Famous Loosen Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Ambulances

by Philip Larkin
Closed like confessionals, they thread
Loud noons of cities, giving back
None of the glances they absorb.
Light glossy grey, arms on a plaque,
They come to rest at any kerb:
All streets in time are visited.

Then children strewn on steps or road,
Or women coming from the shops
Past smells of different dinners, see
A wild white face that overtops
Red stretcher-blankets momently
As it is carried in and...Read more of this...

Jenny Carrister The Heroine of Lucknow-Mine

by William Topaz McGonagall
 A heroic story I will unfold,
Concerning Jenny Carrister, a heroine bold,
Who lived in Australia, at a gold mine called Lucknow,
And Jenny was beloved by the the miners, somehow. 

Jenny was the only daughter of the old lady who owned the mine-
And Jenny would come of an evening, like a gleam of sunshine,
And by the presence of her bright face...Read more of this...

Localities

by Carl Sandburg
 WAGON WHEEL GAP is a place I never saw
And Red Horse Gulch and the chutes of Cripple Creek.

Red-shirted miners picking in the sluices,
Gamblers with red neckties in the night streets,
The fly-by-night towns of Bull Frog and Skiddoo,
The night-cool limestone white of Death Valley,
The straight drop of eight hundred feet
From a shelf road in the Hasiampa Valley:
Men and places they...Read more of this...

Sand Scribblings

by Carl Sandburg
 THE WIND stops, the wind begins.
The wind says stop, begin.

A sea shovel scrapes the sand floor.
The shovel changes, the floor changes.

The sandpipers, maybe they know.
Maybe a three-pointed foot can tell.
Maybe the fog moon they fly to, guesses.

The sandpipers cheep “Here” and get away.
Five of them fly and keep together flying.

Night hair of some sea woman
Curls on the sand when...Read more of this...

Baltic Fog Notes

by Carl Sandburg
 (Bergen)SEVEN days all fog, all mist, and the turbines pounding through high seas.
I was a plaything, a rat’s neck in the teeth of a scuffling mastiff.
Fog and fog and no stars, sun, moon.
Then an afternoon in fjords, low-lying lands scrawled in granite languages on a gray sky,
A night harbor, blue dusk mountain shoulders against a night sky,
And a circle...Read more of this...

The Cellist

by Galway Kinnell
 At intermission I find her backstage
still practicing the piece coming up next.
She calls it the "solo in high dreary."
Her bow niggles at the string like a hand
stroking skin it never wanted to touch.
Probably under her scorn she is sick
that she can't do better by it. As I am,
at the dreary in me, such as the disparity
between all the tenderness...Read more of this...

The Old Woman of Berkeley

by Robert Southey
 The Raven croak'd as she sate at her meal, 
And the Old Woman knew what he said, 
And she grew pale at the Raven's tale, 
And sicken'd and went to her bed. 

'Now fetch me my children, and fetch them with speed,' 
The Old Woman of Berkeley said, 
'The Monk my son, and my daughter the Nun, 
Bid them...Read more of this...

Darest Thou Now O Soul

by Walt Whitman
 1
DAREST thou now, O Soul, 
Walk out with me toward the Unknown Region, 
Where neither ground is for the feet, nor any path to follow? 

2
No map, there, nor guide, 
Nor voice sounding, nor touch of human hand,
Nor face with blooming flesh, nor lips, nor eyes, are in that land. 

3
I know it not, O Soul; 
Nor dost thou—all...Read more of this...

An Image From A Past Life

by William Butler Yeats
 He. Never until this night have I been stirred.
The elaborate starlight throws a reflection
On the dark stream,
Till all the eddies gleam;
And thereupon there comes that scream
From terrified, invisible beast or bird:
Image of poignant recollection.

She. An image of my heart that is smitten through
Out of all likelihood, or reason,
And when at last,
Youth's bitterness being past,
I had thought that all my...Read more of this...

Laws XIII

by Kahlil Gibran
 Then a lawyer said, "But what of our Laws, master?" 

And he answered: 

You delight in laying down laws, 

Yet you delight more in breaking them. 

Like children playing by the ocean who build sand-towers with constancy and then destroy them with laughter. 

But while you build your sand-towers the ocean brings more sand to the shore, 

And when...Read more of this...

No, my heart has never tired of you

by Emile Verhaeren
No, my heart has never tired of you.
In the time of June, long ago, you said to me: "If I knew, friend, if I knew that my presence one day might be a burden to you— with my poor heart and sorrowful thoughts, I would go away, no matter where."
And gently your forehead rose towards my kiss.
And you said to...Read more of this...

Dream Song 12: Sabbath

by John Berryman
 There is an eye, there was a slit.
Nights walk, and confer on him fear.
The strangler tree, the dancing mouse
confound his vision; then they loosen it.
Henry widens. How did Henry House
himself ever come here?

