Famous Form Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Form poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous form poems. These examples illustrate what a famous form poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Mary Darby Robinson
TERRIFIC FIEND! thou Monster fell,
Condemn'd in haunts profane to dwell,
Why quit thy solitary Home,
O'er wide Creation's paths to roam?
Pale Tyrant of the timid Heart,
Whose visionary spells can bind
The strongest passions of the mind,
Freezing Life's current with thy baneful Art.
Nature recoils when thou art near,
For round thy form all plagues are...Read more of this...
by
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Out of the sunshine and out of the heat,
Out of the dust of the grimy street,
A song fluttered down in the form of a dove,
And it bore me a message, the one word—Love!
Ah, I was toiling, and oh, I was sad:
I had forgotten the way to be glad.
Now, smiles for my sadness and for my toil, rest
Since the dove fluttered...Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
O my soul! we two form together the parallel of a compass.
Although we have two points, we make but one
body. Actually, we turn upon the same point and describe
a circle, but the day will come finally, when these two
points shall be united....Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
This is the form Thou gavest me of old,
Wherein Thou workest marvels manifold;
Can I aspire to be a better man,
Or other than I issued from Thy mould?...Read more of this...
by
Claude McKay
Oh, I have tried to laugh the pain away,
Let new flames brush my love-springs like a feather.
But the old fever seizes me to-day,
As sickness grips a soul in wretched weather.
I have given up myself to every urge,
With not a care of precious powers spent,
Have bared my body to the strangest scourge,
To soothe...Read more of this...
by
Kalidasa
Why should his tender form expire,
As blossoms perish in the fire?
How could that gentle life endure
The deadly arrow, sharp and sure?
Restore your arrow to the quiver;
To you were weapons lent
The broken-hearted to deliver,
Not strike the innocent....Read more of this...
by
Robert Louis Stevenson
COME to me, all ye that labour; I will give your spirits rest;
Here apart in starry quiet I will give you rest.
Come to me, ye heavy laden, sin defiled and care opprest,
In your father's quiet mansions, soon to prove a welcome guest.
But an hour you bear your trial, sin and suffer, bleed and die;
But an hour you toil and...Read more of this...
by
Aleister Crowley
When the chill of earth black-breasted is uplifted at the
glance
Of the red sun million-crested, and the forest blossoms
dance
With the light that stirs and lustres of the dawn, and with
the bloom
Of the wind’s cheek as it clusters from the hidden valley’s
gloom :
Then I walk in woodland spaces, musing on the solemn
ways
Of the immemorial places shut behind the starry rays
Of the...Read more of this...
by
Philip Larkin
The little lives of earth and form,
Of finding food, and keeping warm,
Are not like ours, and yet
A kinship lingers nonetheless:
We hanker for the homeliness
Of den, and hole, and set.
And this identity we feel
- Perhaps not right, perhaps not real -
Will link us constantly;
I see the rock, the clay, the chalk,
The flattened grass, the swaying stalk,
And...Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
What though 'tis fair to view, this form of man,
I know not why the heavenly Artisan
Hath set these tulip cheeks and cypress forms
To deck the mournful halls of earth's divan....Read more of this...
by
Robert Creeley
I have come far enough
from where I was not before
to have seen the things
looking in at me from through the open door
and have walked tonight
by myself
to see the moonlight
and see it as trees
and shapes more fearful
because I feared
what I did not know
but have wanted to know.
My facd is my own, I thought.
But you have seen it
turn into a thousand...Read more of this...
by
Francois Villon
Freres humains qui apres nous vivez,
N'ayez les coeurs contre nous endurcis ...
Men, brother men, that after us yet live,
Let not your hearts too hard against us be;
For if some pity of us poor men ye give,
The sooner God shall take of you pity.
Here are we five or six strung up, you see,
And...Read more of this...
by
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Himself it was who wrote
His rank, and quartered his own coat.
There is no king nor sovereign state
That can fix a hero's rate;
Each to all is venerable,
Cap-a-pie invulnerable,
Until he write, where all eyes rest,
Slave or master on his breast.
I saw men go up and down
In the country and the town,
With this prayer upon their neck,
"Judgment and a judge we seek."
