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Famous Hem Poems by Famous Poets

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

Twas like a Maelstrom with a notch

by Emily Dickinson

 'Twas like a Maelstrom, with a notch,
That nearer, every Day,
Kept narrowing its boiling Wheel
Until the Agony

Toyed coolly with the final inch
Of your delirious Hem --
And you dropt, lost,
When something broke --
And let you from a Dream --

As if a Goblin with a Gauge --
Kept measuring the Hours --
Until you felt your Second
Weigh, helpless, in his Paws --

And not a...Read more of this...

Form: Free verse

Celestial Love

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

 Higher far,
Upward, into the pure realm,
Over sun or star,
Over the flickering Dæmon film,
Thou must mount for love,—
Into vision which all form
In one only form dissolves;
In a region where the wheel,
On which all beings ride,
Visibly revolves;
Where the starred eternal worm
Girds the world with bound and term;
Where unlike things are like,
When good and ill,
And joy and moan,
Melt into one.
There Past, Present,...Read more of this...

Blind Mans Buff

by William Blake

 When silver snow decks Susan's clothes,
And jewel hangs at th' shepherd's nose,
The blushing bank is all my care,
With hearth so red, and walls so fair;
`Heap the sea-coal, come, heap it higher,
The oaken log lay on the fire.'
The well-wash'd stools, a circling row,
With lad and lass, how fair the show!
The merry can of nut-brown ale,
The laughing jest, the love-sick tale,
Till,...Read more of this...

Sisters Of Mercy

by Leonard Cohen

 Oh the sisters of mercy, they are not departed or gone. 
They were waiting for me when I thought that I just can't go
on. 
And they brought me their comfort and later they brought me
this song. 
Oh I hope you run into them, you who've been travelling so
long. 
Yes you who must leave everything that you cannot control.

It begins...Read more of this...

The Haystack in the Floods

by William Morris

 Had she come all the way for this,
To part at last without a kiss?
Yea, had she borne the dirt and rain
That her own eyes might see him slain
Beside the haystack in the floods?

Along the dripping leafless woods,
The stirrup touching either shoe,
She rode astride as troopers do;
With kirtle kilted to her knee,
To which the mud splash'd wretchedly;
And the wet dripp'd...Read more of this...

Form: Ballad

From The Porch At Runnymede

by Paul Laurence Dunbar

I stand above the city's rush and din,
[Pg 276]And gaze far down with calm and undimmed eyes,
To where the misty smoke wreath grey and dim
Above the myriad roofs and spires rise;
Still is my heart and vacant is my breath—
This lovely view is breath and life to me,
Why I could charm the icy soul of death
With such a sight...Read more of this...

Power

by Aleister Crowley

 The mighty sound of forests murmuring 
In answer to the dread command; 
The stars that shudder when their king 
extends his hand, 

His awful hand to bless, to curse; or moves 
Toward the dimmest den 
In the thick leaves, not known of loves 
Or nymphs or men; 

(Only the sylph's frail gossamer may wave 
Their quiet frondage yet, 
Only...Read more of this...

Stupidity

by Amy Lowell

 Dearest, forgive that with my clumsy touch
I broke and bruised your rose.
I hardly could suppose
It were a thing so fragile that my clutch
Could kill it, thus.
It stood so proudly up upon its stem,
I knew no thought of fear,
And coming very near
Fell, overbalanced, to your garment's hem,
Tearing it down.
Now, stooping, I upgather, one by one,
The crimson petals, all
Outspread about my...Read more of this...

We Are Seven

by William Wordsworth

  A simple child, dear brother Jim,  That lightly draws its breath,  And feels its life in every limb,  What should it know of death?   I met a little cottage girl,  She was eight years old, she said;  Her hair was thick with many a curl  That cluster'd round her head.   She had a rustic, woodland air,  And she was wildly clad;  Her eyes were fair, and very fair,  —Her...Read more of this...

The Vagabonds

by Bliss Carman

 We are the vagabonds of time, 
And rove the yellow autumn days, 
When all the roads are gray with rime 
And all the valleys blue with haze. 
We came unlooked for as the wind 
Trooping across the April hills, 
When the brown waking earth had dreams 
Of summer in the Wander Kills. 
How far afield we joyed to fare,...Read more of this...

A Little Litany

by G K Chesterton

 When God turned back eternity and was young,
Ancient of Days, grown little for your mirth
(As under the low arch the land is bright)
Peered through you, gate of heaven--and saw the earth.

Or shutting out his shining skies awhile
Built you about him for a house of gold
To see in pictured walls his storied world
Return upon him as a tale is told.

Or...Read more of this...

