Famous Free Verse Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Free Verse poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous free verse poems. These examples illustrate what a famous free verse poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Anna Akhmatova
And the stone word fell
On my still-living breast.
Never mind, I was ready.
I will manage somehow.
Today I have so much to do:
I must kill memory once and for all,
I must turn my soul to stone,
I must learn to live again--
Unless . . . Summer's ardent rustling
Is like a festival outside my window.
For a long time I've foreseen this
Brilliant day, deserted...Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
Yesterday, I visited the workshop of a potter; there I
saw two thousand pitchers, some speaking, others silent.
Each one of these seemed to say to me: Where is the
potter? Where is the buyer of pitchers? Where the
seller?...Read more of this...
by
Howard Nemerov
You know the old story Ann Landers tells
About the houseife in her basement doing the wash?
She's wearing her nightie, and she thinks, "Well, hell,
I might's well put this in as well," and then
Being dripped on by a leaky pipe puts on
Her son's football helmet; whereupon
The meter reader happens to walk through
and "Lady," he gravely says, "I sure hope your...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
BATHED in war’s perfume—delicate flag!
(Should the days needing armies, needing fleets, come again,)
O to hear you call the sailors and the soldiers! flag like a beautiful woman!
O to hear the tramp, tramp, of a million answering men! O the ships they arm with joy!
O to see you leap and beckon from the tall masts of...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
THE MOUTH of this man is a gaunt strong mouth.
The head of this man is a gaunt strong head.
The jaws of this man are bone of the Rocky Mountains, the Appalachians.
The eyes of this man are chlorine of two sobbing oceans,
Foam, salt, green, wind, the changing unknown.
The neck of this man is pith of buffalo prairie, old longing and...Read more of this...
by
Ted Hughes
He tried ignoring the sea
But it was bigger than death, just as it was bigger than life.
He tried talking to the sea
But his brain shuttered and his eyes winced from it as from open flame.
He tried sympathy for the sea
But it shouldered him off - as a dead thing shoulders you off.
He tried hating...Read more of this...
by
Robert Desnos
To slip into your shadow under cover of night.
To follow your footsteps, your shadow at the window.
That shadow at the window is you and no one else;
it's you.
Do not open that window behind whose curtains you're moving.
Shut your eyes.
I'd like to shut them with my lips.
But the window opens and the breeze, the breeze
which strangely balances flame and flag...Read more of this...
by
Rg Gregory
all is still on this starless night
the mountain waits
quiescent as a cat
smoothing crag and chasm
to a white fur
then against the black sky
puffs of snow
flutter from a jutting cliff
into obscurity
a drumroll utters
from the mountain's throat
and stops
reprehended by a silence so intense
that even night
seems shallow in its presence
high up a front of snow
crumples and cascades down
plashing from rock to rock
spawning further...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Lee Masters
I winged my bird,
Though he flew toward the setting sun;
But just as the shot rang out, he soared
Up and up through the splinters of golden light,
Till he turned right over, feathers ruffled,
With some of the down of him floating near,
And fell like a plummet into the grass.
I tramped about, parting the tangles,...Read more of this...
by
William Carlos (WCW) Williams
At ten AM the young housewife
moves about in negligee behind
the wooden walls of her husband's house.
I pass solitary in my car.
Then again she comes to the curb
to call the ice-man, fish-man, and stands
shy, uncorseted, tucking in
stray ends of hair, and I compare her
to a fallen leaf.
The noiseless wheels of my car
rush with a crackling sound over
dried leaves as I...Read more of this...
by
Kahlil Gibran
I was here from the moment of the
Beginning, and here I am still. And
I shall remain here until the end
Of the world, for there is no
Ending to my grief-stricken being.
I roamed the infinite sky, and
Soared in the ideal world, and
Floated through the firmament. But
Here I am, prisoner of measurement.
I heard...Read more of this...
by
Andrew Barton Paterson
Now listen to me and I'll tell you my views concerning the African war,
And the man who upholds any different views, the same is a ritten Pro-Boer!
