Famous Instruments Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Instruments poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous instruments poems. These examples illustrate what a famous instruments poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Vachel Lindsay
I. THE LION
The Lion is a kingly beast.
He likes a Hindu for a feast.
And if no Hindu he can get,
The lion-family is upset.
He cuffs his wife and bites her ears
Till she is nearly moved to tears.
Then some explorer finds the den
And all is family peace again.
II. AN EXPLANATION OF THE GRASSHOPPER
The Grasshopper, the grasshopper,
I will explain to you:—
He...Read more of this...
by
Wystan Hugh (W H) Auden
IHe disappeared in the dead of winter:The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,And snow disfigured the public statues;The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.What instruments we have agreeThe day of his death was a dark cold day. Far from his illnessThe wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;By...Read more of this...
by
Tristan Tzara
Art is going to sleep for a new world to be born
"ART"-parrot word-replaced by DADA,
PLESIOSAURUS, or handkerchief
The talent THAT CAN BE LEARNED makes the
poet a druggist TODAY the criticism
of balances no longer challenges with resemblances
Hypertrophic painters hyperaes-
theticized and hypnotized by the hyacinths
of the hypocritical-looking muezzins
CONSOLIDATE THE HARVEST OF EX-
ACT CALCULATIONS
Hypodrome of immortal guarantees: there is
no such thing as importance...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
1
TO think of time—of all that retrospection!
To think of to-day, and the ages continued henceforward!
Have you guess’d you yourself would not continue?
Have you dreaded these earth-beetles?
Have you fear’d the future would be nothing to you?
Is to-day nothing? Is the beginningless past nothing?
If the future is nothing, they are just as surely nothing.
To think...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
A MARCH in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown;
A route through a heavy wood, with muffled steps in the darkness;
Our army foil’d with loss severe, and the sullen remnant retreating;
Till after midnight glimmer upon us, the lights of a dim-lighted building;
We come to an open space in the woods, and halt by the dim-lighted...Read more of this...
by
Edith Nesbit
My mouth blooms like a cut.
I've been wronged all year, tedious
nights, nothing but rough elbows in them
and delicate boxes of Kleenex calling crybaby
crybaby , you fool!
Before today my body was useless.
Now it's tearing at its square corners.
It's tearing old Mary's garments off, knot by knot
and see -- Now it's shot full of these electric bolts.
Zing! A resurrection!
Once it was...Read more of this...
by
Kahlil Gibran
Yesterday I drew myself from the noisome throngs and proceeded into the field until I reached a knoll upon which Nature had spread her comely garments. Now I could breathe.
I looked back, and the city appeared with its magnificent mosques and stately residences veiled by the smoke of the shops.
I commenced analyzing man's mission, but could conclude...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
1
PROUD music of the storm!
Blast that careers so free, whistling across the prairies!
Strong hum of forest tree-tops! Wind of the mountains!
Personified dim shapes! you hidden orchestras!
You serenades of phantoms, with instruments alert,
Blending, with Nature’s rhythmus, all the tongues of nations;
You chords left us by vast composers! you choruses!
You formless, free, religious dances! you...Read more of this...
by
Yehuda Amichai
"What kind of a person are you," I heard them say to me.
I'm a person with a complex plumbing of the soul,
Sophisticated instruments of feeling and a system
Of controlled memory at the end of the twentieth century,
But with an old body from ancient times
And with a God even older than my body.
I'm a person for the surface of the...Read more of this...
by
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The first time that the sun rose on thine oath
To love me, I looked forward to the moon
To slacken all those bonds which seemed too soon
And quickly tied to make a lasting troth.
Quick-loving hearts, I thought, may quickly loathe;
And, looking on myself, I seemed not one
For such man's love!—more like an out-of-tune
Worn viol, a good singer would be wroth
To...Read more of this...
by
Conrad Aiken
From time to time, lifting his eyes, he sees
The soft blue starlight through the one small window,
The moon above black trees, and clouds, and Venus,—
And turns to write . . . The clock, behind ticks softly.
It is so long, indeed, since I have written,—
Two years, almost, your last is turning yellow,—
That these first words I write seem cold and...Read more of this...
by
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
There's a breathless hush on the freeway tonight
Beyond the ledges of concrete
restaurants fall into dreams
with candlelight couples
Lost Alexandria still burns
in a billion lightbulbs
Lives cross lives
idling at stoplights
Beyond the cloverleaf turnoffs
'Souls eat souls in the general emptiness'
A piano concerto comes out a kitchen window
A yogi speaks at Ojai
'It's all taking pace in one mind'
On the lawn among the trees
lovers are...Read more of this...
by
William Strode
Keepe on your maske, and hide your eye,
For with beholding you I dye:
Your fatall beauty, Gorgon-like,
Dead with astonishment will strike;
Your piercing eyes if them I see
Are worse than basilisks to mee.
