Famous Handsome Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Glasgow

by William Topaz McGonagall
 Beautiful city of Glasgow, with your streets so neat and clean,
Your stateley mansions, and beautiful Green!
Likewise your beautiful bridges across the River Clyde,
And on your bonnie banks I would like to reside. 

Chorus --

Then away to the west -- to the beautiful west!
To the fair city of Glasgow that I like the best,
Where the River Clyde rolls on to...Read more of this...

The Disabled Debauchee

by John Wilmot
 As some brave admiral, in former war,
Deprived of force, but pressed with courage still,
Two rival fleets appearing from afar,
Crawls to the top of an adjacent hill;

From whence (with thoughts full of concern) he views
The wise and daring conduct of the fight,
And each bold action to his mind renews
His present glory, and his past delight;

From his fierce eyes, flashes of...Read more of this...

Cock-A-Doodle-Do

by Mother Goose
Oh, my pretty cock, oh, my handsome cock,
  I pray you, do not crow before day,
And your comb shall be made of the very beaten gold,
  And your wings of the silver so gray....Read more of this...

An Address to the New Tay Bridge

by William Topaz McGonagall
 Beautiful new railway bridge of the Silvery Tay,
With your strong brick piers and buttresses in so grand array,
And your thirteen central girders, which seem to my eye
Strong enough all windy storms to defy.
And as I gaze upon thee my heart feels gay,
Because thou are the greatest railway bridge of the present day,
And can be seen for miles away
From North,...Read more of this...

A Requisition to the Queen

by William Topaz McGonagall
 Smiths Buildings No. 19
Patons Lane,
Dundee.
Sept the 6th. 1877. 


Most August! Empress of India, and of great Britain the Queen,
I most humbly beg your pardon, hoping you will not think it mean
That a poor poet that lives in Dundee,
Would be so presumptous to write unto Thee 

Most lovely Empress of India, and Englands generous Queen,
I send you an Address, I...Read more of this...

The Naulahka

by Rudyard Kipling
 There was a strife 'twixt man and maid--
Oh, that was at the birth of time!
But what befell 'twixt man and maid,
Oh, that's beyond the grip of rhyme.
'Twas "Sweet, I must not bide with you,"
And, "Love, I cannot bide alone";
For both were young and both were true.
And both were hard as the nether stone.

Beware the man who's crossed in love;
...Read more of this...

To His Muse

by Robert Herrick
 Whither, mad maiden, wilt thou roam?
Far safer 'twere to stay at home;
Where thou mayst sit, and piping, please
The poor and private cottages.
Since cotes and hamlets best agree
With this thy meaner minstrelsy.
There with the reed thou mayst express
The shepherd's fleecy happiness;
And with thy Eclogues intermix:
Some smooth and harmless Bucolics.
There, on a hillock, thou mayst sing
Unto a handsome shepherdling;
Or to a...Read more of this...

Pau-Puk-Keewis

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 You shall hear how Pau-Puk-Keewis,
He, the handsome Yenadizze,
Whom the people called the Storm-Fool,
Vexed the village with disturbance;
You shall hear of all his mischief,
And his flight from Hiawatha,
And his wondrous transmigrations,
And the end of his adventures.
On the shores of Gitche Gumee,
On the dunes of Nagow Wudjoo,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water
Stood the lodge of Pau-Puk-Keewis.
It was he who in his frenzy
Whirled these...Read more of this...

1. Song—Handsome Nell

by Robert Burns
 O ONCE I lov’d a bonie lass,
 Ay, and I love her still;
And whilst that virtue warms my breast,
 I’ll love my handsome Nell.


As bonie lasses I hae seen,
 And mony full as braw;
But, for a modest gracefu’ mein,
 The like I never saw.


A bonie lass, I will confess,
 Is pleasant to the e’e;
But, without some better qualities,
 She’s...Read more of this...

The Handsome Heart

by Gerard Manley Hopkins
 at a Gracious Answer


'But tell me, child, your choice; what shall I buy
You?'—'Father, what you buy me I like best.'
With the sweetest air that said, still plied and pressed,
He swung to his first poised purport of reply. 

What the heart is! which, like carriers let fly—
Doff darkness, homing nature knows the rest—
To its own fine function, wild and self-instressed,
Falls...Read more of this...

Snapshots of a Daughter-In-Law

by Adrienne Rich
  1

You, once a belle in Shreveport,
with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud,
still have your dresses copied from that time,
and play a Chopin prelude
called by Cortot: "Delicious recollections
float like perfume through the memory."

Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake,
heavy with useless experience, rich
with suspicion, rumor, fantasy,
crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge
of mere fact. In the prime of your life.

Nervy, glowering,...Read more of this...

The Bullfinches

by Thomas Hardy
 Bother Bulleys, let us sing 
 From the dawn till evening! - 
For we know not that we go not 
 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...Read more of this...

