Famous Give Off Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The Revolutionary

by D. H. Lawrence
 Look at them standing there in authority 
The pale-faces, 
As if it could have any effect any more. 

Pale-face authority,
Caryatids, 
Pillars of white bronze standing rigid, lest the skies fall. 

What a job they've got to keep it up. 
Their poor, idealist foreheads naked capitals 
To the entablature of clouded heaven. 

When the skies are going to fall, fall...Read more of this...

Browning Decides To Be A Poet

by Jorge Luis Borges
 in these red labyrinths of London
I find that I have chosen
the strangest of all callings,
save that, in its way, any calling is strange.
Like the alchemist
who sought the philosopher's stone
in quicksilver,
I shall make everyday words--
the gambler's marked cards, the common coin--
give off the magic that was their
when Thor was both the god and the din,
the thunderclap and the prayer.
In today's...Read more of this...

Babi Yar

by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
 No monument stands over Babi Yar.
A drop sheer as a crude gravestone. 
I am afraid.
 Today I am as old in years 
as all the Jewish people. 
Now I seem to be
 a Jew. 
Here I plod through ancient Egypt. 
Here I perish crucified, on the cross, 
and to this day I bear the scars of nails. 
I seem...Read more of this...

The Doctor Will Return

by Weldon Kees
 The surgical mask, the rubber teat
Are singed, give off an evil smell.
You seem to weep more now that heat
Spreads everywhere we look.
It says here none of us is well.

The warty spottings on the figurines
Are nothing you would care to claim.
You seem to weep more since the magazines
Began revivals on the Dundas book.
It says here you were most to blame.

But...Read more of this...

Giant Snail

by Elizabeth Bishop
 The rain has stopped. The waterfall will roar like that all 
night. I have come out to take a walk and feed. My body--foot,
that is--is wet and cold and covered with sharp gravel. It is
white, the size of a dinner plate. I have set myself a goal, a 
certain rock, but it may well be dawn before I get...Read more of this...

Bavarian Gentians

by D. H. Lawrence
 Not every man has gentians in his house
in Soft September, at slow, Sad Michaelmas.

Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the daytime torchlike with the smoking blueness of Pluto's
 gloom,
ribbed and torchlike, with their blaze of darkness spread blue
down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day
torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto's dark-blue daze,
black lamps from the...Read more of this...

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