Famous I Do Not Know Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous I Do Not Know poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous i do not know poems. These examples illustrate what a famous i do not know poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...A bird came down the walk:
He did not know I saw;
He bit an angle-worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw.
And then he drank a dew
From a convenient grass,
And then hopped sidewise to the wall
To let a beetle pass.
He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all abroad,--
They looked like frightened beads, I thought;
He stirred his velvet head
...Read more of this...
by
Dickinson, Emily
...
There was thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit.
There were grief and ruins, and you were the miracle.
Ah woman, I do not know how you could contain me
in the earth of your soul, in the cross of your arms!
How terrible and brief my desire was to you!
How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid.
Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs,
still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds.
Oh the bitten mouth, oh the kissed limbs,
oh the hungering teeth,...Read more of this...
by
Neruda, Pablo
...Prologue
Listen! We have gathered the glory in days of yore
of the Spear-Danes, kings among men:
how these warriors performed deeds of courage. (ll. 1-3)
Often Scyld Scefing seized the mead-seats
from hordes of harmers, from how many people,
terrifying noble men, after he was found
so needy at the start. He wrangled his remedy after,
growing hal...Read more of this...
by
Anonymous,
...Muse of my native land! loftiest Muse!
O first-born on the mountains! by the hues
Of heaven on the spiritual air begot:
Long didst thou sit alone in northern grot,
While yet our England was a wolfish den;
Before our forests heard the talk of men;
Before the first of Druids was a child;--
Long didst thou sit amid our regions wild
Rapt in a deep prophetic so...Read more of this...
by
Keats, John
...Never shall I dread love’s strength
Nor any pain it might give.
Through all the years I may live
I shall never have any fear of love.
I shall never draw back from love
Through fear of its vast pain
But build joy of it and count it again.
I shall never have any fear of love....Read more of this...
by
Gidlow, Elsa
...CANTO I
ONE night, when half my life behind me lay,
I wandered from the straight lost path afar.
Through the great dark was no releasing way;
Above that dark was no relieving star.
If yet that terrored night I think or say,
As death's cold hands its fears resuming are.
Gladly the dreads I felt, too dire to tell,
The hopeless, pathless, li...Read more of this...
by
Alighieri, Dante
...Little things I’ll give to you—
Till your fingers learn to press
Gently
On a loveliness;
Little things and new—
Till your fingers learn to hold
Love that’s fragile,
Love that’s old....Read more of this...
by
Strobel, Marion
...I shall make a song like your hair . . . .
gold-woven with shadows green-tinged,
And I shall play with my song
As my fingers might play with your hair.
Deep in my heart
I shall play with my song of you,
Gently . . . .
I shall laugh
At its sensitive lustre . . .
I shall wrap my song in a blanket,
Blue like your eyes are blue
With tiny shot...Read more of this...
by
Bennett, Gwendolyn B.
...
poke-weed.
6
A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is, any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer, designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and
remark, and say, Whose?
Or I guess the grass is it...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...1
AFOOT and light-hearted, I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune—I myself am good fortune;
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Strong and content, I travel the open road.
The earth—that is sufficient;
I do not...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...DEDICATION
Of great limbs gone to chaos,
A great face turned to night--
Why bend above a shapeless shroud
Seeking in such archaic cloud
Sight of strong lords and light?
Where seven sunken Englands
Lie buried one by one,
Why should one idle spade, I wonder,
Shake up the dust of thanes like thunder
To smoke and choke the sun?
In cloud of clay so cast to ...Read more of this...
by
Chesterton, G K
...Your daisies have come
on the day of my divorce:
the courtroom a cement box,
a gas chamber for the infectious Jew in me
and a perhaps land, a possibly promised land
for the Jew in me,
but still a betrayal room for the till-death-do-us—
and yet a death, as in the unlocking of scissors
that makes the now separate parts useless,
even to cut each other up as w...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
..."Had we never loved so kindly,
Had we never loved so blindly,
Never met or never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted." — Burns
TO
THE RIGHT HONOURABLE LORD HOLLAND,
THIS TALE IS INSCRIBED,
WITH EVERY SENTIMENT OF REGARD AND RESPECT,
BY HIS GRATEFULLY OBLIGED AND SINCERE FRIEND,
BYRON.
THE BRIDE OF ABYDOS
_________
CANTO THE FIRST. ...Read more of this...
by
Byron, George (Lord)
...1.1 Lo now! four other acts upon the stage,
1.2 Childhood, and Youth, the Manly, and Old-age.
1.3 The first: son unto Phlegm, grand-child to water,
1.4 Unstable, supple, moist, and cold's his Nature.
1.5 The second: frolic claims his pedigree;
1.6 From blood and air, for hot and moist is he.
1.7 The third of fire and choler is compos'd,
1.8 Vindicative, an...Read more of this...
by
Bradstreet, Anne
...CANTO FIRST.
The Chase.
Harp of the North! that mouldering long hast hung
On the witch-elm that shades Saint Fillan's spring
And down the fitful breeze thy numbers flung,
Till envious ivy did around thee cling,
Muffling with verdant ringlet every string,—
O Minstrel Harp, still must thine accents sleep?
...Read more of this...
by
Scott, Sir Walter
...is is harder than Bezique!"
But when she asked him "Wherefore so?"
He felt his very whiskers glow,
And frankly owned "I do not know."
While, like broad waves of golden grain,
Or sunlit hues on cloistered pane,
His colour came and went again.
Pitying his obvious distress,
Yet with a tinge of bitterness,
She said "The More exceeds the Less."
"A truth of such undoubted weight,"
He urged, "and so extreme in date,
It were superfluous to state."
Roused into sudden passion...Read more of this...
by
Carroll, Lewis
...n I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
- But who is that on the other side of you?
What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling ...Read more of this...
by
Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...I
I have loved England, dearly and deeply,
Since that first morning, shining and pure,
The white cliffs of Dover I saw rising steeply
Out of the sea that once made her secure.
I had no thought then of husband or lover,
I was a traveller, the guest of a week;
Yet when they pointed 'the white cliffs of Dover',
Startled I found there were tears on my ...Read more of this...
by
Miller, Alice Duer
...Before those cruel twins whom at one birth
Incestuous Change bore to her father Time,
Error and Truth, had hunted from the earth
All those bright natures which adorned its prime,
And left us nothing to believe in, worth
The pains of putting into learn?d rhyme,
A Lady Witch there lived on Atlas mountain
Within a cavern by a secret fountain.
Her mother was ...Read more of this...
by
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...winter of white sheets, white faces.
There is very little to go into my suitcase.
There are the clothes of a fat woman I do not know.
There is my comb and brush. There is an emptiness.
I am so vulnerable suddenly.
I am a wound walking out of hospital.
I am a wound that they are letting go.
I leave my health behind. I leave someone
Who would adhere to me: I undo her fingers like bandages: I go.
SECOND VOICE:
I am myself again. There are no loose ends.
I am bled white as wax,...Read more of this...
by
Plath, Sylvia
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