Nights run. Tes yeux bizarres me suivent
when loth at landfall soft I leave.
The soldiers, Coleridge Rilke Poe,
shout commands I never heard.
They march about, dying & absurd.
Toddlers are...Read more of this...

prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by incapacity (blake proverb)

by Rg Gregory
 prudence my love
each time you invite me to tea
i wonder do i have the appetite
for what i
hope you are requiring of me

prudence my love
are you really trying to say
over the sickly cream cakes
i can’t eat
that you desire me to stay

prudence my love
what can i read in the signs
your eyes and hands throw out
as we talk
i’m lost in your guide-lines

prudence...Read more of this...

Hymn to Proserpine (After the Proclamation of the Christian

by Algernon Charles Swinburne
 Vicisti, Galilæe
I have lived long enough, having seen one thing, that love hath an end;
Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend.
Thou art more than the day or the morrow, the seasons that laugh or that weep;
For these give joy and sorrow; but thou, Proserpina, sleep.
Sweet is the treading of wine, and sweet the feet of...Read more of this...

Interior

by Carl Sandburg
 IN the cool of the night time
The clocks pick off the points
And the mainsprings loosen.
They will need winding.
One of these days…
 they will need winding.

Rabelais in red boards,
Walt Whitman in green,
Hugo in ten-cent paper covers,
Here they stand on shelves
In the cool of the night time
And there is nothing…
To be said against them…
Or for them…
In the cool of the night...Read more of this...

A Farewell to Secretary Shu-yun at the Hsieh Tiao Villa in Hsuan-Chou

by Li Bai
Since yesterday had throw me and bolt,
Today has hurt my heart even more.
The autumn wildgeese have a long wing for escort
As I face them from this villa, drinking my wine.
The bones of great writers are your brushes, in the school of heaven,
And I am Lesser Hsieh growing up by your side.
We both are exalted to distant thought,
Aspiring to the sky...Read more of this...

Song of the Devoted Slave

by Adela Florence Cory Nicolson
   On the wooden deck of the wooden Junk, silent, alone, we lie,
   With silver foam about the bow, and a silver moon in the sky:
   A glimmer of dimmer silver here, from the anklets round your feet,
   Our lips may close on each other's lips, but never our souls may meet.

...Read more of this...

Three Pieces on the Smoke of Autumn

by Carl Sandburg
 SMOKE of autumn is on it all.
The streamers loosen and travel.
The red west is stopped with a gray haze.
They fill the ash trees, they wrap the oaks,
They make a long-tailed rider
In the pocket of the first, the earliest evening star.. . .
Three muskrats swim west on the Desplaines River.

There is a sheet of red ember glow on the river;...Read more of this...

He Thinks Of Those Who Have Spoken Evil Of His Beloved

by William Butler Yeats
 Half close your eyelids, loosen your hair,
And dream about the great and their pride;
They have spoken against you everywhere,
But weigh this song with the great and their pride;
I made it out of a mouthful of air,
Their children's children shall say they have lied....Read more of this...

Prayers of Steel

by Carl Sandburg
 LAY me on an anvil, O God.
Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar.
Let me pry loose old walls.
Let me lift and loosen old foundations.

Lay me on an anvil, O God.
Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike.
Drive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper together.
Take red-hot rivets and fasten me into the central girders.
Let me be...Read more of this...

The Two Kings

by William Butler Yeats
 King Eochaid came at sundown to a wood
Westward of Tara. Hurrying to his queen
He had outridden his war-wasted men
That with empounded cattle trod the mire,
And where beech-trees had mixed a pale green light
With the ground-ivy's blue, he saw a stag
Whiter than curds, its eyes the tint of the sea.
Because it stood upon his path and seemed
More hands in height...Read more of this...

Before A Crucifix

by Algernon Charles Swinburne
 Here, down between the dusty trees,
At this lank edge of haggard wood,
Women with labour-loosened knees,
With gaunt backs bowed by servitude,
Stop, shift their loads, and pray, and fare
Forth with souls easier for the prayer.

The suns have branded black, the rains
Striped grey this piteous God of theirs;
The face is full of prayers and pains,
To which they bring their pains and prayers;
Lean...Read more of this...

To Beethoven

by Sidney Lanier
 In o'er-strict calyx lingering,
Lay music's bud too long unblown,
Till thou, Beethoven, breathed the spring:
Then bloomed the perfect rose of tone.

O Psalmist of the weak, the strong,
O Troubadour of love and strife,
Co-Litanist of right and wrong,
Sole Hymner of the whole of life,

I know not how, I care not why, --
Thy music sets my world at ease,
And melts my passion's mortal...Read more of this...

How Could You Not

by Galway Kinnell
 -- for Jane kenyon


It is a day after many days of storms.
Having been washed and washed, the air glitters;
small heaped cumuli blow across the sky; a shower
visible against the firs douses the crocuses.
We knew it would happen one day this week.
Now, when I learn you have died, I go
to the open door and look across at New Hampshire
and see...Read more of this...

Yes the Dead Speak to Us

by Carl Sandburg
 YES, the Dead speak to us.
This town belongs to the Dead, to the Dead and to the Wilderness.

Back of the clamps on a fireproof door they hold the papers of the Dead in a house here
And when two living men fall out, when one says the Dead spoke a Yes, and the other says the Dead spoke a No,...Read more of this...

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