Famous Helped Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Baseball and Writing

by Marianne Moore
 Fanaticism?No.Writing is exciting
and baseball is like writing.
You can never tell with either
how it will go
or what you will do;
generating excitement--
a fever in the victim--
pitcher, catcher, fielder, batter.
Victim in what category?
Owlman watching from the press box?
To whom does it apply?
Who is excited?Might it be I?

It's a pitcher's battle all the way--a duel--
a catcher's, as, with cruel
puma paw, Elston Howard lumbers...Read more of this...

The Little Match Girl

by William Topaz McGonagall
 It was biting cold, and the falling snow,
Which filled a poor little match girl's heart with woe,
Who was bareheaded and barefooted, as she went along the street,
Crying, "Who'll buy my matches? for I want pennies to buy some meat!" 

When she left home she had slippers on;
But, alas! poor child, now they were gone.
For she lost both of them...Read more of this...

To a Contemporary Bunkshooter

by Carl Sandburg
 YOU come along. . . tearing your shirt. . . yelling about
Jesus.
Where do you get that stuff?
What do you know about Jesus?
Jesus had a way of talking soft and outside of a few
bankers and higher-ups among the con men of Jerusalem
everybody liked to have this Jesus around because
he never made any fake passes and everything
he said went and he...Read more of this...

Sappers

by Rudyard Kipling
 When the Waters were dried an' the Earth did appear,
 ("It's all one," says the Sapper),
The Lord He created the Engineer,
 Her Majesty's Royal Engineer,
 With the rank and pay of a Sapper!

When the Flood come along for an extra monsoon,
'Twas Noah constructed the first pontoon
 To the plans of Her Majesty's, etc.

But after fatigue in the wet an'...Read more of this...

The Score

by Robert William Service
 Because I've come to eighty odd,
I must prepare to meet you, God.
What should I do? I cannot pray,
I have no pious words to say;
And though the Bible I might read,
 Scriptures don't meet my need.

Please tell me God what can I do
To be acceptable to you?
I've put in order my affairs,
And left their portion to my heirs;
And what remains...Read more of this...

Read -- Sweet -- how others -- strove

by Emily Dickinson
 Read -- Sweet -- how others -- strove --
Till we -- are stouter --
What they -- renounced --
Till we -- are less afraid --
How many times they -- bore the faithful witness --
Till we -- are helped --
As if a Kingdom -- cared!

Read then -- of faith --
That shone above the fagot --
Clear strains of Hymn
The River could not...Read more of this...

San Sebastian

by Thomas Hardy
 And your sunny years with a gracious wife
Have brought you a daughter dear.

"I watched her to-day; a more comely maid,
As she danced in her muslin bowed with blue,
Round a Hintock maypole never gayed."
--"Aye, aye; I watched her this day, too,
As it happens," the Sergeant said.

"My daughter is now," he again began,
"Of just such an age as one I knew
When...Read more of this...

The Grindstone

by Robert Frost
 Having a wheel and four legs of its own
Has never availed the cumbersome grindstone
To get it anywhere that I can see.
These hands have helped it go, and even race;
Not all the motion, though, they ever lent,
Not all tke miles it may have thought it went,
Have got it one step from the starting place.
It stands beside the same old apple...Read more of this...

Colder

by Erica Jong
 He was six foot four, and forty-six
and even colder than he thought he was
James Thurber, The Thirteen Clocks

Not that I cared about the other woman.
Those perfumed breasts with hearts
of pure rock salt.
Lot's wives-
all of them.

I didn't care
if they fondled him at parties,
eased him in at home
between a husband & a child,
sucked him dry
with vacuum cleaner kisses.

It was the coldness...Read more of this...

An Excursion Steamer Sunk in the Tay

by William Topaz McGonagall
 'Twas in the year of 1888, and on July the 14th day,
That an alarming accident occurred in the River Tay.
Which resulted in the sinking of the Tay Ferries' Steamer "Dundee,"
Which was a most painful and sickening sight to see. 

The Steamer was engaged by the Independent Order of Rechabites,
And all were resolved to see some rural sights;
And the place...Read more of this...

The ORahilly

by William Butler Yeats
 Sing of the O'Rahilly,
Do not deny his right;
Sing a 'the' before his name;
Allow that he, despite
All those learned historians,
Established it for good;
He wrote out that word himself,
He christened himself with blood.
 How goes the weather?

Sing of the O'Rahilly
That had such little sense
He told Pearse and Connolly
He'd gone to great expense
Keeping all the Kerry men
Out of that crazy fight;
That he...Read more of this...

A Dead Flower

by Kumaran Asan
Oh beautiful flower.
You were glowing like a queen in this world till yesterday..
And today you are lying on the ground…
When I see your plight, I am sure that success is not permanent in this world…

The plant that gave birth to you would have pampered
when you were infant.
It helped you to blossom.
The wind would have swung you to its tune.

You had...Read more of this...

The Saginaw Song

by Theodore Roethke
 In Saginaw, in Saginaw,
 The wind blows up your feet,
When the ladies' guild puts on a feed,
 There's beans on every plate,
And if you eat more than you should,
 Destruction is complete.

