Famous Gestures Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Gestures poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous gestures poems. These examples illustrate what a famous gestures poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
See also:
by
Carl Sandburg
BOTH were jailbirds; no speechmakers at all; speaking best with one foot on a brass rail; a beer glass in the left hand and the right hand employed for gestures.
And both were lights snuffed out … no warning … no lingering:
Who knew the hearts of these boozefighters?...Read more of this...
by
Robert Burns
UPON 1 a simmer Sunday morn
When Nature’s face is fair,
I walked forth to view the corn,
An’ snuff the caller air.
The rising sun owre Galston muirs
Wi’ glorious light was glintin;
The hares were hirplin down the furrs,
The lav’rocks they were chantin
Fu’ sweet that day.
As lightsomely I glowr’d abroad,
To see a scene sae gay,
Three hizzies, early...Read more of this...
by
Rg Gregory
(1) a great man
there was a great man
so great he couldn't be criticised in the light
who died
and for a whole week people turned up their collars over their ears
and wept with great gossiping
houses wore their roofs at a mournful angle
and television announcers carried their eyes around in long drooping bags
there was a hush upon the voice of the land
as...Read more of this...
by
Rainer Maria Rilke
Every angel is terrifying. And yet alas
I invoked you almost deadly birds of the soul
knowing about you. Where are the days of Tobias
when one of you veiling his radiance stood at the front door
slightly disguised for the journey no longer appalling;
(a young man like the one who curiously peeked through the window).
But if the archangel now perilous from...Read more of this...
by
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Sing, O Song of Hiawatha,
Of the happy days that followed,
In the land of the Ojibways,
In the pleasant land and peaceful!
Sing the mysteries of Mondamin,
Sing the Blessing of the Cornfields!
Buried was the bloody hatchet,
Buried was the dreadful war-club,
Buried were all warlike weapons,
And the war-cry was forgotten.
There was peace among the nations;
Unmolested roved the hunters,
Built the birch canoe for sailing,
Caught the...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Hardy
I wayed by star and planet shine
Towards the dear one's home
At Kingsbere, there to make her mine
When the next sun upclomb.
I edged the ancient hill and wood
Beside the Ikling Way,
Nigh where the Pagan temple stood
In the world's earlier day.
And as I quick and quicker walked
On...Read more of this...
by
Sylvia Plath
Now this particular girl
During a ceremonious april walk
With her latest suitor
Found herself, of a sudden, intolerably struck
By the birds' irregular babel
And the leaves' litter.
By this tumult afflicted, she
Observed her lover's gestures unbalance the air,
His gait stray uneven
Through a rank wilderness of fern and flower;
She judged petals in disarray,
The whole season, sloven.
How she longed for winter then! --
Scrupulously austere in...Read more of this...
by
Robert Pinsky
to Robert Hass and in memory of Elliot Gilbert
Slow dulcimer, gavotte and bow, in autumn,
Bashõ and his friends go out to view the moon;
In summer, gasoline rainbow in the gutter,
The secret courtesy that courses like ichor
Through the old form of the rude, full-scale joke,
Impossible to tell in writing. "Bashõ"
He named himself, "Banana Tree": banana
After the plant some grateful students...Read more of this...
by
Andre Breton
Always for the first time
Hardly do I know you by sight
You return at some hour of the night to a house at an angle to my window
A wholly imaginary house
It is there that from one second to the next
In the inviolate darkness
I anticipate once more the fascinating rift occurring
The one and only rift
In the facade and in my heart
The...Read more of this...
by
Philip Levine
Numb, stiff, broken by no sleep,
I keep night watch. Looking for
signs to quiet fear, I creep
closer to his bed and hear
his breath come and go, holding
my own as if my own were
all I paid. Nothing I bring,
say, or do has meaning here.
Outside, ice crusts on river
and pond; wild hare come...Read more of this...
by
Howard Nemerov
Here at the Super Duper, in a glass tank
Supplied by a rill of cold fresh water
Running down a glass washboard at one end
And siphoned off at the other, and so
Perpetually renewed, a herd of lobster
Is made available to the customer
Who may choose whichever one he wants
To carry home and drop into boiling water
And serve with a sauce of melted...Read more of this...
by
Rg Gregory
(i) introduction
his home in ruins
his parents gone
frederick seeks
to reclaim his throne
to the golden mountain
he sets his path
the enchantress listening
schemes with wrath
four desperate trials
which she takes from store
to silence frederick
for ever...Read more of this...
by
Victor Hugo
Sitting in a porchway cool,
Fades the ruddy sunlight fast,
Twilight hastens on to rule—
Working hours are wellnigh past
Shadows shoot across the lands;
But one sower lingers still,
Old, in rags, he patient stands,—
Looking on, I feel a thrill.
