Famous Melted Poems by Famous Poets

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

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O Beauty Passing Beauty!

by Alfred Lord Tennyson
 O beauty, passing beauty! Sweetest sweet!
How can thou let me waste my youth in sighs?
I only ask to sit beside thy feet.
Thou knowest I dare not look into thine eyes.
Might I but kiss thy hand! I dare not fold
My arms about thee--scarcely dare to speak.
And nothing seems to me so wild and bold,
As with one kiss to touch thy...Read more of this...

After Apple-Picking

by Robert Frost
 My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got...Read more of this...

Manhole Covers

by Karl Shapiro
 The beauty of manhole covers--what of that?
Like medals struck by a great savage khan,
Like Mayan calendar stones, unliftable, indecipherable,
Not like the old electrum, chased and scored,
Mottoed and sculptured to a turn,
But notched and whelked and pocked and smashed
With the great company names
(Gentle Bethlehem, smiling United States).
This rustproof artifact of my street,
Long after roads are melted away will lie
Sidewise in...Read more of this...

Memoir

by Carl Sandburg
 We look on the shoulders filling the stage of the Chicago Auditorium.

A fat mayor has spoken much English and the mud of his speech is crossed with quicksilver hisses elusive and rapid from floor and gallery.

A neat governor speaks English and the listeners ring chimes to his clear thoughts.

Joffre speaks a few words in French; this is a voice...Read more of this...

Death-lament Of The Noble Wife Of Asan Aga

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 [From the Morlack.)

WHAT is yonder white thing in the forest?
Is it snow, or can it swans perchance be?
Were it snow, ere this it had been melted,
Were it swans, they all away had hastend.
Snow, in truth, it is not, swans it is not,
'Tis the shining tents of Asan Aga.
He within is lying, sorely wounded;
To him come his mother and his...Read more of this...

Noah

by Siegfried Sassoon
WHEN old Noah stared across the floods 
Sky and water melted into one
Looking-glass of shifting tides and sun.

Mountain-tops were few: the ship was foul:
All the morn old Noah marvelled greatly 5
At this weltering world that shone so stately 
Drowning deep the rivers and the plains.
Through the stillness came a rippling breeze;
Noah sighed remembering the green trees.

Clear along the morning stooped...Read more of this...

Eveleens Bower

by Thomas Moore
 Oh! weep for the hour, 
When to Eveleen's bower, 
The Lord of the Valley with false vows came; 
The moon hid her light, 
From the heavens that night, 
And wept behind her clouds o'er the maiden's shame. 

The clouds pass'd soon 
From the chaste cold moon, 
And heaven smiled again with her vestal flame; 
But none will see the...Read more of this...

Historion

by Ezra Pound
 No man hath dared to write this thing as yet, 
And yet I know, how that the souls of all men great 
At times pass athrough us, 
And we are melted into them, and are not 
Save reflexions of their souls. 
Thus am I Dante for a space and am 
One Francois Villon, ballad-lord and thief, 
Or am such...Read more of this...

The Song of Los

by William Blake
 AFRICA 

I will sing you a song of Los. the Eternal Prophet: 
He sung it to four harps at the tables of Eternity. 
In heart-formed Africa. 
Urizen faded! Ariston shudderd! 
And thus the Song began 

Adam stood in the garden of Eden: 
And Noah on the mountains of Ararat; 
They saw Urizen give his Laws to the Nations 
By...Read more of this...

A Meeting With The Princess

by Barry Tebb
 Just a family get-together in a terrace house in Bradford

High tea with a few stuffy aunts I hadn’t seen for years

Their husbands in tow like lost dogs sniffing round for food

But she came all the same, ushered in politely as a friend

Of a friend or somebody’s cousin twice removed though

Everybody was a bit put out at first except me...Read more of this...

Now I am a Plant a Weed..

by Katherine Mansfield
 Now I am a plant, a weed,
Bending and swinging
On a rocky ledge;
And now I am a long brown grass
Fluttering like flame;
I am a reed;
An old shell singing
For ever the same;
A drift of sedge;
A white, white stone;
A bone;
Until I pass
Into sand again,
And spin and blow
To and fro, to and fro,
On the edge of the sea
In the fading light--
For the light...Read more of this...

Exmoor

by Amy Clampitt
 Lost aboard the roll of Kodac-
olor that was to have super-
seded all need to remember
Somerset were: a large flock

of winter-bedcover-thick-
pelted sheep up on the moor;
a stile, a church spire, 
and an excess, at Porlock,

of tenderly barbarous antique
thatch in tandem with flower-
beds, relentlessly pictur-
esque, along every sidewalk;

a millwheel; and a millbrook 
running down brown as beer.
Exempt from the disaster.
however, as...Read more of this...

