Famous For Free Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Seeing off Hermit Wen Back to Former Residence White Goose Peak in the Yellow Mountains

by Li Bai
Thousands of feet high towers the Yellow Mountains
With its thirty-two magnificent peaks,
Blooming like golden lotus flowers
Amidst red crags and rock columns.
Once I was on its lofty summit,
Admiring Tianmu Pine below.
The place is still traceable where the immortal
Before ascending to heaven made elixir out of jade.
Now you embark on your journey there alone---
Another Wen Boxue* I happened to meet---
Who've been to...Read more of this...

Bourne

by Judith Skillman
 When the Cherry
rustles above her head
she hardly realizes
why she leaves
her clothes on the rocks,

passes a hand absently
through water
as if smoothing
an infant’s forehead.
Instead she takes the fruit

pressed into her hand
and watches the bloody stone
wet her fingers.
Wasn’t sweetness always 
a symbol for their falling.

She walks with the man
along the river bank
until they come to know
the sore places
in the soles of their...Read more of this...

O thou who art the summing up of the universal creation,

by Omar Khayyam
O thou who art the summing up of the universal creation,
cease for an instant to occupy thyself with gain or
loss; take a cup of wine from the hand of the etern
cupbearer, and free thyself thus altogether from the cares
of this world and from those of the other!...Read more of this...

To Tu Fu from Shantung

by Li Po
 You ask how I spend my time--
I nestle against a treetrunk
and listen to autumn winds
in the pines all night and day.

Shantung wine can't get me drunk.
The local poets bore me.
My thoughts remain with you,
like the Wen River, endlessly flowing....Read more of this...

The Snow

by Emile Verhaeren
Uninterruptedly falls the snow,
Like meagre, long wool-strands, scant and slow,
O'er the meagre, long plain disconsolate.
Cold with lovelessness, warm with hate.


Infinite, infinite falls the snow.
Like a moment's time.
Monotonously, in a moment's time;
On the houses it falls and drops, the snow.
Monotonous, whitening them o'er with rime;
It falls on the sheds and their palings below.
And myriad-wise, it falls and lies
In ridgèd waves
In the...Read more of this...

The House Of Dust: Part 04: 05: The Bitter Love-Song

by Conrad Aiken
 No, I shall not say why it is that I love you—
Why do you ask me, save for vanity?
Surely you would not have me, like a mirror,
Say 'yes,—your hair curls darkly back from the temples,
Your mouth has a humorous, tremulous, half-shy sweetness,
Your eyes are April grey. . . .with jonquils in them?'
No, if I tell at all, I shall...Read more of this...

At Midocean

by Robert Bly
All day I loved you in a fever holding on to the tail of the horse.
I overflowed whenever I reached out to touch you.
My hand moved over your body covered
With its dress 
Burning rough an animal's hand or foot moving over leaves.
The rainstorm retires clouds open sunlight
sliding over ocean water a thousand miles from land....Read more of this...

With Antecedents

by Walt Whitman
 1
WITH antecedents; 
With my fathers and mothers, and the accumulations of past ages; 
With all which, had it not been, I would not now be here, as I am: 
With Egypt, India, Phenicia, Greece and Rome; 
With the Kelt, the Scandinavian, the Alb, and the Saxon;
With antique maritime ventures,—with laws, artizanship, wars and journeys; 
With the poet, the skald,...Read more of this...

We Are Those People

by Robinson Jeffers
 I have abhorred the wars and despised the liars, laughed at the frightened
And forecast victory; never one moment's doubt.
But now not far, over the backs of some crawling years, the next
Great war's column of dust and fire writhes
Up the sides of the sky: it becomes clear that we too may suffer
What others have, the brutal horror of defeat—
Or if...Read more of this...

Lovers Gifts XLII: Are You a Mere Picture

by Rabindranath Tagore
 Are you a mere picture, and not as true as those stars, true as
this dust? They throb with the pulse of things, but you are
immensely aloof in your stillness, painted form.
The day was when you walked with me, your breath warm, your
limbs singing of life. My world found its speech in your voice, and
touched my heart with your face....Read more of this...

Sounds of Imagination

by Dejan Stojanovic
I imagined I was a mountain 
Then I became a cloud over that mountain 
Lightning and thunder pummeled the mountain 
Pierced the heart of the earth, 
Becoming lava and exploding as a volcano. 

I imagined I was a star 
Light traveling into space 
Then I grew as a tree 
With leaves of galaxies eating the light 
Becoming the angel of...Read more of this...

A Sad State Of Freedom

by Nazim Hikmet
 You waste the attention of your eyes, 
the glittering labour of your hands, 
and knead the dough enough for dozens of loaves 
of which you'll taste not a morsel; 
you are free to slave for others-- 
you are free to make the rich richer. 

