Famous Kept Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Kept poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous kept poems. These examples illustrate what a famous kept poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Linda Pastan
I remember what my father told me:
There is an age when you are most yourself.
He was just past fifty then,
Was it something about the trees that make him speak?
There is an age when you are most yourself.
I know more than I did once.
Was it something about the trees that make him speak?
Only a single leaf had turned so far.
I...Read more of this...
by
Donald Justice
A delicate young ***** stands
With the reins of a horse clutched loosely in his hands;
So delicate, indeed, that we wonder if he can hold the spirited creature
beside him
Until the master shall arrive to ride him.
Already the animal's nostrils widen with rage or fear.
But if we imagine him snorting, about to rear,
This boy, who should know about such things better...Read more of this...
by
Amy Lowell
There once was a man whom the gods didn't love,
And a disagreeable man was he.
He loathed his neighbours, and his neighbours hated him,
And he cursed eternally.
He damned the sun, and he damned the stars,
And he blasted the winds in the sky.
He sent to Hell every green, growing thing,
And he raved at the birds as they fly.
His oaths were many,...Read more of this...
by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
WITHIN a town where parity
According to old form we see,--
That is to say, where Catholic
And Protestant no quarrels pick,
And where, as in his father's day,
Each worships God in his own way,
We Luth'ran children used to dwell,
By songs and sermons taught as well.
The Catholic clingclang in truth
Sounded more pleasing to our youth,
For all that we encounter'd there,
To us seem'd varied,...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
Alone in Sutton with Fynbos my orange cat
A long weekend of wind and rain drowning
The tumultuous flurry of mid-February blossom
A surfeit of letters to work through, a mountain
Of files to sort, some irritation at the thought
Of travelling to Kentish Town alone when
My mind was flooded with the mellifluous voice
Of Heath-Stubbs on tape reading ‘The Divided Ways’
In memory of Sidney...Read more of this...
by
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
We will be what we could be. Do not say,
"It might have been, had not this, or that, or this."
No fate can keep us from the chosen way;
He only might who is.
We will do what we could do. Do not dream
Chance leaves a hero, all uncrowned to grieve.
I hold, all men are greatly what they seem;
He does, who could...Read more of this...
by
Sir Walter Raleigh
Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay,
Within that temple where the vestal flame
Was wont to burn; and, passing by that way,
To see that buried dust of living fame,
Whose tomb fair Love, and fairer Virtue kept:
All suddenly I saw the Fairy Queen;
At whose approach the...Read more of this...
by
W S Merwin
The cold slope is standing in darkness
But the south of the trees is dry to the touch
The heavy limbs climb into the moonlight bearing feathers
I came to watch these
White plants older at night
The oldest
Come first to the ruins
And I hear magpies kept awake by the moon
The water flows through its
Own fingers without end
Tonight once more
I find a single prayer...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
Father, this year's jinx rides us apart
where you followed our mother to her cold slumber;
a second shock boiling its stone to your heart,
leaving me here to shuffle and disencumber
you from the residence you could not afford:
a gold key, your half of a woolen mill,
twenty suits from Dunne's, an English Ford,
the love and legal verbiage of another will,...Read more of this...
by
Sylvia Plath
Old man, you surface seldom.
Then you come in with the tide's coming
When seas wash cold, foam-
Capped: white hair, white beard, far-flung,
A dragnet, rising, falling, as waves
Crest and trough. Miles long
Extend the radial sheaves
Of your spread hair, in which wrinkling skeins
Knotted, caught, survives
The old myth of orgins
Unimaginable. You float near
As kneeled ice-mountains
Of the north, to be steered clear
Of, not fathomed....Read more of this...
by
William Butler Yeats
Poets with whom I learned my trade.
Companions of the Cheshire Cheese,
Here's an old story I've remade,
Imagining 'twould better please
Your cars than stories now in fashion,
Though you may think I waste my breath
Pretending that there can be passion
That has more life in it than death,
And though at bottling of your wine
Old wholesome Goban had no say;
The moral's yours because it's...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
The Sun kept setting -- setting -- still
No Hue of Afternoon --
Upon the Village I perceived
From House to House 'twas Noon --
The Dusk kept dropping -- dropping -- still
No Dew upon the Grass --
But only on my Forehead stopped --
And wandered in my Face --
My Feet kept drowsing -- drowsing -- still
My fingers were awake --
Yet why so little...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
VIGIL strange I kept on the field one night:
When you, my son and my comrade, dropt at my side that day,
One look I but gave, which your dear eyes return’d, with a look I shall never forget;
One touch of your hand to mine, O boy, reach’d up as you lay on the ground;
Then onward I sped...Read more of this...
by
Anthony Hecht
Third Avenue in sunlight. Nature's error.