Shutt from mine eyes those hills of snowe,
Their melting valleys doe not showe;
Their azure paths lead to dispaire,
O vex me not, forbeare, forbeare;
For while I thus in torments dwell
The...Read more of this...
by
Christopher Marlowe
Black is the beauty of the brightest day,
The golden belle of heaven's eternal fire,
That danced with glory on the silver waves,
Now wants the fuel that inflamed his beams:
And all with faintness and for foul disgrace,
He binds his temples with a frowning cloud,
Ready to darken earth with endless night:
Zenocrate that gave him light and life,
Whose eyes shot fire from their...Read more of this...
by
Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Throughout these infinite orbs of mingling light,
Of which yon earth is one, is wide diffus'd
A Spirit of activity and life,
That knows no term, cessation, or decay;
That fades not when the lamp of earthly life,
Extinguish'd in the dampness of the grave,
Awhile there slumbers, more than when the babe
In the dim newness of its being feels
The impulses of sublunary things,
And...Read more of this...
by
Alexander Pope
Close by those meads, for ever crown'd with flow'rs,
Where Thames with pride surveys his rising tow'rs,
There stands a structure of majestic frame,
Which from the neighb'ring Hampton takes its name.
Here Britain's statesmen oft the fall foredoom
Of foreign tyrants and of nymphs at home;
Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes counsel take--and sometimes tea.
Hither the heroes and the...Read more of this...
by
Adrienne Rich
Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750-1848),
astronomer, sister of William; and others.
A woman in the shape of a monster
a monster in the shape of a woman
the skies are full of them
a woman 'in the snow
among the Clocks and instruments
or measuring the ground with poles'
in her 98 years to discover
8 comets
She whom the moon ruled
like us
levitating into the night sky
riding the...Read more of this...
by
Imamu Amiri Baraka
WHYS (Nobody Knows
The Trouble I Seen)
Traditional
If you ever find
yourself, some where
lost and surrounded
by enemies
who won't let you
speak in your own language
who destroy your statues
& instruments, who ban
your omm bomm ba boom
then you are in trouble
deep trouble
they ban your
own boom ba boom
you in deep deep
trouble
humph!
probably take you several hundred...Read more of this...
by
Kahlil Gibran
Part One
As night fell and the light glittered in the great house, the servants stood at the massive door awaiting the coming of the guests; and upon their velvet garments shown golden buttons.
The magnificent carriages drew into the palace park and the nobles entered, dressed in gorgeous raiment and decorated with jewels. The instruments filled the air with...Read more of this...
by
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Emily,
A ship is floating in the harbour now,
A wind is hovering o'er the mountain's brow;
There is a path on the sea's azure floor,
No keel has ever plough'd that path before;
The halcyons brood around the foamless isles;
The treacherous Ocean has forsworn its wiles;
The merry mariners are bold and free:
Say, my heart's sister, wilt thou sail with me?
Our bark is...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
1
A GREAT year and place;
A harsh, discordant, natal scream out-sounding, to touch the mother’s heart closer
than
any yet.
I walk’d the shores of my Eastern Sea,
Heard over the waves the little voice,
Saw the divine infant, where she woke, mournfully wailing, amid the roar of cannon,
curses,
shouts, crash of falling buildings;
Was not so sick from...Read more of this...
by
Billy Collins
This is not bad --
ambling along 44th Street
with Sonny Rollins for company,
his music flowing through the soft calipers
of these earphones,
as if he were right beside me
on this clear day in March,
the pavement sparkling with sunlight,
pigeons fluttering off the curb,
nodding over a profusion of bread crumbs.
In fact, I would say
my delight at being suffused
with phrases from his saxophone --
some like...Read more of this...
by
Les Murray
We who travel between worlds
lose our muscle and bone.
I was wheeling a barrow of earth
when agony bayoneted me.
I could not sit, or lie down,
or stand, in Casualty.
Stomach-calming clay caked my lips,
I turned yellow as the moon
and slid inside a CAT-scan wheel
in a hospital where I met no one
so much...Read more of this...
by
George Eliot
Your soul was lifted by the wings today
Hearing the master of the violin:
You praised him, praised the great Sabastian too
Who made that fine Chaconne; but did you think
Of old Antonio Stradivari? -him
Who a good century and a half ago
Put his true work in that brown instrument
And by the nice adjustment of its frame
Gave it responsive life, continuous
With the master's...Read more of this...
by
Elizabeth Bishop
Days that cannot bring you near
or will not,
Distance trying to appear
something more obstinate,
argue argue argue with me
endlessly
neither proving you less wanted nor less dear.
Distance: Remember all that land
beneath the plane;
that coastline
of dim beaches deep in sand
stretching indistinguishably
all the way,
all the way to where my reasons end?
Days: And think
of all those cluttered instruments,
one to a fact,
canceling each other's experience;
how they...Read more of this...
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