Famous Legs Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Legs poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous legs poems. These examples illustrate what a famous legs poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...ever, "Cat! ... Cat! ... Cat!..."
Morphia drowsed, again I lay
In a crater by High Wood:
He was there with straddling legs,
Staring eyes as big as eggs,
Purring as he lapped my blood,
His black bulk darkening the day,
With a voice cruel and flat,
"Cat! ... Cat! ... Cat! ... Cat!..." he said, "Cat! ... Cat!..."
When I'm shot through heart and head,
And there's no choice but to die,
The last word I'll hear, no doubt,
Won't be "Charge!" or "Bomb them out!"
Nor the stretcher-b...Read more of this...
by
Graves, Robert
...by north. The grasshopper weathervane
bares to the moon his golden breastplate, swings
in his predicted circle, gilded legs and wings
bright with frost, predicting frost. The tide
scales with moon-silver, floods the marsh, fulfils
Payne Creek and Quivett Creek, rises to lift
the fishing-boats against a jetty wall;
and past them floods the plankton and the weed
and limp sea-lettuce for the horseshoe crab
who sleeps till daybreak in his nest of reed.
The hour is open as the mi...Read more of this...
by
Aiken, Conrad
...r ran back
Full of brownish foam bubbles.
There was nothing else to see --
It was all so dull --
Except a few grey legs under shiny black umbrellas
Running along the grey shiny pavements;
Sometimes there was a waggon
Whose horses made a strange loud hollow sound
With their hoofs
Through the silent rain.
And there was a grey museum
Full of dead birds and dead insects and dead animals
And a few relics of the Romans -- dead also.
There was a sea-front,
A long asp...Read more of this...
by
Aldington, Richard
...icy than these arms; the staves
Of hideous biers have not their joints more strong
Than are the joinings of these legs; the long
Scaled gauntlet fingers look like worms that shine,
And battle robes to shroud-like folds incline.
The heads are skull-like, and the stony feet
Seem for the charnel house but only meet.
The pikes have death's-heads carved, and seem to be
Too heavy; but the shapes defiantly
Sit proudly in the saddle—and perforce
The ride...Read more of this...
by
Hugo, Victor
...wretched folly,
And freedom was his need; his throat was choking.
Barbed brambles gripped and clawed him round his legs,
And he floundered over snags and hidden stumps.
Mumbling: ¡®I will get out! I must get out!¡¯ 30
Butting and thrusting up the baffling gloom,
Pausing to listen in a space ¡¯twixt thorns,
He peers around with peering, frantic eyes.
An evil creature in the twilight looping,
Flapped blindly in his face. Beating it off, 35
He screeched in...Read more of this...
by
Sassoon, Siegfried
...the era of colonization,
And before that of exploration even.
John Smith remarked them as be coasted by,
Dangling their legs and fishing off a wharf
At the Isles of Shoals, and satisfied himself
They weren't Red Indians but veritable
Pre-primitives of the white race, dawn people,
Like those who furnished Adam's sons with wives;
However uninnocent they may have been
In being there so early in our history.
They'd been there then a hundred years or more.
Pity he didn't ask what ...Read more of this...
by
Frost, Robert
...I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
M...Read more of this...
by
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...leisure, wondering at himself now more,
His visage drawn he felt to sharp and spare;
His arms clung to his ribs; his legs entwining
Each other, till supplanted down he fell
A monstrous serpent on his belly prone,
Reluctant, but in vain; a greater power
Now ruled him, punished in the shape he sinned,
According to his doom: he would have spoke,
But hiss for hiss returned with forked tongue
To forked tongue; for now were all transformed
Alike, to serpents all, as acce...Read more of this...
by
Milton, John
...hore,
Some of the fishermen lounge in their boats—others stand negligently ankle-deep in the
water,
pois’d on strong legs;
The boats are partly drawn up—the water slaps against them;
On the sand, in heaps and winrows, well out from the water, lie the green-back’d spotted
mossbonkers.
9
I see the despondent red man in the west, lingering about the banks of Moingo, and about
Lake
Pepin;
He has heard the quail and beheld the honey-bee, and sadly prepared to depart.
I...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...ve that flags in the race, leans by the fence, blowing,
cover’d with sweat;
The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck—the murderous
buckshot and the bullets;
All these I feel, or am.
I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs,
Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen;
I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinn’d with the ooze of my
skin;
I fall on the weeds and stones;
The riders spur their unwill...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...ng only, then as now, but served the dead.
8
I see the European headsman;
He stands mask’d, clothed in red, with huge legs, and strong naked arms,
And leans on a ponderous axe.