Black and high his silhouette
Dominates...Read more of this...
by
Billy Collins
How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer,
wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hilltowns.
How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets,
fully grasping the meaning of every roadsign and billboard
and all the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots.
There are no abbeys here, no crumbling frescoes or famous
domes and there is no need to memorize a...Read more of this...
by
Francesco Petrarch
SONNET XXVIII. Solo e pensoso i più deserti campi. HE SEEKS SOLITUDE, BUT LOVE FOLLOWS HIM EVERYWHERE. Alone, and lost in thought, the desert gladeMeasuring I roam with ling'ring steps and slow;And still a watchful glance around me throw,Anxious to shun the print of human tread:No other means I find, no...Read more of this...
by
Omer Tarin
I. You are not dead
Why do they call you
Mohen-jo-daro,
“ Mounds-of-the-Dead”?
You are not dead!
You have never been dead
Or buried
Or cremated
By the scorching banks of the Sindhu;
Historians have conspired against you
A thousand and one tales
Have besmirched your name
Misguided fools have imagined
Your obituary to be true;
Sentimental fools have sung elegies
By their own graves
Garlanded their own biers,
Cursed the stars and howled...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
Mark Doty
Glassmakers,
at century's end,
compounded metallic lusters
in reference
to natural sheens (dragonfly
and beetle wings,
marbled light on kerosene)
and invented names
as coolly lustrous
as their products'
scarab-gleam: Quetzal,
Aurene, Favrile.
Suggesting,
respectively, the glaze
of feathers,
that sun-shot fog
of which halos
are composed,
and -- what?
What to make of Favrile,
Tiffany's term
for his coppery-rose
flushed with gold
like the alchemized
atmosphere of sunbeams
in a Flemish room?
Faux Moorish,
fake Japanese,
his lamps illumine
chiefly themselves,
copying waterlilies'
bronzy stems,
wisteria or trout scales;
surfaces burnished
like...Read more of this...
by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
THE warder looks down at the mid hour of night,
On the tombs that lie scatter'd below:
The moon fills the place with her silvery light,
And the churchyard like day seems to glow.
When see! first one grave, then another opes wide,
And women and men stepping forth are descried,
In cerements snow-white and trailing.
In haste for the sport soon their ankles they twitch,
And...Read more of this...
by
Rg Gregory
the two hands of me make inimical gestures
that only long after betray the one tune
though they have the same taste in throats
they go to their crime disgusted with kinship
the right has to act as if crazy for order
the left as a dawdler dangling by water
on sundays they plan suicides for each other
splitting time's atoms or drowning in feathers
between them...Read more of this...
by
Denise Levertov
A night that cuts between you and you
and you and you and you
and me : jostles us apart, a man elbowing
through a crowd. We won't
look for each other, either-
wander off, each alone, not looking
in the slow crowd. Among sideshows
under movie signs,
pictures made of a million lights,
giants that move and again move
again, above a cloud of thick smells,
franks, roasted nutmeats-
Or...Read more of this...
by
Lew Welch
When I drive cab
I am moved by strange whistles and wear a hat
When I drive cab
I am the hunter. My prey leaps out from where it
hid, beguiling me with gestures
When I drive cab
all may command me, yet I am in command of all who do
When I drive cab
I am guided by voices descending from the naked air
When I drive...Read more of this...
by
Sylvia Plath
All summer we moved in a villa brimful of echos,
Cool as the pearled interior of a conch.
Bells, hooves, of the high-stipping black goats woke us.
Around our bed the baronial furniture
Foundered through levels of light seagreen and strange.
Not one leaf wrinkled in the clearing air.
We dreamed how we were perfect, and we were.
Against bare, whitewashed walls, the furniture
Anchored itself, griffin-legged...Read more of this...
by
Philip Larkin
When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives--
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That'll...Read more of this...
by
Mary Darby Robinson
It was in the days of a gay British King
(In the old fashion'd custom of merry-making)
The Palace of Woodstock with revels did ring,
While they sang and carous'd--one and all:
For the monarch a plentiful treasury had,
And his Courtiers were pleas'd, and no visage was sad,
And the knavish and foolish with drinking were mad,
While they sat in the Banquetting hall.
Some talk'd...Read more of this...
Dont forget to view our wonderful member Gestures poems.