Famous Intact Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Intact poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous intact poems. These examples illustrate what a famous intact poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Mark Doty
The intact facade's now almost black
in the rain; all day they've torn at the back
of the building, "the oldest concrete structure
in New England," the newspaper said. By afternoon,
when the backhoe claw appears above
three stories of columns and cornices,
the crowd beneath their massed umbrellas cheer.
Suddenly the stairs seem to climb down themselves,
atomized...Read more of this...
by
Philip Levine
1
Dawn. First light tearing
at the rough tongues of the zinnias,
at the leaves of the just born.
Today it will rain. On the road
black cars are abandoned, but the clouds
ride above, their wisdom intact.
They are predictions. They never matter.
The jet fighters lift above the flat roofs,
black arrowheads trailing their future.
2
When...Read more of this...
by
Amy Clampitt
Daily the cortege of crumpled
defunct cars
goes by by the lasagna-
layered flatbed
truckload: hardtop
reverting to tar smudge,
wax shine antiqued to crusted
winepress smear,
windshield battered to
intact ice-tint, a rarity
fresh from the Pleistocene.
I like it; privately
I find esthetic
satisfaction in these
ceremonial removals
from the category of
received ideas
to regions where pigeons'
svelte smoke-velvet
limousines, taxiing
in whirligigs, reclaim...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
Struck, was I, not yet by Lightning --
Lightning -- lets away
Power to perceive His Process
With Vitality.
Maimed -- was I -- yet not by Venture --
Stone of stolid Boy --
Nor a Sportsman's Peradventure --
Who mine Enemy?
Robbed -- was I -- intact to Bandit --
All my Mansion torn --
Sun -- withdrawn to Recognition --
Furthest shining -- done --
Yet was not the...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Lee Masters
A step-mother drove me from home, embittering me.
A squaw-man, a flaneur and dilettante took my virtue.
For years I was his mistress -- no one knew.
I learned from him the parasite cunning
With which I moved with the bluffs, like a flea on a dog.
All the time I was nothing but "very private" with different men.
Then Daniel, the radical, had me...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
Doubt Me! My Dim Companion!
Why, God, would be content
With but a fraction of the Life --
Poured thee, without a stint --
The whole of me -- forever --
What more the Woman can,
Say quick, that I may dower thee
With last Delight I own!
It cannot be my Spirit --
For that was thine, before --
I ceded all of Dust I knew --
What Opulence...Read more of this...
by
Philip Levine
The doctor fingers my bruise.
"Magnificent," he says, "black
at the edges and purple
cored." Seated, he spies for clues,
gingerly probing the slack
flesh, while I, standing, fazed, pull
for air, losing the battle.
Faced by his aged diploma,
the heavy head of the X-
ray, and the iron saddle,
I grow lonely. He finds my
secrets common...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Hardy
'Whenever I plunge my arm, like this,
In a basin of water, I never miss
The sweet sharp sense of a fugitive day
Fetched back from its thickening shroud of gray.
Hence the only prime
And real love-rhyme
That I know by heart,
And that leaves no smart,
Is the purl of a little valley fall
About three spans...Read more of this...
by
Charles Simic
The obvious is difficult
To prove. Many prefer
The hidden. I did, too.
I listened to the trees.
They had a secret
Which they were about to
Make known to me--
And then didn't.
Summer came. Each tree
On my street had its own
Scheherazade. My nights
Were a part of their wild
Storytelling. We were
Entering dark houses,
Always more dark houses,
Hushed and abandoned.
There was someone with eyes closed
On the upper floors.
The...Read more of this...
by
Rg Gregory
cherries are so vulnerable
blinking their way from green
to polished red in trees
guileless to stave off birds
a murmur does its rounds
and when the bright day comes
and ripeness throws its coyness
in the air a seething mesh
of wings and whetted beaks
(knowing its cherry-right)
falls upon the fleshy fruit
and rips it to the stone
then birds become the foe
of people leaden in their legs
who...Read more of this...
by
Victor Hugo
("Orphée au bois du Caystre.")
{Bk. I. ii.}
Orpheus, through the hellward wood
Hurried, ere the eve-star glowed,
For the fauns' lugubrious hoots
Followed, hollow, from crookèd roots;
Aeschylus, where Aetna smoked,
Gods of Sicily evoked
With the flute, till sulphur taint
Dulled and lulled the echoes faint;
...Read more of this...
by
Du Fu
Dusk stay at stone moat village Be official night capture people Old man over wall escape Old woman out door look Official shout with what anger Woman cry with what grief Hear woman forward send words Three sons Ye city defend One son send letter to Two sons newly battle dead Survive one for now sneak life...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
By the Laws of the Family Circle 'tis written in letters of brass
That only a Colonel from Chatham can manage the Railways of State,
Because of the gold on his breeks, and the subjects wherein he must pass;
Because in all matters that deal not with Railways his knowledge is great.
