Famous Hollows Poems by Famous Poets

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

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On A Political Prisoner

by William Butler Yeats
 She that but little patience knew,
From childhood on, had now so much
A grey gull lost its fear and flew
Down to her cell and there alit,
And there endured her fingers' touch
And from her fingers ate its bit.

Did she in touching that lone wing
Recall the years before her mind
Became a bitter, an abstract thing,
Her thought some popular enmity:
Blind and leader of...Read more of this...

Man and Wife

by Robert Lowell
Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother's bed;
the rising sun in war paint dyes us red;
in broad daylight her gilded bed-posts shine,
abandoned, almost Dionysian.
At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street,
blossoms on our magnolia ignite
the morning with their murderous five days' white.
All night I've held your hand,
as if you had
a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad--
its hackneyed...Read more of this...

Hymn

by Barry Tebb
 How I love the working-class girls of Leeds,

Their mile-wide smiles, eyes bright as beads,

Their young breasts bobbing as they run,

Hands quick as darting fish, lithe legs

Bare as they scramble over the Hollows

With brown-soled feet and dimpled bums

Half-covered with knickers, and short frocks

Full of flowers and their delicate ears,

Perfect teeth and flickering tongues, the

Fragile bones of their cheeks, the soft

Sweetness...Read more of this...

the missing

by Suheir Hammad
 the way loss seeps
into neck hollows
and curls at temples
sits between front teeth
cavity
empty and waiting
for mourning to open
the way mourning stays
forever shadowing vision
shaping lives with memory
a drawer won't close
sleep elusive
smile illusive
the only real is grief
forever counting the days
minutes missing without knowing
so that one day 
you find yourself 
showering tears
missing that love
like sugar 
aches teeth...Read more of this...

The Bell-ringer

by Emile Verhaeren
Yon, in the depths of the evening's track,
Like a herd of blind bullocks that seek their fellows,
Wild, as in terror, the tempest bellows.
And suddenly, there, o'er the gables black
That the church, in the twilight, around it raises
All scored with lightnings the steeple blazes.


See the old bell-ringer, frenzied with fear.
Mouth gaping, yet speechless, draw hastening near.
And the knell of alarm that...Read more of this...

Mine Sweepers

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...

My love, and not I, is the egoist

by Fernando Pessoa
My love, and not I, is the egoist.

My love for thee loves itself more than thee;

Ay, more than me, in whom it doth exist,

And makes me live that it may feed on me.

In the country of bridges the bridge is

More real than the shores it doth unsever;

So in our world, all of Relation, this

Is true--that truer is Love than either...Read more of this...

Whats the Railroad to Me

by Henry David Thoreau
 What's the railroad to me?
I never go to see
Where it ends.
It fills a few hollows,
And makes banks for the swallows,
It sets the sand a-blowing,
And the blackberries a-growing....Read more of this...

Seal Lullaby

by Rudyard Kipling
 Oh! hush thee, my baby, the night is behind us
And black are the waters that sparkled so green.
The moon, O'er the combers, looks downward to find us
At rest in the hollows that rustle between.
Where billow meets billow, there soft by the pillow.
Oh, weary wee flipperling, curl at thy ease!
The storm shall not wake thee, no shark shall overtake thee
Asleep...Read more of this...

Childhood

by Rainer Maria Rilke
 HOW I could see through and through you!
So unconscious, tender, kind,
More than ever was known to you
Of the pure ways of your mind.


We who long to rest from strife
Labour sternly as a duty;
But a magic in your life
Charms, unknowing of its beauty.


We are pools whose depths are told;
You are like a mystic fountain,
Issuing ever pure and cold
From the hollows...Read more of this...

Escape

by Elinor Wylie
 When foxes eat the last gold grape, 
And the last white antelope is killed, 
I shall stop fighting and escape 
Into a little house I'll build.

But first I'll shrink to fairy size, 
With a whisper no one understands, 
Making blind moons of all your eyes, 
And muddy roads of all your hands.

And you may grope for me in vain...Read more of this...

American Feuillage

by Walt Whitman
 AMERICA always! 
Always our own feuillage! 
Always Florida’s green peninsula! Always the priceless delta of Louisiana! Always the
 cotton-fields of Alabama and Texas! 
Always California’s golden hills and hollows—and the silver mountains of New
 Mexico!
 Always soft-breath’d Cuba! 
Always the vast slope drain’d by the Southern Sea—inseparable with the slopes
 drain’d
 by the Eastern and Western Seas;
The area the...Read more of this...

The Swimmer

by Adam Lindsay Gordon
 With short, sharp violent lights made vivid,
To the southward far as the sight can roam,
Only the swirl of the surges livid,
The seas that climb and the surfs that comb,
Only the crag and the cliff to nor'ward,
And rocks receding, and reefs flung forward,
And waifs wreck'd seaward and wasted shoreward
On shallows sheeted with flaming foam.

A grim grey coast and a seaboard...Read more of this...