Smoky the Bear Sutra

by Gary Snyder
Smokey the Bear Sutra

Once in the Jurassic about 150 million years ago,
 the Great Sun Buddha in this corner of the Infinite
 Void gave a Discourse to all the assembled elements
 and energies: to the standing beings, the walking beings,
 the flying beings, and the sitting beings -- even grasses,
 to the number of thirteen billion, each one born from...Read more of this...

6. The Tarbolton Lasses

by Robert Burns
 IF ye gae up to yon hill-tap,
 Ye’ll there see bonie Peggy;
She kens her father is a laird,
 And she forsooth’s a leddy.


There Sophy tight, a lassie bright,
 Besides a handsome fortune:
Wha canna win her in a night,
 Has little art in courtin’.


Gae down by Faile, and taste the ale,
 And tak a look o’ Mysie;
She’s dour and din,...Read more of this...

Lines on Hearing it Declared that No Women Were So Handsome as the English

by Mary Darby Robinson
 BEAUTY, the attribute of Heaven! 
In various forms to mortals given, 
With magic skill enslaves mankind, 
As sportive fancy sways the mind. 
Search the wide world, go where you will, 
VARIETY pursues you still; 
Capricious Nature knows no bound, 
Her unexhausted gifts are found 
In ev'ry clime, in ev'ry face, 
Each has its own peculiar grace. 

To GALLIA's frolic...Read more of this...

A Carol of Harvest for 1867

by Walt Whitman
 1
A SONG of the good green grass! 
A song no more of the city streets; 
A song of farms—a song of the soil of fields. 

A song with the smell of sun-dried hay, where the nimble pitchers handle the pitch-fork; 
A song tasting of new wheat, and of fresh-husk’d maize.

2
For the lands, and for these passionate days, and for...Read more of this...

Caesarion

by Constantine P Cavafy
 Partly to verify an era,
partly also to pass the time,
last night I picked up a collection
of Ptolemaic epigrams to read.
The plentiful praises and flatteries
for everyone are similar. They are all brilliant,
glorious, mighty, beneficent;
each of their enterprises the wisest.
If you talk of the women of that breed, they too,
all the Berenices and Cleopatras are admirable.

When I had managed to verify...Read more of this...

The Lord of Burleigh

by Alfred Lord Tennyson
 IN her ear he whispers gaily, 
'If my heart by signs can tell, 
Maiden, I have watch'd thee daily, 
And I think thou lov'st me well.' 
She replies, in accents fainter, 
'There is none I love like thee.' 
He is but a landscape-painter, 
And a village maiden she. 
He to lips, that fondly falter, 
Presses his without reproof: 
Leads...Read more of this...

The Children of Lir

by Katharine Tynan
 Out upon the sand-dunes thrive the coarse long grasses;
Herons standing knee-deep in the brackish pool;
Overhead the sunset fire and flame amasses
And the moon to eastward rises pale and cool.
Rose and green around her, silver-gray and pearly, 
Chequered with the black rooks flying home to bed; 
For, to wake at daybreak, birds must couch them early: 
And the day's a...Read more of this...

The Locket

by Robert William Service
 From out her shabby rain-coat pocket
The little Jew girl in the train
Produced a dinted silver locket
With pasted in it portraits twain.
"These are my parents, sir" she said;
"Or were, for now I fear they're dead.

"I know to Belsen they were sent;
I never heard of them again.
So many were like that - they went,
Our woeful quest was all in vain.
I was...Read more of this...

My Husbands

by Robert William Service
 My first I wed when just sixteen
And he was sixty-five.
He treated me like any queen
The years he was alive.
Oh I betrayed him on the sly,
Like any other *****,
and how I longed for him to die
And leave me young and rich!

My second is a gigolo
I took when I was old;
That he deceives me well I know,
And hungers for my gold.
When...Read more of this...

Boaz Asleep

by Victor Hugo
 Boaz, overcome with weariness, by torchlight 
made his pallet on the threshing floor 
where all day he had worked, and now he slept 
among the bushels of threshed wheat.

The old man owned wheatfields and barley, 
and though he was rich, he was still fair-minded. 
No filth soured the sweetness of his well. 
No hot iron of torture whitened in...Read more of this...

Finery

by Jane Taylor
 In an elegant frock, trimm'd with beautiful lace,
And hair nicely curl'd, hanging over her face,
Young Fanny went out to the house of a friend, 
With a large little party the evening to spend. 

"Ah! how they will all be delighted, I guess,
And stare with surprise at my handsome new dress!" 
Thus said the vain girl, and her little heart...Read more of this...

To The Handsome Mistress Grace Potter

by Robert Herrick
 As is your name, so is your comely face
Touch'd every where with such diffused grace,
As that in all that admirable round,
There is not one least solecism found;
And as that part, so every portion else
Keeps line for line with beauty's parallels....Read more of this...

Mulhollands Contract

by Rudyard Kipling
 The fear was on the cattle, for the gale was on the sea,
An' the pens broke up on the lower deck an' let the creatures free --
An' the lights went out on the lower deck, an' no one near but me.

I had been singin' to them to keep 'em quiet there,
For the lower deck is the dangerousest, requirin' constant...Read more of this...

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