Famous Frantic Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Frantic poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous frantic poems. These examples illustrate what a famous frantic poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
See also:
by
Siegfried Sassoon
We’d gained our first objective hours before
While dawn broke like a face with blinking eyes,
Pallid, unshaved and thirsty, blind with smoke.
Things seemed all right at first. We held their line,
With bombers posted, Lewis guns well placed,
And clink of shovels deepening the shallow trench.
The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs
High-booted, sprawled...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
How still the Bells in Steeples stand
Till swollen with the Sky
They leap upon their silver Feet
In frantic Melody!...Read more of this...
by
Oodgeroo Noonuccal
What if you came back now
To our new world, the city roaring
There on the old peaceful camping place
Of your red fires along the quiet water,
How you would wonder
At towering stone gunyas high in air
Immense, incredible;
Planes in the sky over, swarms of cars
Like things frantic in flight....Read more of this...
by
John Williams
The blatant horns blare strident sound;
Delighted, you laugh and seize
My passive arm, but I have found
Content in the harmonies.
They sound, are silent; please or annoy,
Are not clever, cruel, or coy
Like human qualities.
See agile fingers in frantic flight
Along the smoking row
Of piano keys cut from ebony night
And from the sullied snow
Of the city. Look love, listen love, tell me--
Where does...Read more of this...
by
Robert Burns
THOU, Liberty, thou art my theme;
Not such as idle poets dream,
Who trick thee up a heathen goddess
That a fantastic cap and rod has;
Such stale conceits are poor and silly;
I paint thee out, a Highland filly,
A sturdy, stubborn, handsome dapple,
As sleek’s a mouse, as round’s an apple,
That when thou pleasest canst do wonders;
But when thy luckless rider blunders,
Or if thy...Read more of this...
by
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Send but a song oversea for us,
Heart of their hearts who are free,
Heart of their singer, to be for us
More than our singing can be;
Ours, in the tempest at error,
With no light but the twilight of terror;
Send us a song oversea!
Sweet-smelling of pine-leaves and grasses,
And blown as a tree through and through
With the winds of the keen mountain-passes,
And tender...Read more of this...
by
Mary Darby Robinson
Swift, o'er the wild and dreary waste
A NUT-BROWN GIRL was seen to haste;
Wide waving was her unbound hair,
And sun-scorch'd was her bosom bare;
For Summer's noon had shed its beams
While she lay wrapp'd in fev'rish dreams;
While, on the wither'd hedge-row's side,
By turns she slept, by turns she cried,
"Ah ! where lies hid the balsam sweet,
"To heal the wounds of MARGUERITE?"
Dark...Read more of this...
by
D. H. Lawrence
What large, dark hands are those at the window
Lifted, grasping the golden light
Which weaves its way through the creeper leaves
To my heart's delight?
Ah, only the leaves! But in the west,
In the west I see a redness come
Over the evening's burning breast--
...Read more of this...
by
Countee Cullen
That bright chimeric beast
Conceived yet never born,
Save in the poet's breast,
The white-flanked unicorn,
Never may be shaken
From his solitude;
Never may be taken
In any earthly wood.
That bird forever feathered,
Of its new self the sire,
After aeons weathered,
Reincarnate by fire,
Falcon may not nor eagle
Swerve from his eyrie,
Nor any crumb inveigle
Down to an earthly tree.
That fish of the dread regime
Invented to become
The fable...Read more of this...
by
Edwin Arlington Robinson
I say no more for Clavering
Than I should say of him who fails
To bring his wounded vessel home
When reft of rudder and of sails;
I say no more than I should say
Of any other one who sees
Too far for guidance of to-day,
Too near for the eternities.
I think of him as I should think...Read more of this...
by
Michael Ondaatje
All night long the hockey pictures
gaze down at you
sleeping in your tracksuit.
Belligerent goalies are your ideal.
Threats of being traded
cuts and wounds
--all this pleases you.
O my god! you say at breakfast
reading the sports page over the Alpen
as another player breaks his ankle
or assaults the coach.
When I thought of daughters
I wasn't expecting this
but I like this more.
I like all your faults
even...Read more of this...
by
Francesco Petrarch
SONNET I. Voi, ch' ascoltate in rime sparse il suono. HE CONFESSES THE VANITY OF HIS PASSION Ye who in rhymes dispersed the echoes hearOf those sad sighs with which my heart I fedWhen early youth my mazy wanderings led,Fondly diverse from what I now appear,Fluttering 'twixt frantic hope and frantic...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...
by
D. H. Lawrence
What large, dark hands are those at the window
Lifted, grasping in the yellow light
Which makes its way through the curtain web
At my heart to-night?
