Famous Heading Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Heading poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous heading poems. These examples illustrate what a famous heading poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Barry Tebb
For Penny Abraham
I wish I had Auden’s penchant
For going about in carpet slippers
Or the late HRH Margaret’s panache-
A chauffered Rolls with six outriders-
This late December day with its sparkle of sun on frost
I’d so much rather be in Haworth’s cobbled street
With cascades of carols in torchlit procession
Or still better with a passionate friend to make love to
By...Read more of this...
by
Anna Akhmatova
Celebrate our anniversary – can’t you see
tonight the snowy night of our first winter
comes back again in every road and tree -
that winter night of diamantine splendour.
Steam is pouring out of yellow stables,
the Moika river’s sinking under snow,
the moonlight’s misted as it is in fables,
and where we are heading – I don’t know.
There are icebergs on the Marsovo Pole.
The...Read more of this...
by
Constantine P Cavafy
When one of them passed through the market place
of Seleucia, toward the hour that night falls
as a tall and perfectly handsome youth,
with the joy of immortality in his eyes,
with his scented black hair,
the passers-by would stare at him
and one would ask the other if he knew him,
and if he were a Greek of Syria, or a stranger. But some,
who...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
King Solomon drew merchantmen,
Because of his desire
For peacocks, apes, and ivory,
From Tarshish unto Tyre,
With cedars out of Lebanon
Which Hiram rafted down;
But we be only sailormen
That use in London town.
Coastwise -- cross-seas -- round the world and back again --
Where the paw shall head us or the full Trade suits --
Plain-sail --...Read more of this...
by
Erica Jong
Can you imagine the air filled with smoke?
It was. The city was vanishing before noon
or was it earlier than that? I can't say because
the light came from nowhere and went nowhere.
This was years ago, before you were born, before
your parents met in a bus station downtown.
She'd come on Friday after work all the way
from Toledo, and he'd dressed...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
1
COME, my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready;
Have you your pistols? have you your sharp edged axes? Pioneers! O pioneers!
2
For we cannot tarry here,
We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger,
We, the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend, Pioneers! O pioneers!
3
O...Read more of this...
by
Langston Hughes
When a man starts out with nothing,
When a man starts out with his hands
Empty, but clean,
When a man starts to build a world,
He starts first with himself
And the faith that is in his heart-
The strength there,
The will there to build.
First in the heart is the dream-
Then the mind starts seeking a way.
His eyes look out on...Read more of this...
by
W S Merwin
So gradual in those summers was the going
of the age it seemed that the long days setting out
when the stars faded over the mountains were not
leaving us even as the birds woke in full song and the dew
glittered in the webs it appeared then that the clear morning
opening into the sky was something of ours
to have...Read more of this...
by
Edwin Muir
Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
This is the desk I sit at
and this is the desk where I love you too much
and this is the typewriter that sits before me
where yesterday only your body sat before me
with its shoulders gathered in like a Greek chorus,
with its tongue like a king making up rules as he goes,
with its tongue quite openly like a cat lapping...Read more of this...
by
Linda Pastan
Because the shad
are swimming
in our waters now,
breaching the skin
of the river with their
tarnished silvery fins,
heading upstream
straight for our tables
where already
knives and forks gleam
in anticipation, these trees
in the woods break
into flower--small, white
flags surrendering
to the season....Read more of this...
by
Adela Florence Cory Nicolson
Whether I loved you who shall say?
Whether I drifted down your way
In the endless River of Chance and Change,
And you woke the strange
Unknown longings that have no names,
But burn us all in their hidden flames,
...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
1919
As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
Make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market-Place.
'eering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
Ne were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us,...Read more of this...
by
Andrew Barton Paterson
In the good old days when the Army's ways were simple and unrefined,
With a stock to keep their chins in front, and a pigtail down behind,
When the only light in the barracks at night was a candle of grease or fat,
When they put the extinguisher on the light, they called it the Old Tin Hat.
Now,...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
Said President MacConnachie to Treasurer MacCall:
"We ought to have a piper for our next Saint Andrew's Ball.
Yon squakin' saxophone gives me the syncopated gripes.
I'm sick of jazz, I want to hear the skirling of the pipes."
"Alas! it's true," said Tam MacCall. "The young folk of to-day
Are fox-trot mad and dinna ken a reel from Strathspey.
Now, what we want's a...Read more of this...
by
Billy Collins
You know the brick path in the back of the house,
the one you see from the kitchen window,
the one that bends around the far end of the garden
where all the yellow primroses are?
And you know how if you leave the path
and walk into the woods you come
to a heap of rocks, probably pushed
down during the horrors of...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
Our brows are bound with spindrift and the weed is on our knees;
Our loins are battered 'neath us by the swinging, smoking seas.
From reef and rock and skerry -- over headland, ness, and voe --
The Coastwise Lights of England watch the ships of England go!
Through the endless summer evenings, on the lineless, level floors;
Through the yelling Channel tempest when...Read more of this...
by
Richard Jones
Swimming the English Channel,
struggling to make it to Calais,
I swam into Laura halfway across.
My body oiled for warmth,
black rubber cap on my head,
eyes hidden behind goggles,
I was exhausted, ready to drown,
when I saw her coming toward me,
bobbing up and down between waves,
effortlessly doing a breaststroke,
heading for Dover. Treading water
I asked in French if she spoke English,
and she said, "Yes,...Read more of this...
by
Philip Levine
Pond snipe, bleached pine, rue weed, wart --
I walk by sedge and brown river rot
to where the old lake boats went daily out.
All the ships are gone, the gray wharf fallen
in upon itself. Even the channel's
grown over. Once we set sail here
for Bob-Lo, the Brewery Isles, Cleveland.
We would have gone as far...Read more of this...
by
John Berryman
these hearings endlessly, friends, word is had
Henry may be returning to our life
adult & difficult.
There exist rumors that remote and sad
and quite beyond the knowledge of his wife
to the foothills of the cult
will come in silence this distinguished one
essaying once again the lower slopes
in triumph, keeping up our hopes,
and heading not for the highest we have done
but enigmatic faces,...Read more of this...
by
Joseph Brodsky
The stone-built villages of England.
A cathedral bottled in a pub window.
Cows dispersed across fields.
Monuments to kings.
A man in a moth-eaten suit
sees a train off heading like everything here
for the sea
smiles at his daughter leaving for the East.
A whistle blows.
And the endless sky over the tiles
grows bluer as swelling birdsong fills.
And the clearer the song is heard
the smaller...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
Dawn off the Foreland--the young flood making
Jumbled and short and steep--
Black in the hollows and bright where it's breaking--
Awkward water to sweep.
"Mines reported in the fairway,
"Warn all traffic and detain.
"'Sent up Unity, Cralibel, Assyrian, Stormcock, and Golden
Gain."
Noon off the Foreland--the first ebb making
Lumpy and strong in the bight.
Boom after boom, and...Read more of this...
by
Wendell Berry
1.
Dear relatives and friends, when my last breath
Grows large and free in air, don't call it death --
A word to enrich the undertaker and inspire
His surly art of imitating life; conspire
Against him. Say that my body cannot now
Be improved upon; it has no fault to show
To the sly cosmetician. Say that my flesh
Has a perfect compliance with the grass
Truer...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
"Tell Annie I'll be home in time
To help her with her Christmas-tree."
That's what he wrote, and hark! the chime
Of Christmas bells, and where is he?
And how the house is dark and sad,
And Annie's sobbing on my knee!
The page beside the candle-flame
With cruel type was overfilled;
I read and read until a name
Leapt at me and my heart was stilled:
My eye...Read more of this...
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