Famous Heartbeat Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Heartbeat poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous heartbeat poems. These examples illustrate what a famous heartbeat poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Tebb, Barry
...in the trembling
Currents of air.
On Hunslet Road
A heat haze:
Walk with a lighter tread
I hear an angel’s
Heartbeat overhead.
22
The wind holds my hand
Diffident, tremulous,
Margaret, I sense your
Fingers touching mine
Tip to tip.
Nancy came too
And I had to kiss
The both of you
On the cheek
Behind the wagon
Wanting to get you alone
On a slow boat to China
Get you and keep you
In my arms evermoreAuntie Nellie’s hands
Thrummed the tu...Read more of this...
by
Schuyler, James
...uds, crowded together. The
rapid music fills in the spaces of
the leaves. And the piano comes in,
like an extra heartbeat, dangerous
and lovely. Slower now, less like
the leaves, more like the rain which
almost isn't rain, more like thawed-
out hail. All this beauty in the
mess of this small apartment on
West 20th in Chelsea, New York.
Slowly the notes pour out, slowly,
more slowly still, fat rain falls....Read more of this...
by
Gregory, Rg
...the coloured strands
the words have hidden from the poet
asking what world has come to light
people measured by their heartbeats
language can't flout that come-and-go
to touch the heartbeat in a poem
calls for the brain's surrender
a warm diffusion of the mind
a listening to an eery silence
the words both mimic and destroy
(no excuses slipping off the tongue)
and when a poem works the unknown
opens a timid shutter on a world
so familiar it's not been seen
before - and then...Read more of this...
by
Rilke, Rainer Maria
...Only mouths are we. Who sings the distant heart
which safely exists in the center of all things?
His giant heartbeat is diverted in us
into little pulses. And his giant grief
is, like his giant jubilation, far too
great for us. And so we tear ourselves away
from him time after time, remaining only
mouths. But unexepectedly and secretly
the giant heartbeat enters our being,
so that we scream ----,
and are transformed in being and in countenance....Read more of this...
by
Levertov, Denise
...of the faithless world
back to the cold sepulchre, tearstained
stifling shroud; to break from them
back into breath and heartbeat, and walk
the world again, closed into days and weeks again,
wounds of His anguish open, and Spirit
streaming through every cell of flesh
so that if mortal sight could bear
to perceive it, it would be seen
His mortal flesh was lit from within, now,
and aching for home. He must return,
first, in Divine patience, and know
hunger again, and give
t...Read more of this...
by
Hughes, Langston
...a crown,
Take the Lenox Avenue busses,
Taxis, subways,
And for your love song tone their rumble down.
Take Harlem's heartbeat,
Make a drumbeat,
Put it on a record, let it whirl,
And while we listen to it play,
Dance with you till day--
Dance with you, my sweet brown Harlem girl....Read more of this...
by
Gluck, Louise
...reparing a person
for sleep, for death. The lullabies--they all say
don't be afraid, that's how they paraphrase
the heartbeat of the mother.
So the living grow slowly calm; it's only
the dying who can't, who refuse.
The dying are like tops, like gyroscopes--
they spin so rapidly they seem to be still.
Then they fly apart: in my mother's arms,
my sister was a cloud of atoms, of particles--that's the difference.
When a child's asleep, it's still whole.
...Read more of this...
by
Swinburne, Algernon Charles
...rowan and larch
Break forth as laughter on lips that said
Nought till the pulse in them beat love's march.
But the heartbeat now in the lips rose-red
Speaks life to the world, and the winds that parch
Bring April forth as a bride to wed
Mad March....Read more of this...
by
Hacker, Marilyn
...You were as deep down as I've ever been.
You were inside me like my pulse. A new-
born flailing toward maternal heartbeat through
the shock of cold and glare: when you were gone,
swaddled in strange air I was that alone
again, inventing life left after you.
I don't want to remember you as that
four o'clock in the morning eight months long
after you happened to me like a wrong
number at midnight that blew up the phone
bill to an astronomical unknown
quantity in a ...Read more of this...
by
Rich, Adrienne
...lived in vain'
What we see, we see
and seeing is changing
the light that shrivels a mountain
and leaves a man alive
Heartbeat of the pulsar
heart sweating through my body
The radio impulse
pouring in from Taurus
I am bombarded yet I stand
I have been standing all my life in the
direct path of a battery of signals
the most accurately transmitted most
untranslatable language in the universe
I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo-
luted that a light wave could take 15
years...Read more of this...
by
Duffy, Carol Ann
...
I screw a tight snarl to a weasel.
Fierce. I stitch the flippers on a seal.
Splayed. I pierce the heartbeat of a quail.
I like her to be naked and to kneel.
Tame. My motionless, my living doll.
Mute. And afterwards I like her not to tell....Read more of this...
by
Gregory, Rg
...
a blackbird sang on a high branch
a white horse ambled by the hedge
a brindled cow munched grass - the man
shared his heartbeat with them
his gun in his arm
his dog at his heels
today he was disturbed - a mist
obscured what grew inside and out
a tree loomed upon him like a threat
his walk had nothing safe about it
a gun in his arm
a dog at his heels
a huge crow shrieked from the tree
its wings churning the mist
its beak sharpening for attack
its claws reaching for t...Read more of this...
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