The moment you're born 
they plant around you 
mills that grind lies 
lies to last...Read more of this...

Perhaps I asked too large

by Emily Dickinson
 Perhaps I asked too large --
I take -- no less than skies --
For Earths, grow thick as
Berries, in my native town --

My Basked holds -- just -- Firmaments --
Those -- dangle easy -- on my arm,
But smaller bundles -- Cram....Read more of this...

Triad

by Adelaide Crapsey
These be
Three silent things:
The falling snow…the hour
Before the dawn…the mouth of one
Just dead....Read more of this...

Closed Gentian Distances

by James Schuyler
 A nothing day full of
wild beauty and the
timer pings. Roll up
the silver off the bay
take down the clouds
sort the spruce and
send to laundry marked,
more starch. Goodbye
golden- and silver-
rod, asters, bayberry
crisp in elegance.
Little fish stream
by, a river in water....Read more of this...

Restaurant

by Harold Pinter
 No, you're wrong.

Everyone is as beautiful
 as they can possibly be

Particularly at lunch
 in a laughing restaurant

Everyone is as beautiful
 as they can possibly be

And they are moved 
 by their own beauty

And they shed tears for it
 in the back of the taxi home...Read more of this...

Apostrophe To Man

by Edna St. Vincent Millay
 (On reflecting that the world 
 is ready to go to war again)

Detestable race, continue to expunge yourself, die out.
Breed faster, crowd, encroach, sing hymns, build 
 bombing airplanes;
Make speeches, unveil statues, issue bonds, parade;
Convert again into explosives the bewildered ammonia 
and the distracted cellulose;
Convert again into putrescent matter drawing flies
The hopeful bodies of the young; exhort,
Pray, pull long...Read more of this...

Poetry For Supper

by R S Thomas
 'Listen, now, verse should be as natural 
As the small tuber that feeds on muck 
And grows slowly from obtuse soil 
To the white flower of immortal beauty.' 

'Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer 
Said once about the long toil 
That goes like blood to the poem's making? 
Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls, 
Limp as bindweed,...Read more of this...

To Women As Far As Im Concerned

by D. H. Lawrence
 The feelings I don't have I don't have.
The feeling I don't have, I won't say I have.
The feelings you say you have, you don't have.
The feelings you would like us both to have, we neither of us have.
The feelings people ought to have, they never have.
If people say they've got feelings, you may be pretty sure they haven't got...Read more of this...

Flames

by Billy Collins
 Smokey the Bear heads
into the autumn woods
with a red can of gasoline
and a box of wooden matches.

His ranger's hat is cocked
at a disturbing angle.

His brown fur gleams
under the high sun
as his paws, the size
of catcher's mitts,
crackle into the distance.

He is sick of dispensing
warnings to the careless,
the half-wit camper,
the dumbbell hiker.

He is going to show them
how a professional does it....Read more of this...

December 30

by Richard Brautigan
 At 1:30 in the morning a fart 
smells like a marriage between
an avocado and a fish head.

I have to get out of bed
to write this down without
my glasses on....Read more of this...

Anecdote of the Jar

by Wallace Stevens
I placed a jar in Tennessee, 
And round it was, upon a hill. 
It made the slovenly wilderness 
Surround that hill. 

The wilderness rose up to it, 
And sprawled around, no longer wild. 
The jar was round upon the ground 
And tall and of a port in air. 

It took dominion every where. 
The jar was gray and bare. 
It...Read more of this...

Crater Face

by Denise Duhamel
 is what we called her. The story was
that her father had thrown Drano at her
which was probably true, given the way she slouched
through fifth grade, afraid of the world, recess
especially. She had acne scars
before she had acne—poxs and dips
and bright red patches.
 I don't remember
any report in the papers. I don't remember
my father telling me her father had gone...Read more of this...

An Arab Shepherd Is Searching For His Goat On Mount Zion

by Yehuda Amichai
 An Arab shepherd is searching for his goat on Mount Zion
And on the opposite hill I am searching for my little boy.
An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father
Both in their temporary failure.
Our two voices met above
The Sultan's Pool in the valley between us.
Neither of us wants the boy or the goat
To get caught in the wheels
Of the "Had Gadya"...Read more of this...

Beacons

by Charles Baudelaire
 Reubens, river of forgetfulness, garden of sloth,
Pillow of wet flesh that one cannot love,
But where life throngs and seethes without cease
Like the air in the sky and the water in the sea.

Leonardo da Vinci, sinister mirror,
Where these charming angels with sweet smiles
Charged with mystery, appear in shadows
Of glaciers and pines that close off the country.

Rembrandt, sad hospital full of...Read more of this...

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