-ward, where trees cluster, the...Read more of this...
by
Richard Aldington
I turn the page and read:
"I dream of silent verses where the rhyme
Glides noiseless as an oar."
The heavy musty air, the black desks,
The bent heads and the rustling noises
In the great dome
Vanish ...
And
The sun hangs in the cobalt-blue sky,
The boat drifts over the lake shallows,
The fishes skim like umber shades...Read more of this...
by
John Masefield
The Loch Achray was a clipper tall
With seven-and-twenty hands in all.
Twenty to hand and reef and haul,
A skipper to sail and mates to bawl
'Tally on to the tackle-fall,
Heave now 'n' start her, heave 'n' pawl!'
Hear the yarn of a sailor,
An old yarn learned at sea.
Her crew were shipped and they said 'Farewell,
So-long, my Tottie, my lovely gell;
We sail to-day...Read more of this...
by
William Topaz McGonagall
'TWAS in the month of December, and in the year l883,
That a monster whale came to Dundee,
Resolved for a few days to sport and play,
And devour the small fishes in the silvery Tay.
So the monster whale did sport and play
Among the innocent little fishes in the beautiful Tay,
Until he was seen by some men one day,
And they resolved...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
ON the beach at night alone,
As the old mother sways her to and fro, singing her husky song,
As I watch the bright stars shining—I think a thought of the clef of the universes, and of
the future.
A VAST SIMILITUDE interlocks all,
All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets, comets, asteroids,
All the substances of the...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
To the Williamson Brothers
HIGH noon. White sun flashes on the Michigan Avenue
asphalt. Drum of hoofs and whirr of motors.
Women trapsing along in flimsy clothes catching
play of sun-fire to their skin and eyes.
Inside the playhouse are movies from under the sea.
From the heat of pavements and the dust of sidewalks,
passers-by go in a breath to be witnesses of
large cool sponges,...Read more of this...
by
Edmund Spenser
YE Nymphes of Mulla which with carefull heed,
The siluer scaly trouts doe tend full well,
and greedy pikes which vse therein to feed,
(Those trouts and pikes all others doo excell)
And ye likewise which keepe the rushy lake,
Where none doo fishes take.
Bynd vp the locks the which hang scatterd light,
And in his waters which your mirror make,
Behold your faces as the...Read more of this...
by
Rainer Maria Rilke
The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
That I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can't reach.
With my senses, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
in the ponds broken off from the sky
my falling sinks,...Read more of this...
by
Sylvia Plath
Black lake, black boat, two black, cut-paper people.
Where do the black trees go that drink here?
Their shadows must cover Canada.
A little light is filtering from the water flowers.
Their leaves do not wish us to hurry:
They are round and flat and full of dark advice.
Cold worlds shake from the oar.
The spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes.
A...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Hardy
How do you know that the pilgrim track
Along the belting zodiac
Swept by the sun in his seeming rounds
Is traced by now to the Fishes' bounds
And into the Ram, when weeks of cloud
Have wrapt the sky in a clammy shroud,
And never as yet a tinct of spring
Has shown in the Earth's apparelling;
O vespering bird, how do you know,
How do you...Read more of this...
by
Delmore Schwartz
In the slight ripple, the fishes dart
Like fingers, centrifugal, like wishes
Wanton. And pleasures rise
as the eyes fall
Through the lucid water. The small pebble,
The clear clay bottom, the white shell
Are apparent, though superficial.
Who would ask more of the August afternoon?
Who would dig mines and follow shadows?
"I would," answers bored Heart, "Lounger, rise"
(Underlip trembling, face...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Gray
'Twas on a lofty vase's side,
Where China's gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers that blow,
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima, reclined,
Gazed on the lake below.
Her conscious tail her joy declared;
The fair round face, the snowy beard,
The velvet of her paws,
Her coat, that with the tortoise vies,
Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes,
She saw; and purred applause.
Still had she...Read more of this...
by
William Browne
Now as an angler melancholy standing
Upon a green bank yielding room for landing,
A wriggling yellow worm thrust on his hook,
Now in the midst he throws, then in a nook:
Here pulls his line, there throws it in again,
Mendeth his cork and bait, but all in vain,
He long stands viewing of the curled stream;
At last a hungry pike, or well-grown bream
Snatch...Read more of this...
Dont forget to view our wonderful member Fishes poems.