Famous Lidless Poems by Famous Poets

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

See also:

A Game Of Chess

by T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
  The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
  Glowed on the marble, where the glass
  Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
  From which a golden Cupidon peeped out                        ...Read more of this...

Outsong in the Jungle

by Rudyard Kipling
 For the sake of him who showed
One wise Frog the Jungle-Road,
Keep the Law the Man-Pack make
For thy blind old Baloo's sake!
Clean or tainted, hot or stale,
Hold it as it were the Trail,
Through the day and through the night,
Questing neither left nor right.
For the sake of him who loves
Thee beyond all else that moves,
When thy Pack would make thee pain,
Say:...Read more of this...

Ode for the Keats Centenary

by Duncan Campbell Scott
 The Muse is stern unto her favoured sons,
Giving to some the keys of all the joy
Of the green earth, but holding even that joy
Back from their life;
Bidding them feed on hope,
A plant of bitter growth,
Deep-rooted in the past;
Truth, 'tis a doubtful art
To make Hope sweeten
Time as it flows;
For no man knows
Until the very last,
Whether it be a sovereign herb...Read more of this...

The Andante of Snakes

by Arthur Symons
 They weave a slow andante as in sleep, 
Scaled yellow, swampy black, plague-spotted white; 
With blue and lidless eyes at watch they keep 
A treachery of silence; infinite 

Ancestral angers brood in these dull eyes 
Where the long-lineaged venom of the snake 
Meditates evil; woven intricacies 
Of Oriental arabesque awake, 

Unfold, expand, contract, and raise and sway 
Swoln heart-shaped...Read more of this...

Cold-Blooded Creatures

by Elinor Wylie
 Man, the egregious egoist
(In mystery the twig is bent)
Imagines, by some mental twist,
That he alone is sentient

Of the intolerable load
That on all living creatures lies,
Nor stoops to pity in the toad
The speechless sorrow of his eyes.

He asks no questions of the snake,
Nor plumbs the phosphorescent gloom
Where lidless fishes, broad awake,
Swim staring at a nightmare doom....Read more of this...

Insomniac

by Sylvia Plath
 The night is only a sort of carbon paper,
Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars
Letting in the light, peephole after peephole --
A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.
Under the eyes of the stars and the moon's rictus
He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness
Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions.

Over and over the old, granular movie
Exposes embarrassments--the mizzling days
Of...Read more of this...

The Vagaries of Fishes

by Judith Skillman
 After they passed beneath us I could tell
more would be coming, beneath the sand,
under the bejeweled sky, under the first
layer of earth where water exists 
in flutes and eddies. I lay there with you,
not wanting to leave your side even
for them, the miraculous creatures of sex
and sediment, the ones who obey currents 
and ladders, blindly seeking out their own
individual...Read more of this...

The Mantra-Yoga

by Aleister Crowley
 I

How should I seek to make a song for thee
When all my music is to moan thy name?
That long sad monotone - the same - the same -
Matching the mute insatiable sea
That throbs with life's bewitching agony,
Too long to measure and too fierce to tame!
An hurtful joy, a fascinating shame
Is this great ache that grips the heart of me.

Even...Read more of this...

Upon A House Shaken By The Land Agitation

by William Butler Yeats
 How should the world be luckier if this house,
Where passion and precision have been one
Time out of mind, became too ruinous
To breed the lidleSs eye that loves the sun?
And the sweet laughing eagle thoughts that grow
Where wings have memory of wings, and all
That comes of the best knit to the best? Although
Mean roof-trees were the sturdier for its fall.
How...Read more of this...

Dont forget to view our wonderful member Lidless poems.

Get a Premium Membership
Turn off ads, get more exposure for your poetry, and get more features with a Premium Membership.
Book: Diverse Voices: The Poetry of Human Rights and the Pursuit of Peace