Famous Foil Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Marginalia

by Barry Tebb
 Here is a silence I had not hoped for

This side of paradise, I am an old believer

In nature’s bounty as God’s grace

To us poor mortals, fretting and fuming

At frustrated lust or the scent of fame 

Coming too late to make a difference

Blue with white vertebrae of cloud forms

Riming the spectrum of green dark of poplars

Lined like soldiers, paler the...Read more of this...

Song. Good Counsel to a Young Maid

by Thomas Carew
 GAZE not on thy beauty's pride, 
Tender maid, in the false tide 
That from lovers' eyes doth slide. 
Let thy faithful crystal show 
How thy colours come and go : 
Beauty takes a foil from woe. 

Love, that in those smooth streams lies 
Under pity's fair disguise, 
Will thy melting heart surprise. 

Nets of passion's finest thread, 
Snaring poems,...Read more of this...

Refrigerator 1957

by Thomas Lux
 More like a vault -- you pull the handle out
and on the shelves: not a lot,
and what there is (a boiled potato
in a bag, a chicken carcass
under foil) looking dispirited,
drained, mugged. This is not
a place to go in hope or hunger.
But, just to the right of the middle
of the middle door shelf, on fire, a lit-from-within red,
heart red, sexual...Read more of this...

Upon a Fit of Sickness

by Anne Bradstreet
 Twice ten years old not fully told
since nature gave me breath,
My race is run, my thread spun,
lo, here is fatal death.
All men must die, and so must I;
this cannot be revoked.
For Adam's sake this word God spake
when he so high provoked.
Yet live I shall, this life's but small,
in place of highest bliss,
Where I shall have all I can crave,
no...Read more of this...

Mementos

by Charlotte Bronte
 ARRANGING long-locked drawers and shelves 
Of cabinets, shut up for years, 
What a strange task we've set ourselves ! 
How still the lonely room appears ! 
How strange this mass of ancient treasures, 
Mementos of past pains and pleasures; 
These volumes, clasped with costly stone, 
With print all faded, gilding gone; 

These fans of leaves, from Indian trees­ 
These...Read more of this...

Epitaphs For Two Players

by Vachel Lindsay
 I. EDWIN BOOTH

An old actor at the Player's Club told me that Edwin Booth first impersonated Hamlet when a barnstormer in California. There were few theatres, but the hotels were provided with crude assembly rooms for strolling players.


The youth played in the blear hotel.
The rafters gleamed with glories strange.
And winds of mourning Elsinore
Howling at chance and fate and change;
Voices...Read more of this...

The Mortal One

by Sharon Olds
 Three months after he lies dead, that
long yellow narrow body,
not like Christ but like one of his saints,
the naked ones in the paintings whose bodies are
done in gilt, all knees and raw ribs,
the ones who died of nettles, bile, the
one who died roasted over a slow fire—
three months later I take the pot of
tulip bulbs out of the closet
and...Read more of this...

Our biggest fish

by Eugene Field
 When in the halcyon days of old, I was a little tyke,
I used to fish in pickerel ponds for minnows and the like;
And oh, the bitter sadness with which my soul was fraught
When I rambled home at nightfall with the puny string I'd caught!
And, oh, the indignation and the valor I'd display
When I claimed that all the biggest fish...Read more of this...

A Marching Song

by Algernon Charles Swinburne
 We mix from many lands,
We march for very far;
In hearts and lips and hands
Our staffs and weapons are;
The light we walk in darkens sun and moon and star.

It doth not flame and wane
With years and spheres that roll,
Storm cannot shake nor stain
The strength that makes it whole,
The fire that moulds and moves it of the sovereign soul.

We are they...Read more of this...

A Song

by William Butler Yeats
 I thought no more was needed
Youth to polong
Than dumb-bell and foil
To keep the body young.
O who could have foretold
That thc heart grows old?

Though I have many words,
What woman's satisfied,
I am no longer faint
Because at her side?
O who could have foretold
That the heart grows old?

I have not lost desire
But the heart that I had;
I thOught 'twould burn my body
Laid on...Read more of this...

Sonnet X: Reason

by Sir Philip Sidney
 Reason, in faith thou art well serv'd, that still 
Wouldst brabbling be with sense and love in me: 
I rather wish'd thee climb the Muses' hill, 
Or reach the fruit of Nature's choicest tree, 

Or seek heav'n's course, or heav'n's inside to see: 
Why shouldst thou toil our thorny soil to till? 
Leave sense, and those which sense's objects...Read more of this...

Lycidas

by John Milton
 In this Monody the author bewails a learned Friend, unfortunately
drowned in his passage from Chester on the Irish Seas, 1637;
and, by occasion, foretells the ruin of our corrupted Clergy, 
then in their height.


YET once more, O ye laurels, and once more,
Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,
I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,
And with forced fingers rude
Shatter...Read more of this...

Gods Grandeur

by Gerard Manley Hopkins
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
  It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
  It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed.  Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
  And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
  And wears...Read more of this...

Emptying Town

by Nick Flynn
 I want to erase your footprints
from my walls. Each pillow
is thick with your reasons. Omens 

fill the sidewalk below my window: a woman
in a party hat, clinging
to a tin-foil balloon. Shadows 

creep slowly across the tar, someone yells, "Stop!"
and I close my eyes. I can't watch 

as this town slowly empties, leaving me
strung between bon-voyages, like so many clothes
on...Read more of this...

The Logger

by Robert William Service
 In the moonless, misty night, with my little pipe alight,
 I am sitting by the camp-fire's fading cheer;
Oh, the dew is falling chill on the dim, deer-haunted hill,
 And the breakers in the bay are moaning drear.
The toilful hours are sped, the boys are long abed,
 And I alone a weary vigil keep;
In the sightless, sullen sky I can...Read more of this...

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