Already the bars are filled and John is there.
Beneath a plentiful lady over the mirror
He tilts his glass in the mild mahogany air.
I think of him when he first got out of college,
Serious, thin, unlikely to succeed;
For several months he hung around the Village,
Boldly T-shirtet, unfettered but unfreed.
Now he confides to a stranger, "I...Read more of this...
by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
[Goethe describes this much-admired Poem, which
he wrote in honour of his love Lily, as being "designed to change
his surrender of her into despair, by drolly-fretful images."]
THERE'S no menagerie, I vow,
Excels my Lily's at this minute;
She keeps the strangest creatures in it,
And catches them, she knows not how.
Oh, how they hop, and run, and rave,
And their clipp'd pinions...Read more of this...
by
Ogden Nash
It is common knowledge to every schoolboy and even every Bachelor of Arts,
That all sin is divided into two parts.
One kind of sin is called a sin of commission, and that is very important,
And it is what you are doing when you are doing something you ortant,
And the other kind of sin is just the opposite and is called...Read more of this...
by
William Barnes
In the zunsheen of our zummers
Wi’ the hay time now a-come,
How busy wer we out a-vield
Wi’ vew a-left at hwome,
When waggons rumbled out ov yard
Red wheeled, wi’ body blue,
And back behind ‘em loudly slamm’d
The geate a’vallen to.
Drough daysheen ov how many years
The geate ha’ now a-swung
Behind the veet o’ vull-grown men
And vootsteps of the young.
Drough years o’ days it...Read more of this...
by
Henry Van Dyke
Children of the elemental mother,
Born upon some lonely island shore
Where the wrinkled ripples run and whisper,
Where the crested billows plunge and roar;
Long-winged, tireless roamers and adventurers,
Fearless breasters of the wind and sea,
In the far-off solitary places
I have seen you floating wild and free!
Here the high-built cities rise around you;
Here the cliffs that tower east and...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
INTO the gulf and the pit of the dark night, the cold night, there is a man goes into the dark and the cold and when he comes back to his people he brings fire in his hands and they remember him in the years afterward as the fire bringer—they remember or forget—the man whose head kept singing to...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
'Ave you seen Bill's mug in the Noos to-day?
'E's gyned the Victoriar Cross, they say;
Little Bill wot would grizzle and run away,
If you 'it 'im a swipe on the jawr.
'E's slaughtered the Kaiser's men in tons;
'E's captured one of their quick-fire guns,
And 'e 'adn't no practice in killin' 'Uns
Afore 'e went off to the war.
Little Bill wot...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
The Sun kept stooping -- stooping -- low!
The Hills to meet him rose!
On his side, what Transaction!
On their side, what Repose!
Deeper and deeper grew the stain
Upon the window pane --
Thicker and thicker stood the feet
Until the Tyrian
Was crowded dense with Armies --
So gay, so Brigadier --
That I felt martial stirrings
Who once the Cockade wore --
Charged from my chimney corner...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
Because there was no other place
to flee to,
I came back to the scene of the disordered senses,
came back last night at midnight,
arriving in the thick June night
without luggage or defenses,
giving up my car keys and my cash,
keeping only a pack of Salem cigarettes
the way a child holds on to a toy.
I signed myself in where a stranger
puts the inked-in...Read more of this...
by
William Topaz McGonagall
'Twas in the year of 1869, and on the 19th of November,
Which the people in Southern Germany will long remember,
The great rain-storm which for twenty hours did pour down,
That the rivers were overflowed and petty streams all around.
The rain fell in such torrents as had never been seen before,
That it seemed like a second deluge, the mighty torrents'...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
I'm dead.
Officially I'm dead. Their hope is past.
How long I stood as missing! Now, at last
I'm dead.
Look in my face -- no likeness can you see,
No tiny trace of him they knew as "me".
How terrible the change!
Even my eyes are strange.
So keyed are they to pain,
That if I chanced to meet
My mother in the street
She'd look at me...Read more of this...
by
Edna St. Vincent Millay
This door you might not open, and you did;
So enter now, and see for what slight thing
You are betrayed.... Here is no treasure hid
No cauldron, no clear crystal mirroring
The sought-for truth, no heads of women slain
For greed like yours, no writhings of distress
But only what you see.... Look yet again—
An empty room, cobwebbed and comfortless
Yet...Read more of this...
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