Not...Read more of this...
by
Charlotte Bronte
A Short Poem or Else Not Say I
True pleasure breathes not city air,
Nor in Art's temples dwells,
In palaces and towers where
The voice of Grandeur dwells.
No! Seek it where high Nature holds
Her court 'mid stately groves,
Where she her majesty unfolds,
And in fresh beauty moves;
Where thousand birds of sweetest song,
The wildly rushing storm
And...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Moore
I saw thy form in youthful prime,
Nor thought that pale decay
Would steal before the steps of Time,
And waste its bloom away, Mary!
Yet still thy features wore that light,
Which fleets not with the breath;
And life ne'er look'd more truly bright
Than in thy smile of death, Mary!
As streams that run o'er golden mines,...Read more of this...
by
Isaac Watts
v.1-5,31
C. M.
Love to enemies from the example of Christ.
God of my mercy and my praise,
Thy glory is my song,
Though sinners speak against thy grace
With a blaspheming tongue.
When in the form of mortal man
Thy Son on earth was found,
With cruel slanders, false and vain,
They compassed him around.
Their miseries his compassion move,
Their peace he still pursued;
They render hatred for his...Read more of this...
by
Erin Moure
Courageous lair "might prevail"
Waking up to her your "yellow coal"
Steals a its way
harm's imbrogliatic murmur
to concatenate
has been "said"
a mortal habitation or cut in air
that air leaks through
here too
***
Tricked again out of
hope's chord
The oscillatory hum in the head, or
amygdala
continual reaction in the wet mouth to
old oranges, or
mistakes in form
"I retain a clear memory of afternoon light."
A vertebra unfolds its wing,...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
Between the form of Life and Life
The difference is as big
As Liquor at the Lip between
And Liquor in the Jug
The latter -- excellent to keep --
But for ecstatic need
The corkless is superior --
I know for I have tried...Read more of this...
by
Laura Riding Jackson
I do not doubt you.
I know you love me.
It is a fact of your indoor face,
A true fancy of your muscularity.
Your step is confident.
Your look is thorough.
Your stay-beside-me is a pillow
To roll over on
And sleep as on my own upon.
But make me a statement
In due form on endless foolscap
Witnessed before a notary
And sent by post, registered,
To be signed for...Read more of this...
by
Mary Shelley
Thy form is here indeed—a lovely one—
But thou art fled, gone down the dreary road,
That leads to Sorrow's most obscure abode.
Thou sittest on the hearth of pale despair,
Where
For thine own sake I cannot follow thee....Read more of this...
by
Thomas Moore
Tis believed that this Harp, which I wake now for thee
Was a Siren of old, who sung under the sea;
And who often, at eve, through the bright waters roved,
To meet, on the green shore, a youth whom she loved.
But she loved him in vain, for he left her to weep,
And in tears, all the...Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
In the region of hope, form as many friends as you
can; in the time of existence, bind yourself to a perfect
friend, for, know well that a hundred Kaabas, made
of earth and water, are not worth one heart. Leave,
then, thy Kaabas and rather seek a heart....Read more of this...
by
Adam Lindsay Gordon
They are rhymes rudely strung with intent less
Of sound than of words,
In lands where bright blossoms are scentless,
And songless bright birds;
Where, with fire and fierce drought on her tresses,
Insatiable Summer oppresses
Sere woodlands and sad wildernesses,
And faint flocks and herds.
Where in drieariest days, when all dews end,
And all winds are warm,
Wild Winter's large floodgates are loosen'd,
And floods, freed...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Moore
Oh! the days are gone, when Beauty bright
My heart's chain wove;
When my dream of life, from morn till night,
Was love, still love.
New hope may bloom,
And days may come,
Of milder calmer beam,
But there's nothing half so sweet in life
As love's young dream:
No, there's nothing half so sweet in life
As love's...Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
O Khayyam! although the Wheel of the Heavens has,
in setting up his tent, closed the door to discussions, [it
is evident, nevertheless,] that the cupbearer of eternity
[God] has produced, in the form of globules of wine in
the cup of creation, a thousand other Khayyams like
thee....Read more of this...
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