Famous Intelligible Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Frost at Midnight

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry
Came loud---and hark, again! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings: save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
`Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
This...Read more of this...

Winter Journey Over The Hartz Mountains

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 [The following explanation is necessary, in order 
to make this ode in any way intelligible. The Poet is supposed to 
leave his companions, who are proceeding on a hunting expedition 
in winter, in order himself to pay a visit to a hypochondriacal 
friend, and also to see the mining in the Hartz mountains. The ode 
alternately describes, in a...Read more of this...

I Come Home Wanting To Touch Everyone

by Stephen Dunn
 The dogs greet me, I descend
into their world of fur and tongues
and then my wife and I embrace
as if we'd just closed the door
in a motel, our two girls slip in
between us and we're all saying
each other's names and the dogs
Buster and Sundown are on their hind legs,
people-style, seeking more love.
I've come home wanting to touch
everyone, everything; usually I...Read more of this...

A Crazed Girl

by William Butler Yeats
 That crazed girl improvising her music.
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,
Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling She knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.

No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the...Read more of this...

The Blue Swallows

by Howard Nemerov
 Across the millstream below the bridge 
Seven blue swallows divide the air 
In shapes invisible and evanescent, 
Kaleidoscopic beyond the mind’s 
Or memory’s power to keep them there. 

“History is where tensions were,” 
“Form is the diagram of forces.” 
Thus, helplessly, there on the bridge, 
While gazing down upon those birds— 
How strange, to be above the birds!— 
Thus...Read more of this...

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