Out Hemlock Way there is a stream
 That some have called Swan Creek;
The turtles have bloodsucker sores,
 And mossy filthy feet;
The bottoms of migrating ducks
 Come off it...Read more of this...

A Boy Named Sue

by Shel Silverstein
 Well, my daddy left home when I was three,
and he didn't leave much to Ma and me,
just this old guitar and a bottle of booze.
Now I don't blame him because he run and hid,
but the meanest thing that he ever did was
before he left he went and named me Sue.

Well, he must have thought it was quite a joke,
and...Read more of this...

Now Returned Home

by Robinson Jeffers
 Beyond the narrows of the Inner Hebrides
We sailed the cold angry sea toward Barra, where Heaval mountain
Lifts like a mast. There were few people on the steamer, it was late in the
 year; I noticed most an old shepherd,
Two wise-eyed dogs wove anxious circles around his feet, and a thin-armed
 girl 
Who cherished what seemed a doll, wrapping it...Read more of this...

Percival Sharp

by Edgar Lee Masters
 Observe the clasped hands!
Are they hands of farewell or greeting,
Hands that I helped or hands that helped me?
Would it not be well to carve a hand
With an inverted thumb, like Elagabalus?
And yonder is a broken chain,
The weakest-link idea perhaps --
But what was it?
And lambs, some lying down,
Others standing, as if listening to the shepherd --
Others bearing a cross, one...Read more of this...

The Transparent Man

by Anthony Hecht
 I'm mighty glad to see you, Mrs. Curtis,
And thank you very kindly for this visit--
Especially now when all the others here
Are having holiday visitors, and I feel
A little conspicuous and in the way.
It's mainly because of Thanksgiving. All these mothers
And wives and husbands gaze at me soulfully
And feel they should break up their box of chocolates
For a donation, or...Read more of this...

The Christmas Tree

by Robert William Service
 In the dark and damp of the alley cold,
Lay the Christmas tree that hadn't been sold;
By a shopman dourly thrown outside;
With the ruck and rubble of Christmas-tide;
Trodden deep in the muck and mire,
Unworthy even to feed a fire...
So I stopped and salvaged that tarnished tree,
And thus is the story it told to me:

"My Mother was Queen of the forest...Read more of this...

The Old Age Of Queen Maeve

by William Butler Yeats
 A certain poet in outlandish clothes
Gathered a crowd in some Byzantine lane,
Talked1 of his country and its people, sang
To some stringed instrument none there had seen,
A wall behind his back, over his head
A latticed window. His glance went up at time
As though one listened there, and his voice sank
Or let its meaning mix into the strings.

Maeve the great queen...Read more of this...

Song of the Wave XVII

by Kahlil Gibran
 The strong shore is my beloved 
And I am his sweetheart. 
We are at last united by love, and 
Then the moon draws me from him. 
I go to him in haste and depart 
Reluctantly, with many 
Little farewells. 


I steal swiftly from behind the 
Blue horizon to cast the silver of 
My foam upon the gold of his...Read more of this...

The Message

by Henry Van Dyke
 Waking from tender sleep,
My neighbour's little child
Put out his baby hand to me,
Looked in my face, and smiled.

It seemed as if he came
Home from a happy land,
To tell me something that my heart
Would surely understand.

Somewhere, among bright dreams,
A child that once was mine
Had whispered wordless love to him,
And given him a sign.

Comfort of kindly speech,
And counsel of the wise,
Have...Read more of this...

Lambert Hutchins

by Edgar Lee Masters
 I have two monuments besides this granite obelisk:
One, the house I built on the hill,
With its spires, bay windows, and roof of slate;
The other, the lake-front in Chicago,
Where the railroad keeps a switching yard,
With whistling engines and crunching wheels,
And smoke and soot thrown over the city,
And the crash of cars along the boulevard, --
A blot like a hog-pen on...Read more of this...

Conscious

by Wilfred Owen
 His fingers wake, and flutter up the bed.
His eyes come open with a pull of will,
Helped by the yellow may-flowers by his head.
A blind-cord drawls across the window-sill . . .
How smooth the floor of the ward is! what a rug!
And who's that talking, somewhere out of sight?
Why are they laughing? What's inside that jug?
"Nurse! Doctor!" "Yes; all right,...Read more of this...

Why Washington Retreated

by Ellis Parker Butler
 1775

Said Congress to George Washington:
 “To set this country free,
You’ll have to whip the Britishers
 And chase them o’er the sea.”
“Oh, very well,” said Washington,
 “I’ll do the best I can.
I’ll slam and bang those Britishers
 And whip them to a man.”

1777

Said Congress to George Washington:
 “The people all complain;
Why don’t you fight? You but retreat
 And then retreat...Read more of this...

Modern Love X: But Where Began the Change

by George Meredith
 But where began the change; and what's my crime? 
The wretch condemned, who has not been arraigned, 
Chafes at his sentence. Shall I, unsustained, 
Drag on Love's nerveless body thro' all time? 
I must have slept, since now I wake. Prepare, 
You lovers, to know Love a thing of moods: 
Not like hard life, of laws. In Love's deep...Read more of this...

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