Now Exeter Battleby Tring had laboured from boyhood to eld
On the...Read more of this...
by
Laura Riding Jackson
Across a continent imaginary
Because it cannot be discovered now
Upon this fully apprehended planet—
No more applicants considered,
Alas, alas—
Ran an animal unzoological,
Without a fate, without a fact,
Its private history intact
Against the travesty
Of an anatomy.
Not visible not invisible,
Removed by dayless night,
Did it ever fly its ground
Out of fancy into light,
Into space to replace
Its unwritable decease?
Ah, the minutes twinkle in and out
And in...Read more of this...
by
Delmore Schwartz
(After Rilke)
We cannot know the indescribable face
Where the eyes like apples ripened. Even so,
His torso has a candelabra's glow,
His gaze, contained as in a mirror's grace,
Shines within it. Otherwise his breast
Would not be dazzling. Nor would you recognize
The smile that moves along his curving thighs,
There where love's strength is caught within its nest.
This stone would not be broken, but...Read more of this...
by
Louise Gluck
My mother's an expert in one thing:
sending people she loves into the other world.
The little ones, the babies--these
she rocks, whispering or singing quietly. I can't say
what she did for my father;
whatever it was, I'm sure it was right.
It's the same thing, really, preparing a person
for sleep, for death. The lullabies--they all say
don't be afraid, that's how they paraphrase
the heartbeat...Read more of this...
by
Roger McGough
So you think its Stephen?
Then I'd best make sure
Be on the safe side as it were.
Ah, theres been a mistake. The hair
you see, its black, now Stephens fair ...
Whats that? The explosion?
Of course, burnt black. Silly of me.
I should have known. Then lets get on.
The face, is that the face mask?
that mask of charred wood
blistered scarred could
that have been...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
Growth of Man -- like Growth of Nature --
Gravitates within --
Atmosphere, and Sun endorse it --
Bit it stir -- alone --
Each -- its difficult Ideal
Must achieve -- Itself --
Through the solitary prowess
Of a Silent Life --
Effort -- is the sole condition --
Patience of Itself --
Patience of opposing forces --
And intact Belief --
Looking on -- is the Department
Of its Audience...Read more of this...
by
Marilyn Hacker
An unwrapped icon, too potent to touch,
she freed my breasts from the camp Empire dress.
Now one of them's the shadow of a breast
with a lost object's half-life, with as much
life as an anecdotal photograph:
me, Kim and Iva, all stripped to the waist,
hiking near Russian River on June first
'79: Iva's five-and-a-half.
While she was almost twenty, wearing black
T-shirts in D.C., where...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
Consider
a girl who keeps slipping off,
arms limp as old carrots,
into the hypnotist's trance,
into a spirit world
speaking with the gift of tongues.
She is stuck in the time machine,
suddenly two years old sucking her thumb,
as inward as a snail,
learning to talk again.
She's on a voyage.
She is swimming further and further back,
up like a salmon,
struggling into her mother's pocketbook.
Little doll child,
come here...Read more of this...
by
Robinson Jeffers
Christ was your lord and captain all your life,
He fails the world but you he did not fail,
He led you through all forms of grief and strife
Intact, a man full-armed, he let prevail
Nor outward malice nor the worse-fanged snake
That coils in one's own brain against your calm,
That great rich jewel well guarded for his sake
With coronal age and death like...Read more of this...
by
Vladimir Mayakovsky
The drum of war thunders and thunders.
It calls: thrust iron into the living.
From every country
slave after slave
are thrown onto bayonet steel.
For the sake of what?
The earth shivers
hungry
and stripped.
Mankind is vapourised in a blood bath
only so
someone
somewhere
can get hold of Albania.
Human gangs bound in malice,
blow after blow strikes the world
only for
someone’s vessels
to pass without charge
through the Bosporus....Read more of this...
by
Thomas Hardy
Good Father!… ’Twas an eve in middle June,
And war was waged anew
By great Napoleon, who for years had strewn
Men’s bones all Europe through.
Three nights ere this, with columned corps he’d crossed
The Sambre at Charleroi,
To move on Brussels, where the English host
Dallied in Parc and Bois.
The yestertide we’d heard the gloomy gun
Growl through...Read more of this...
by
Alan Seeger
O happiness, I know not what far seas,
Blue hills and deep, thy sunny realms surround,
That thus in Music's wistful harmonies
And concert of sweet sound
A rumor steals, from some uncertain shore,
Of lovely things outworn or gladness yet in store:
Whether thy beams be pitiful and come,
Across the sundering of vanished years,
From childhood and...Read more of this...
by
Pablo Neruda
From bristly foliage
you fell
complete, polished wood, gleaming mahogany,
as perfect
as a violin newly
born of the treetops,
that falling
offers its sealed-in gifts,
the hidden sweetness
that grew in secret
amid birds and leaves,
a model of form,
kin to wood and flour,
an oval instrument
that holds within it
intact delight, an edible rose.
In the heights you abandoned
the sea-urchin burr
that parted its spines
in the light of the chestnut tree;
through that...Read more of this...
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