A Japanese Wood-Carving

by Amy Lowell
 High up above the open, welcoming door
It hangs, a piece of wood with colours dim.
Once, long ago, it was a waving tree
And knew the sun and shadow through the leaves
Of forest trees, in a thick eastern wood.
The winter snows had bent its branches down,
The spring had swelled its buds with coming flowers,
Summer had run like fire through its veins,
While...Read more of this...

Berck-Plage

by Sylvia Plath
(1)

This is the sea, then, this great abeyance.
How the sun's poultice draws on my inflammation.

Electrifyingly-colored sherbets, scooped from the freeze
By pale girls, travel the air in scorched hands.

Why is it so quiet, what are they hiding?
I have two legs, and I move smilingly..

A sandy damper kills the vibrations;
It stretches for miles, the shrunk voices

Waving and crutchless, half their old size.
The...Read more of this...

The Snow

by Emile Verhaeren
Uninterruptedly falls the snow,
Like meagre, long wool-strands, scant and slow,
O'er the meagre, long plain disconsolate.
Cold with lovelessness, warm with hate.


Infinite, infinite falls the snow.
Like a moment's time.
Monotonously, in a moment's time;
On the houses it falls and drops, the snow.
Monotonous, whitening them o'er with rime;
It falls on the sheds and their palings below.
And myriad-wise, it falls and lies
In ridgèd waves
In the...Read more of this...

Melancholy -- To Laura

by Friedrich von Schiller
 Laura! a sunrise seems to break
Where'er thy happy looks may glow.
Joy sheds its roses o'er thy cheek,
Thy tears themselves do but bespeak
The rapture whence they flow;
Blest youth to whom those tears are given--
The tears that change his earth to heaven;
His best reward those melting eyes--
For him new suns are in the skies!

Thy soul--a crystal river passing,
Silver-clear, and sunbeam-glassing,
Mays into...Read more of this...

The Song of the Dead

by Rudyard Kipling
 Hear now the Song of the Dead -- in the North by the torn berg-edges --
They that look still to the Pole, asleep by their hide-stripped sledges.
Song of the Dead in the South -- in the sun by their skeleton horses,
Where the warrigal whimpers and bays through the dust of the sere river-courses.

Song of the Dead in the East...Read more of this...

To The House

by Robinson Jeffers
I am heaping the bones of the old mother
To build us a hold against the host of the air;
Granite the blood-heat of her youth
Held molten in hot darkness against the heart
Hardened to temper under the feet
Of the ocean cavalry that are maned with snow
And march from the remotest west.
This is the primitive rock, here in the wet
Quarry under the shadow...Read more of this...

White Horses

by Rudyard Kipling
 Where run your colts at pasture?
 Where hide your mares to breed?
'Mid bergs about the Ice-cap
 Or wove Sargasso weed;
By chartless reef and channel,
 Or crafty coastwise bars,
But most the ocean-meadows
 All purple to the stars!

Who holds the rein upon you?
 The latest gale let free.
What meat is in your mangers?
 The glut of all the sea.
'Twixt tide and...Read more of this...

Pity

by George William Russell
 THE TWINKLING mists of green and gold
Afloat in the abyss of air,
From out the window high and old
 We watched together there.


The monstrous fabric of the town
Lay black below; the cries of pain
Came to our ears from up and down
 The dimly-lighted lane.


Olive, your eyes were turned to me,
Seeking a soul to sympathise:
I wondered what that glow might be,
...Read more of this...

A Beautiful Young Nymph Going To Bed

by Jonathan Swift
 Corinna, Pride of Drury-Lane,
For whom no Shepherd sighs in vain;
Never did Covent Garden boast
So bright a batter'd, strolling Toast;
No drunken Rake to pick her up,
No Cellar where on Tick to sup;
Returning at the Midnight Hour;
Four Stories climbing to her Bow'r;
Then, seated on a three-legg'd Chair,
Takes off her artificial Hair: 
Now, picking out a Crystal Eye,
She wipes it clean, and...Read more of this...

The Hollows round His eager Eyes

by Emily Dickinson
 The Hollows round His eager Eyes
Were Pages where to read
Pathetic Histories -- although
Himself had not complained.
Biography to All who passed
Of Unobtrusive Pain
Except for the italic Face
Endured, unhelped -- unknown....Read more of this...

LEnvoi

by Robert William Service
 Only a rhymer, so I am,
 Lone in the market place;
I shrink, and no one cares a damn
 Though tears corrode my face.
The hollows of my cheeks they track,
 Symbolic of vain hope;
My hands are grimed because I lack
 The price of soap.

Only a rhymer! How my breeks
 Let in the Winter wind;
One of my shoes obscenely leaks,
 My...Read more of this...

Apollo Musagetes

by Matthew Arnold
 Through the black, rushing smoke-bursts,
Thick breaks the red flame;
All Etna heaves fiercely
Her forest-clothed frame. 

Not here, O Apollo!
Are haunts meet for thee.
But, where Helicon breaks down
In cliff to the sea, 

Where the moon-silver'd inlets
Send far their light voice
Up the still vale of Thisbe,
O speed, and rejoice! 

On the sward at the cliff-top
Lie strewn the white flocks,
On the cliff-side the...Read more of this...

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