Famous Isis Poems by Famous Poets

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

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This Beautiful Black Marriage

by Diane Wakoski
 Photograph negative
her black arm: a diving porpoise,
sprawled across the ice-banked pillow.
Head: a sheet of falling water.
Her legs: icicle branches breaking into light.

This woman, 
photographed sleeping.
The man,
making the photograph in the acid pan of his brain.
Sleep stain them both,
as if cloudy semen
rubbed shiningly over the surface
will be used to develop their images.

 on the desert
 the porpoises curl up,
 their...Read more of this...

Sonnet XXXII: Our Floods-Queen Thames

by Michael Drayton
 Our flood's-queen Thames for ships and swans is crown'd, 
And stately Severn for her shore is prais'd, 
The crystal Trent for fords and fish renown'd, 
And Avon's fame to Albion's cliffs is rais'd; 
Carlegion Chester vaunts her holy Dee, 
York many wonders of her Ouse can tell, 
The Peak her Dove, whose banks so fertile be, 
And Kent will...Read more of this...

Transit of the Gods

by Kathleen Raine
 Strange that the self’s continuum should outlast 
The Virgin, Aphrodite, and the Mourning Mother, 
All loves and griefs, successive deities 
That hold their kingdom in the human breast. 
Abandoned by the gods, woman with an ageing body 
That half remembers the Annunciation 
The passion and the travail and the grief 
That wore the mask of my humanity, 
I marvel...Read more of this...

Hymn on the Morning of Christs Nativity

by John Milton
 IT was the Winter wilde, 
While the Heav'n-born-childe, 
 All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies; 
Nature in aw to him 
Had doff't her gawdy trim, 
 With her great Master so to sympathize: 
It was no season then for her 
To wanton with the Sun her lusty Paramour. 

Only with speeches fair 
She woo's the gentle Air...Read more of this...

The Litany Of Nations

by Algernon Charles Swinburne
 CHORUS

If with voice of words or prayers thy sons may reach thee,
We thy latter sons, the men thine after-birth,
We the children of thy grey-grown age, O Earth,
O our mother everlasting, we beseech thee,
By the sealed and secret ages of thy life;
By the darkness wherein grew thy sacred forces;
By the songs of stars thy sisters in their courses;
By thine own...Read more of this...

The Veiled Statue At Sais

by Friedrich von Schiller
 A youth, impelled by a burning thirst for knowledge
To roam to Sais, in fair Egypt's land,
The priesthood's secret learning to explore,
Had passed through many a grade with eager haste,
And still was hurrying on with fond impatience.
Scarce could the Hierophant impose a rein
Upon his headlong efforts. "What avails
A part without the whole?" the youth exclaimed;
"Can there be here a lesser...Read more of this...

The house where I was born (05)

by Yves Bonnefoy
 In the same dream
I am lying in the hollow of a boat,
My forehead and eyes against the curved planks
Where I can hear the undercurrents
Striking the bottom of the boat.
All at once, the prow rises up,
And I think that we’ve come to the estuary,
But I keep my eyes against the wood
That smells of tar and glue.
Too vast, too luminous the...Read more of this...

a reader's de profundis

by Rg Gregory
 in my reading of the moment i have learned
the figure next to christ in da vinci’s last supper
(a painting i have actually seen in a milan church
fragilely restored) is a woman – an honour earned
by mary magdalene who (according to research)
turns out to be christ’s wife – hang on what a whopper

cry those who can’t contemplate centuries of teaching
down...Read more of this...

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