Civic Centre (for Kathryn)

by Jennifer Reeser

 Moscow ballet at seven in the evening.
You look at everything. You lay your cheek
against my shoulder, smoothing down my sleeve,
the Russian blizzards somehow less than bleak,
portrayed with whimsy on the backdrop screens
in dolloped watercolors as they are.
I ask if you know what their movement means.
You wish our situation not so far.

And everywhere, the audience defies
convention and conformity, some dressed
as...Read more of this...

Truth said a traveller

by Stephen Crane

 "Truth," said a traveller,
"Is a rock, a mighty fortress;
Often have I been to it,
Even to its highest tower,
From whence the world looks black."

"Truth," said a traveller,
"Is a breath, a wind,
A shadow, a phantom;
Long have I pursued it,
But never have I touched
The hem of its garment."

And I believed the second traveller;
For truth was to me
A breath, a wind,
A shadow, a...Read more of this...

Would that the tavern could always be animated by

by Omar Khayyam

Would that the tavern could always be animated by
the presence of drinkers, that fire would reach the hem
of the holy robe of devotees, that their monk's frock might
be torn to tatters and their blue woolen garment be trampled
under the feet of the drinkers....Read more of this...

To Ireland In The Coming Times

by William Butler Yeats

 Know, that I would accounted be
True brother of a company
That sang, to sweeten Ireland's wrong,
Ballad and story, rann and song;
Nor be I any less of them,
Because the red-rose-bordered hem
Of her, whose history began
Before God made the angelic clan,
Trails all about the written page.
When Time began to rant and rage
The measure of her flying feet
Made Ireland's heart hegin to beat;
And...Read more of this...

from the Ansty Experience

by Rg Gregory

 (a)
they seek to celebrate the word
not to bring their knives out on a poem
dissecting it to find a heart
whose beat lies naked on a table
not to score in triumph on a line
no sensitive would put a nostril to
but simply to receive it as an
offering glimpsing the sacred there

poem probes the poet's once-intention
but each time said budges its truth
afresh (leaving...Read more of this...

She Of The Garden

by Emile Verhaeren

In such a spot, with radiant flowers for halo,
I saw the Guardian Angel sit her down;
Vine-branches fashioned a green shrine above her
And sun-flowers rose behind her like a crown.


Her fingers, their white slenderness encircled
With humble, fragile rings of coral round.
Held, ranged in couples, sprays of faithful roses.
Sealed with a clasp, with threads of woollen bound.


A shimmering air the golden calm...Read more of this...

The Return

by Philip Levine

 All afternoon my father drove the country roads
between Detroit and Lansing. What he was looking for
I never learned, no doubt because he never knew himself,
though he would grab any unfamiliar side road
and follow where it led past fields of tall sweet corn
in August or in winter those of frozen sheaves.
Often he'd leave the Terraplane beside the highway
to enter the...Read more of this...

The Maid Of The Mills Treachery

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

 [This Ballad is introduced in the Wanderjahre, 
in a tale called The Foolish Pilgrim.]

WHENCE comes our friend so hastily,

When scarce the Eastern sky is grey?
Hath he just ceased, though cold it be,

In yonder holy spot to pray?
The brook appears to hem his path,

Would he barefooted o'er it go?
Why curse his orisons in wrath,

Across those heights beclad with snow?

Alas! his...Read more of this...

The Summer Rain

by Henry David Thoreau

 My books I'd fain cast off, I cannot read, 
'Twixt every page my thoughts go stray at large 
Down in the meadow, where is richer feed, 
And will not mind to hit their proper targe. 
Plutarch was good, and so was Homer too, 
Our Shakespeare's life were rich to live again, 
What Plutarch read, that was not good nor...Read more of this...

To Haydon

by John Keats

 Haydon! forgive me that I cannot speak
Definitively of these mighty things;
Forgive me, that I have not eagle's wings,
That what I want I know not where to seek,
And think that I would not be over-meek,
In rolling out upfollowed thunderings,
Even to the steep of Heliconian springs,
Were I of ample strength for such a freak.
Think, too, that all these numbers should be...Read more of this...

Into the Dusk-Charged Air

by John Ashbery

 Far from the Rappahannock, the silent
Danube moves along toward the sea.
The brown and green Nile rolls slowly
Like the Niagara's welling descent.
Tractors stood on the green banks of the Loire
Near where it joined the Cher.
The St. Lawrence prods among black stones
And mud. But the Arno is all stones.
Wind ruffles the Hudson's
Surface. The Irawaddy is overflowing.
But the yellowish, gray Tiber
Is contained...Read more of this...

The day when the heavens shall be confounded, when