Famous Lyrics Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Lyrics poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous lyrics poems. These examples illustrate what a famous lyrics poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Vachel Lindsay
I asked the old *****, "What is that bird that sings so well?" He answered: "That is the Rachel-Jane." "Hasn't it another name, lark, or thrush, or the like?" "No. Jus' Rachel-Jane."
I. IN WHICH A RACING AUTO COMES FROM THE EAST
This is the order of the music of the morning: —
First, from the far East comes but a crooning.
The...Read more of this...
by
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Reason says, “I will beguile him with the tongue;”
Love says, “Be silent. I will beguile him with the soul.”
The soul says to the heart, “Go, do not laugh at me and yourself. What is there that is not his, that I may beguile him thereby?”
A Summer Day
by
Lucy Maud Montgomery
I
The dawn laughs out on orient hills
And dances with the diamond rills;
The ambrosial wind but faintly stirs
The silken, beaded gossamers;
In the wide valleys, lone and fair,
Lyrics are piped from limpid air,
And, far above, the pine trees free
Voice ancient lore of sky and sea.
Come, let us fill our hearts straightway
With...Read more of this...
by
Delmore Schwartz
I Aria
"--Kiss me there where pride is glittering
Kiss me where I am ripened and round fruit
Kiss me wherever, however, I am supple, bare and flare
(Let the bell be rung as long as I am young:
let ring and fly like a great bronze wing!)
"--I'll kiss you wherever you think you are poor,
Wherever you shudder, feeling striped or barred,...Read more of this...
by
Robert Herrick
Thou shalt not all die; for while Love's fire shines
Upon his altar, men shall read thy lines;
And learn'd musicians shall, to honour Herrick's
Fame, and his name, both set and sing his lyrics.
To his book's end this last line he'd have placed:--
Jocund his Muse was, but his Life was chaste....Read more of this...
by
Ogden Nash
Some singers sing of ladies' eyes,
And some of ladies lips,
Refined ones praise their ladylike ways,
And course ones hymn their hips.
The Oxford Book of English Verse
Is lush with lyrics tender;
A poet, I guess, is more or less
Preoccupied with gender.
Yet I, though custom call me crude,
Prefer to sing in praise of food.
Food,
Yes, food,
Just any old kind of food.
Pheasant is pleasant, of...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
Oh, I was born a lyric babe
(That last word is a bore -
It's only rhyme is astrolabe,"
Whose meaning I ignore.)
From cradlehood I lisped in numbers,
Made jingles even in my slumbers.
Said Ma: "He'll be a bard, I know it."
Said Pa: "let's hoe he will outgrow it."
Alas! I never did and so
A dreamer and a drone was I,
Who persevered in want...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
Barbarous insult to Yeats’ memory and Claudel’s
Allen, thank God you are dead, you who breathed the air of Apollinaire,
Ghost of Reverdy bear witness to the mendacity of his clamour,
Hart Crane, rise from the estuary of the great river you drowned in,
John Clare, rise from your country churchyard grave,
Gray, from your carv?d tomb and Wilde, cast off your winged shield
In...Read more of this...
by
Bliss Carman
In Memory of John Keats
By the Aurelian Wall,
Where the long shadows of the centuries fall
From Caius Cestius' tomb,
A weary mortal seeking rest found room
For quiet burial,
Leaving among his friends
A book of lyrics.
Such untold amends
A traveller might make
In a strange country, bidden to partake
Before he farther wends;
Who slyly should bestow
The foreign reed-flute they had seen him blow
And finger cunningly,
On one...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
(or ‘Huddersfield the Second Poetry Capital of England Re-visited’)
What was it Janice Simmons said to me as James lay dying in Ireland?
“Phone Peter Pegnall in Leeds, an ex-pupil of Jimmy’s. He’s organising
A benefit reading, he’d love to hear from you and have your help.”
‘Like hell he would’ I thought but I phoned him all the same
At his converted farmhouse...Read more of this...
by
Vladimir Mayakovsky
My most respected
comrades of posterity!
Rummaging among
these days’
petrified crap,
exploring the twilight of our times,
you,
possibly,
will inquire about me too.
And, possibly, your scholars
will declare,
with their erudition overwhelming
a swarm of problems;
once there lived
a certain champion of boiled water,
and inveterate enemy of raw water.
Professor,
take off your bicycle glasses!
I myself will expound
those times
and...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
Give me life at its most garish
Friday night in the Square, pink sequins dazzle
And dance on clubbers bare to the midriff
Young men in crisp shirts and pressed pants
‘Dress code smart’ gyrate to ‘Sex Bomb, Sex Bomb’
And sing along its lyrics to the throng of which I’m one
My shorts, shoulder bag and white beard
Making me stand out in the teeming...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
Zut! it's two o'clock.
See! the lights are jumping.
Finish up your bock,
Time we all were humping.
Waiters stack the chairs,
Pile them on the tables;
Let us to our lairs
Underneath the gables.
Up the old Boul' Mich'
Climb with steps erratic.
Steady . . . how I wish
I was in my attic!
Full am I with cheer;
In my heart the joy stirs;
Couldn't be the beer,
Must have been...Read more of this...
by
Delmore Schwartz
I
If nature is life, nature is death:
It is winter as it is spring:
Confusion is variety, variety
And confusion in everything
Make experience the true conclusion
Of all desire and opulence,
All satisfaction and poverty.
II
When a hundred years had passed nature seemed to man
a clock
Another century sank away and nature seemed a jungle
in a rock
And now that nature has become a ticking...Read more of this...
by
Khosrovidukht
More astonishing to me
than the lyrics made for you
more amazing than the music composed
for your death
is the sound of the sobbing mourning
you, Lord Vahan, chosen of God
...Read more of this...
by
Jim Carroll
1/
Genius is not a generous thing
In return it charges more interest than any amount of royalties can cover
And it resents fame
With bitter vengeance
Pills and powdres only placate it awhile
Then it puts you in a place where the planet's poles reverse
Where the currents of electricity shift
Your Body becomes a magnet and pulls to it despair and rotten teeth,
Cheese...Read more of this...
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