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Famous Gowned Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Browning, Robert
...``thou keepest furled?
``Show me their shaping,
``Theirs who most studied man, the bard and sage,---
``Give!''---So, he gowned him,
Straight got by heart that hook to its last page:
Learned, we found him.
Yea, but we found him bald too, eyes like lead,
Accents uncertain:
``Time to taste life,'' another would have said,
``Up with the curtain!''
This man said rather, ``Actual life comes next?
``Patience a moment!
``Grant I have mastered learning's crabbed text,
``Still ther...Read more of this...



by Wilcox, Ella Wheeler
...(musing)
She has not meant to wound me, nor to vex –
Zounds! but ‘tis difficult to please the sex.
I’ve housed and gowned her like a very queen
Yet there she goes, with discontented mien.
I gave her diamonds only yesterday:
Some women are like that, do what you may....Read more of this...

by Larkin, Philip
...br> 'His son's here now.'
Death-suited, visitant, I nod. 'And do
You keep in touch with-' Or remember how
Black-gowned, unbreakfasted, and still half-tight
We used to stand before that desk, to give
'Our version' of 'these incidents last night'?
I try the door of where I used to live:

Locked. The lawn spreads dazzlingly wide.
A known bell chimes. I catch my train, ignored.
Canal and clouds and colleges subside
Slowly from view. But Dockery, good L...Read more of this...

by Lawrence, D. H.
...cliff of horse-chestnut trees 
 Has poised on each of its ledges 
An erect small girl looking down at me; 
White-night-gowned little chits I see, 
 And they peep at me over the edges 
Of the leaves as though they would leap, should I call 
 Them down to my arms; 
"But, child, you're too small for me, too small 
 Your little charms." 

White little sheaves of night-gowned maids, 
 Some other will thresh you out! 
And I see leaning from the shades 
A lilac like a lady ther...Read more of this...

by Teasdale, Sara
...y thing,
And they were proud and glad to raise me high;
They only asked that I should be right fair,
A little kind, and gowned wondrously,
And surely it were little praise to me
If I had pleased them well throughout my life.

I was a queen, the daughter of a king.
The crown was never heavy on my head,
It was my right, and was a part of me.
The women thought me proud, the men were kind,
And bowed right gallantly to kiss my hand,
And watched me as I passed them calm...Read more of this...



by Pound, Ezra
...never been
Of precisely the fashion
To stimulate, in her,
A durable passion;

Doubtful, somewhat, of the value
Of well-gowned approbation
Of literary effort,
But never of The Lady Valentine's vocation:

Poetry, her border of ideas,
The edge, uncertain, but a means of blending
With other strata
Where the lower and higher have ending;

A hook to catch the Lady Jane's attention,
A modulation toward the theatre,
Also, in the case of revolution,
A possible friend and comforter.Read more of this...

by Sassoon, Siegfried
...In this meadow starred with spring 
Shepherds kneel before their king. 
Mary throned, with dreaming eyes, 
Gowned in blue like rain-washed skies, 
Lifts her tiny son that he
May behold their courtesy. 
And green-smocked children, awed and good, 
Bring him blossoms from the wood. 

Clear the sunlit steeples chime 
Mary’s coronation-time.
Loud the happy children quire 
To the golden-windowed morn; 
While the lord of their desire 
Sleeps below the crimso...Read more of this...

by Paterson, Andrew Barton
...ike a week: 
While hapless urchins heard with blanched cheek 
The words of doom "Come in on Saturday". 

The master gowned and spectacled, precise, 
Trying to rule by methods firm and kind 
But always just a little bit behind 
The latest villainy, the last device, 

Born of some smoothfaced urchin's fertile brain 
To irritate the hapless pedagogue, 
And first involve him in a mental fog 
Then "have" him with the same old tale again. 

The "bogus" fight that brought th...Read more of this...

by Plath, Sylvia
...

o bent bow of thorns

the cat unsheathes its claws
the world turns

today
today I will not
disenchant my twelve black-gowned examiners
or bunch my fist
in the wind's sneer....Read more of this...

by Fu, Du
...hite sun Mud dirt after earth what time dry  In Chang'an, who notices the cloth-gowned scholar? Locked behind his gate and guarding his walls. The old man doesn't go out, the weeds grow tall, Children blithely rush through wind and rain. The rustling rain hastens the early cold, And geese with wet wings find high flying hard. This autumn we've had no glimpse of the white sun, When will the mud and dirt become...Read more of this...

by Nash, Ogden
...,

They're no longer corralable
Once they find that you're fallible

But after you've raised them and educated them and gowned them,
They just take their little fingers and wrap you around them.

Being a father Is quite a bother,
But I like it, rather....Read more of this...

by Hardy, Thomas
...When the day's pale pinions fold 
 Unto those who sang of old. 

 When I flew to Blackmoor Vale, 
 Whence the green-gowned faeries hail, 
Roosting near them I could hear them 
 Speak of queenly Nature's ways, 
 Means, and moods,--well known to fays. 

 All we creatures, nigh and far 
 (Said they there), the Mother's are: 
Yet she never shows endeavour 
 To protect from warrings wild 
 Bird or beast she calls her child. 

 Busy in her handsome house 
 Known as Spac...Read more of this...

by Paterson, Andrew Barton
...h a stately tread 
While my patients sleep with the dreamless dead." 


Next, Please 
"I am a barrister, wigged and gowned; 
Of stately presence and look profound. 
Listen awhile till I show you round. 
When courts are sitting and work is flush 
I hurry about in a frantic rush. 
I take your brief and I look to see 
That the same is marked with a thumping fee; 
But just as your case is drawing near 
I bob serenely and disappear. 
And away in another court I...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...amid the writhing storm it saw a tiny spark,
A window broad, a spacious room all goldenly aglow,
A woman slim and Paris-gowned and exquisitely fair,
Who smiled with rapture as she watched her jewels catch the blaze;
A man in faultless evening dress, young, handsome, debonnaire,
Who smoked his cigarette and looked with frank admiring gaze.
"Oh, we are happy, sweet," said he; "youth, health, and wealth are ours.
What if a thousand toil and sweat that we may live at ease...Read more of this...

by Walcott, Derek
...y eye-pockets 
of green buccaneers, the parrot fish floating 
from the frayed shoulders of pirates, sea horses 
drawing gowned ladies in their liquid promenade 
across the moss-green meadows of the sea; 
he heard the drowned choirs under Palisadoes, 
a hymn ascending to earth from a heaven inverted 
by water, a crab climbing the steeple, 
and he climbed from that submarine kingdom 
as the evening lights came on in the institute, 
the scholars lamplit in their own aquarium, 
h...Read more of this...

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Book: Reflection on the Important Things