(Though I'm getting a little bit doubtful myself, as it drags on week after week:
But it's better not ask any questions at all -- let us silence all doubts with...Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
Since the duration of a day is only two stages, make
haste to drink wine, the limpid wine; for know well
that you near the end of your vanishing existence. And,
since you know that this world drags all to decay,
be wise, and, also, day and night be drenched in wine....Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
I spot the hills
With yellow balls in autumn.
I light the prairie cornfields
Orange and tawny gold clusters
And I am called pumpkins.
On the last of October
When dusk is fallen
Children join hands
And circle round me
Singing ghost songs
And love to the harvest moon;
I am a jack-o'-lantern
With terrible teeth
And the children know
I am fooling....Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
Arise, get off thy bed, O cupbearer! and pour the
limpid wine. Before they yet make pitchers of our
skulls, pour out some wine from pitcher into bowl, O
cupbearer!...Read more of this...
by
Pablo Neruda
The memory of you emerges from the night around me.
The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea.
Deserted like the dwarves at dawn.
It is the hour of departure, oh deserted one!
Cold flower heads are raining over my heart.
Oh pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked.
In you the wars and the flights accumulated.
From you the wings of the song...Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
This is the season of roses. Oh! I would now give
rein to one of my desires. I would commit an act which
infringes on the law of the Koran. Yea, for some days,
in company of the fair with velvet and bright tinted cheeks
spreading rose-colored wine over the green turf, I would
transform the plain into a field of tulips.
356...Read more of this...
by
Robinson Jeffers
This morning Hitler spoke in Danzig, we hear his voice.
A man of genius: that is, of amazing
Ability, courage, devotion, cored on a sick child's soul,
Heard clearly through the dog wrath, a sick child
Wailing in Danzig; invoking destruction and wailing at it.
Here, the day was extremely hot; about noon
A south wind like a blast from hell's mouth spilled a slight...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
ASHES of soldiers!
As I muse, retrospective, murmuring a chant in thought,
Lo! the war resumes—again to my sense your shapes,
And again the advance of armies.
Noiseless as mists and vapors,
From their graves in the trenches ascending,
From the cemeteries all through Virginia and Tennessee,
From every point of the compass, out of the countless unnamed graves,
In...Read more of this...
by
Donald Hall
High on a slope in New Guinea
The Grumman Hellcat
lodges among bright vines
as thick as arms. In 1943,
the clenched hand of a pilot
glided it here
where no one has ever been.
In the cockpit, the helmeted
skeleton sits
upright, held
by dry sinews at neck
and shoulder, and webbing
that straps the pelvic cross
to the cracked
leather of the seat, and the breastbone
to the canvas cover
of the...Read more of this...
by
Lam Quang My
Sometimes I am a leaf of grass,
gently borne upon the water.
Sometimes I am a leaf of grass
struck by a wave and sunk.
Sometimes I am a leaf of grass,
drinking rain the long night through.
Sometimes I am a leaf of grass
dry from thirsting for one drop.
Sometimes I am a leaf of grass
rocking in the softest wind.
Sometimes I am a leaf of grass
trampled...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
A Toad, can die of Light --
Death is the Common Right
Of Toads and Men --
Of Earl and Midge
The privilege --
Why swagger, then?
The Gnat's supremacy is large as Thine --
Life -- is a different Thing --
So measure Wine --
Naked of Flask -- Naked of Cask --
Bare Rhine --
Which Ruby's mine?...Read more of this...
by
Claude McKay
Your voice is the color of a robin's breast,
And there's a sweet sob in it like rain--still rain in the night.
Among the leaves of the trumpet-tree, close to his nest,
The pea-dove sings, and each note thrills me with strange delight
Like the words, wet with music, that well from your trembling throat.
I'm afraid of your eyes, they're so bold,
Searching me...Read more of this...
by
William Carlos (WCW) Williams
Each time it rings
I think it is for
me but it is
not for me nor for
anyone it merely
rings and we
serve it bitterly
together, they and I...Read more of this...
by
Randall Jarrell
Looking back in my mind I can see
The white sun like a tin plate
Over the wooden turning of the weeds;
The street jerking --a wet swing--
To end by the wall the children sang.
The thin grass by the girls' door,
Trodden on, straggling, yellow and rotten,
And the gaunt field with its one tied cow--
The...Read more of this...
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