The Call

by Robert William Service
 (France, August first, 1914)

 Far and near, high and clear,
 Hark to the call of War!
Over the gorse and the golden dells,
Ringing and swinging of clamorous bells,
Praying and saying of wild farewells:
 War! War! War!

 High and low, all must go:
 Hark to the shout of War!
Leave to the women the harvest yield;
Gird ye, men, for the sinister field;
A...Read more of this...

Remembrance

by Emily Brontë
 Cold in the earth—and the deep snow piled above thee,
Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave!
Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee,
Severed at last by Time's all-severing wave?

Now, when alone, do my thoughts no longer hover
Over the mountains, on that northern shore,
Resting their wings where heath and fern-leaves cover
That noble heart for ever, ever more?

Cold in...Read more of this...

An Orphans Lament

by Anne Bronte
 She's gone -- and twice the summer's sun
Has gilt Regina's towers,
And melted wild Angora's snows,
And warmed Exina's bowers. 
The flowerets twice on hill and dale
Have bloomed and died away,
And twice the rustling forest leaves
Have fallen to decay,

And thrice stern winter's icy hand
Has checked the river's flow,
And three times o'er the mountains thrown
His spotless robe of snow.

Two summers springs and...Read more of this...

Upon Julias Voice

by Robert Herrick
 When I thy singing next shall hear,
I'll wish I might turn all to ear,
To drink-in notes and numbers, such
As blessed souls can't hear too much
Then melted down, there let me lie
Entranced, and lost confusedly;
And by thy music strucken mute,
Die, and be turn'd into a Lute....Read more of this...

Whether or Not

by D. H. Lawrence
I

Dunna thee tell me its his'n, mother,
      Dunna thee, dunna thee.
--Oh ay! he'll be comin' to tell thee his-sèn
      Wench, wunna he?

Tha doesna mean to say to me, mother,
      He's gone wi that--
--My gel, owt'll do for a man i' the dark,
   ...Read more of this...

The Revenge - A Ballad of the Fleet

by Alfred Lord Tennyson
 At Flores in the Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay, 
And a pinnace, like a fluttered bird, came flying from far away: 
'Spanish ships of war at sea! we have sighted' 
Then sware Lord Thomas Howard: ''Fore God I am no coward; 
But I cannot meet them here, for my ships are out of gear, 
And the half my men...Read more of this...

For My Lover Returning To His Wife

by Anne Sexton
 She is all there. 
She was melted carefully down for you 
and cast up from your childhood, 
cast up from your one hundred favorite aggies. 
She has always been there, my darling. 
She is, in fact, exquisite. 
Fireworks in the dull middle of February 
and as real as a cast-iron pot. 
Let's face it, I have been momentary. 
vA...Read more of this...

The Light o the Moon

by Vachel Lindsay
 [How different people and different animals look upon the moon: showing that each creature finds in it his own mood and disposition]


The Old Horse in the City

The moon's a peck of corn. It lies 
Heaped up for me to eat. 
I wish that I might climb the path 
And taste that supper sweet. 

Men feed me straw and scanty...Read more of this...

The Present

by Philip Levine
 The day comes slowly in the railyard 
behind the ice factory. It broods on 
one cinder after another until each 
glows like lead or the eye of a dog 
possessed of no inner fire, the brown 
and greasy pointer who raises his muzzle 
a moment and sighing lets it thud 
down on the loading dock. In no time 
the...Read more of this...

The Secret of the Machines

by Rudyard Kipling
 We were taken from the ore-bed and the mine,
 We were melted in the furnace and the pit--
We were cast and wrought and hammered to design,
 We were cut and filed and tooled and gauged to fit.
Some water, coal, and oil is all we ask,
 And a thousandth of an inch to give us play:
And now, if you will...Read more of this...

The Last Parade

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 With never a sound of trumpet, 
With never a flag displayed, 
The last of the old campaigners 
Lined up for the last parade. 

Weary they were and battered, 
Shoeless, and knocked about; 
From under their ragged forelocks 
Their hungry eyes looked out. 

And they watched as the old commander 
Read out to the cheering men 
The Nation's thanks, and...Read more of this...

Sisters cake

by Eugene Field
 I'd not complain of Sister Jane, for she was good and kind,
Combining with rare comeliness distinctive gifts of mind;
Nay, I'll admit it were most fit that, worn by social cares,
She'd crave a change from parlor life to that below the stairs,
And that, eschewing needlework and music, she should take
Herself to the substantial art of manufacturing cake.

At breakfast, then, it...Read more of this...

Old Age Gets Up

by Ted Hughes
 Stirs its ashes and embers, its burnt sticks

An eye powdered over, half melted and solid again
Ponders
Ideas that collapse
At the first touch of attention

The light at the window, so square and so same
So full-strong as ever, the window frame
A scaffold in space, for eyes to lean on

Supporting the body, shaped to its old work
Making small movements in gray air
Numbed from...Read more of this...

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