Famous Index Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Index poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous index poems. These examples illustrate what a famous index poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Anne Sexton
The correct death is written in.
I will fill the need.
My bow is stiff.
My bow is in readiness.
I am the bullet and the hook.
I am cocked and held ready.
In my sights I carve him
like a sculptor. I mold out
his last look at everyone.
I carry his eyes and his
brain bone at every position.
I know his male sex and I do
march over...Read more of this...
by
William Strode
I am the faythfull deputy
Unto your fading memory.
Your Index long in search doth hold;
Your folded wrinkles make books olde:
But I the Scripture open plaine,
And what you heard soone teach againe:
By mee the Welchman well may bring
Himselfe to Heaven in a string....Read more of this...
by
Czeslaw Milosz
1
We, whose lungs fill with the sweetness of day.
Who in May admire trees flowering
Are better than those who perished.
We, who taste of exotic dishes,
And enjoy fully the delights of love,
Are better than those who were buried.
We, from the fiery furnaces, from behind barbed wires
On which the winds of endless autumns howled,
We, who remember battles where the wounded air roared...Read more of this...
by
Linda Pastan
Pierre Bonnard would enter
the museum with a tube of paint
in his pocket and a sable brush.
Then violating the sanctity
of one of his own frames
he'd add a stroke of vermilion
to the skin of a flower.
Just so I stopped you
at the door this morning
and licking my index finger, removed
an invisible crumb
from your vermilion mouth. As if
at the ritual moment of departure
I...Read more of this...
by
Edwin Arlington Robinson
(To Mrs. Edward MacDowell)
No sound of any storm that shakes
Old island walls with older seas
Comes here where now September makes
An island in a sea of trees.
Between the sunlight and the shade
A man may learn till he forgets
The roaring of a world remade,
And all his ruins and regrets;
And if he still remembers here...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Lee Masters
You observe the carven hand
With the index finger pointing heavenward.
That is the direction, no doubt.
But how shall one follow it?
It is well to abstain from murder and lust,
To forgive, do good to others, worship God
Without graven images.
But these are external means after all
By which you chiefly do good to yourself.
The inner kernel is freedom,
It is light, purity --
I can...Read more of this...
by
Carolyn Kizer
1.
Had the ham bone, had the lentils,
Got to meat store for the salt pork,
Got to grocery for the celery.
Had the onions, had the garlic,
Borrowed carrots from the neighbor.
Had the spices, had the parsley.
One big kettle I had not got;
Borrowed pot and lid from landlord.
2.
Dice the pork and chop the celery,
Chop the onions, chop the carrots,
Chop the tender index finger.
Put...Read more of this...
by
Oliver Wendell Holmes
YES, write, if you want to, there's nothing like trying;
Who knows what a treasure your casket may hold?
I'll show you that rhyming's as easy as lying,
If you'll listen to me while the art I unfold.
Here's a book full of words; one can choose as he fancies,
As a painter his tint, as a workman his tool;
Just think! all the poems...Read more of this...
by
Robert Burns
HIS face with smile eternal drest,
Just like the Landlord’s to his Guest’s,
High as they hang with creaking din,
To index out the Country Inn.
He looked just as your sign-post Lions do,
With aspect fierce, and quite as harmless too.
——————A head, pure, sinless quite of brain and soul,
The very image of a barber’s Poll;
It shews a human face, and wears a wig,
And...Read more of this...
by
John Berryman
Cedars and the westward sun.
The darkening sky. A man alone
Watches beside the fallen wall
The evening multitudes of sin
Crowd in upon us all.
For when the light fails they begin
Nocturnal sabotage among
The outcast and the loose of tongue,
The lax in walk, the murderers:
Our twilight universal curse.
Children are faultless in the wood,
Untouched. If they are later made
Scandal and index to their time,
It...Read more of this...
by
Hart Crane
We will make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.
For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts.
We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
That slowly...Read more of this...
by
Vasko Popa
Nobody rests
This one constantly shifts his eyes
Hangs them on his head
And whether he wants it or not starts walking
backwards
He puts them on the soles of his feet
And whether he wants it or not returns walking
on his head
This one turns into an ear
He hears all that won't let itself...Read more of this...
by
Hayden Carruth
Just over the horizon a great machine of death is roaring and
rearing.
One can hear it always. Earthquake, starvation, the ever-
renewing field of corpse-flesh.
In this valley the snow falls silently all day and out our window
We see the curtain of it shifting and folding, hiding us away in
our little house,
We see earth smoothened and beautified, made like...Read more of this...
by
Erica Jong
People who live by the sea
understand eternity.
They copy the curves of the waves,
their hearts beat with the tides,
& the saltiness of their blood
corresponds with the sea.
They know that the house of flesh
is only a sandcastle
built on the shore,
that skin breaks
under the waves
like sand under the soles
of the first walker on the beach
when the tide recedes.
Each of us walks there...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
FROM pent-up, aching rivers;
From that of myself, without which I were nothing;
From what I am determin’d to make illustrious, even if I stand sole among men;
From my own voice resonant—singing the phallus,
Singing the song of procreation,
Singing the need of superb children, and therein superb grown people,
Singing the muscular urge and the blending,
Singing the...Read more of this...
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