(Whom have you slaughter’d lately, European headsman?
Whose is that blood upon you, so wet and sticky?)
I see the clear sunsets of the martyrs;
I see from the scaffolds the descending ghosts,
Ghosts of dead lords, uncrown’d ladies, impeach’d ministers, rejected kings,
Rivals, traitors, poison...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...guns. Their dress is picturesque; and I have seen the Capitan Pacha more than once wearing it as a kind of incog. Their legs, however, are generally naked. The buskins described in the text as sheathed behind with silver are those of an Arnaut robber, who was my host (he had quitted the profession) at his Pyrgo, near Gastouni in the Morea; they were plated in scales one over the other, like the back of an armadillo.
(29) The characters on all Turkish scimitars contain somet...Read more of this...
by
Byron, George (Lord)
...nd he is sick, His dwindled body's half awry, His ancles they are swoln and thick; His legs are thin and dry. When he was young he little knew 'Of husbandry or tillage; And now he's forced to work, though weak, —The weakest in the village. He all the country could outrun, Could leave both man and horse behind; And often, ere the race was done, He re...Read more of this...
by
Wordsworth, William
...cold spring water down my neck;
Jim with a lancet quick as flies
Lowered the swelling round my eyes.
They sluiced my legs and fanned my face
Through all that blessed minute's grace;
They gave my calves a thorough kneading,
They salved my cuts and stopped the bleeding.
A gulp of liquor dulled the pain,
And then the flasks clinked again.
Time!
There was Bill as grim as death,
He rushed, I clinched, to get more breath,
And breath I got, though Billy bats
Some sting...Read more of this...
by
Masefield, John
...uls of them fumed-forth, the hearts of them torn-out:
And chief in the chase his neck he perilled
On a lathy horse, all legs and length,
With blood for bone, all speed, no strength;
---They should have set him on red Berold
With the red eye slow consuming in fire,
And the thin stiff ear like an abbey-spire!
VI.
Well, such as he was, he must marry, we heard:
And out of a convent, at the word,
Came the lady, in time of spring.
---Oh, old thoughts they cling, they cling!
That ...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Robert
...t.
5.75 My hands and arms, once strong, have lost their might.
5.76 I cannot labour, nor I cannot fight:
5.77 My comely legs, as nimble as the Roe,
5.78 Now stiff and numb, can hardly creep or go.
5.79 My heart sometimes as fierce, as Lion bold,
5.80 Now trembling, and fearful, sad, and cold.
5.81 My golden Bowl and silver Cord, e're long,
5.82 Shall both be broke, by wracking death so strong.
5.83 I then shall go whence I shall come no more.
5.84 Sons, Nephews, leave, my dea...Read more of this...
by
Bradstreet, Anne
...hich her idiot boy must ride, And seems no longer in a hurry. But when the pony moved his legs, Oh! then for the poor idiot boy! For joy he cannot hold the bridle, For joy his head and heels are idle, He's idle all for very joy. And while the pony moves his legs, In Johnny's left hand you may see, The green bough's motionless and dead: The moon that sh...Read more of this...
by
Wordsworth, William
...s frock and hood.
His grizzled beard and matted hair
Obscured a visage of despair;
His naked arms and legs, seamed o'er,
The scars of frantic penance bore.
That monk, of savage form and face
The impending danger of his race
Had drawn from deepest solitude
Far in Benharrow's bosom rude.
Not his the mien of Christian priest,
But Druid's, from the grave released
Whose hardened heart and eye might brook
On hu...Read more of this...
by
Scott, Sir Walter
...ity
As if I had lost an eye, a leg, a tongue.
And so I stand, a little sightless. So I walk
Away on wheels, instead of legs, they serve as well.
And learn to speak with fingers, not a tongue.
The body is resourceful.
The body of a starfish can grow back its arms
And newts are prodigal in legs. And may I be
As prodigal in what lacks me.
THIRD VOICE:
She is a small island, asleep and peaceful,
And I am a white ship hooting: Goodbye, goodbye.
The day is blazing. It is very mou...Read more of this...
by
Plath, Sylvia
...see,
And bloodied are the branches dark
Of slowly blooming quicken-tree.
Blindingly elegant is she,
Crossing her legs that don't feel cold
Upon the northern stone sits she
And calmly looks upon the road.
I felt the gloomy, dusky fear
Before this woman of delight
As on her shoulders played alone
The rays of miserable light.
And how could I forgive her yet
Your shining praise by love deluded
Look, she is happily in sorrow,
And in such elegance denuded.
...Read more of this...
by
Akhmatova, Anna
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