Ah, only the leaves! So leave me at rest,
In the west I see a redness come
Over the evening's burning breast --
For now the pain is numb.
The woodbine creeps...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
1
PROUD music of the storm!
Blast that careers so free, whistling across the prairies!
Strong hum of forest tree-tops! Wind of the mountains!
Personified dim shapes! you hidden orchestras!
You serenades of phantoms, with instruments alert,
Blending, with Nature’s rhythmus, all the tongues of nations;
You chords left us by vast composers! you choruses!
You formless, free, religious dances! you...Read more of this...
by
Emile Verhaeren
The ferryman, a green reed 'twixt his teeth,
With hand on oar, against the current strong
Had rowed and rowed so long.
But she, alas! whose voice was hailing him
Across the far waves dim.
Still further o'er the far waves seemed to float,
Still further backwards, 'mid the mists, remote.
The casements with their eyes.
The dial-faces of the towers that rise
Upon the shore,
Watched, as he strove...Read more of this...
by
Robert Herrick
Fled are the frosts, and now the fields appear
Reclothed in fresh and verdant diaper;
Thaw'd are the snows; and now the lusty Spring
Gives to each mead a neat enamelling;
The palms put forth their gems, and every tree
Now swaggers in her leafy gallantry.
The while the Daulian minstrel sweetly sings
With warbling notes her Terean sufferings.
--What gentle winds perspire! as if here
Never had...Read more of this...
by
George Herbert
1 I saw Eternity the other night,
2 Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
3 All calm, as it was bright;
4 And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
5 Driv'n by the spheres
6 Like a vast shadow mov'd; in which the world
7 And all her train were hurl'd.
8 The doting lover in his quaintest strain
9 Did there...Read more of this...
by
William Topaz McGonagall
Ye landsmen all attend my verse, and I'll tell to ye a tale
Concerning the barque "Wm. Paterson" that was lost in a tempestuous gale;
She was on a voyage from Bangkok to the Clyde with a cargo of Teakwood,
And the crew numbered Fifteen in all of seamen firm and good.
'Twas on the 11th of March, when a violent gale...Read more of this...
by
Mary Darby Robinson
By the side of the brook, where the willow is waving
Why sits the wan Youth, in his wedding-suit gay!
Now sighing so deeply, now frantickly raving
Beneath the pale light of the moon's sickly ray.
Now he starts, all aghast, and with horror's wild gesture,
Cries, "AGNES is coming, I know her white vesture!
"See! see! how she beckons me on to the willow,
"Where,...Read more of this...
by
Robert Herrick
Ah, Posthumus! our years hence fly
And leave no sound: nor piety,
Or prayers, or vow
Can keep the wrinkle from the brow;
But we must on,
As fate does lead or draw us; none,
None, Posthumus, could e'er decline
The doom of cruel Proserpine.
The pleasing wife, the house, the ground
Must all be left, no one plant found
To follow thee,
Save only the curst cypress-tree!
--A merry mind
Looks...Read more of this...
by
Edwin Arlington Robinson
“Be calm? And was I frantic?
You’ll have me laughing soon.
I’m calm as this Atlantic,
And quiet as the moon;
I may have spoken faster
Than once, in other days;
For I’ve no more a master,
And now—‘Be calm,’ he says.
“Fear not, fear no commotion,—
I’ll be as rocks and sand;
The moon and stars and ocean
Will envy...Read more of this...
by
Victor Hugo
("Quand longtemps a grondé la bouche du Vésuve.")
{I. vii.}
When huge Vesuvius in its torment long,
Threatening has growled its cavernous jaws among,
When its hot lava, like the bubbling wine,
Foaming doth all its monstrous edge incarnadine,
Then is alarm in Naples.
With dismay,
Wanton and wild...Read more of this...
by
Robert Southey
Why dost thou beat thy breast and rend thine hair,
And to the deaf sea pour thy frantic cries?
Before the gale the laden vessel flies;
The Heavens all-favoring smile, the breeze is fair;
Hark to the clamors of the exulting crew!
Hark how their thunders mock the patient skies!
Why dost thou shriek and strain thy red-swoln eyes
As the white sail dim lessens from...Read more of this...
by
Sir Walter Scott
Thy hue, dear pledge, is pure and bright
As in that well - remember'd night
When first thy mystic braid was wove,
And first my Agnes whisper'd love.
Since then how often hast thou prest
The torrid zone of this wild breast,
Whose wrath and hate have sworn to dwell
With the first sin that peopled hell;
A breast whose blood's a troubled ocean,
Each throb the earthquake's...Read more of this...
Dont forget to view our wonderful member Frantic poems.