Famous Messages Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Broadway Pageant

...iderate with her, now and ever, hot Libertad—for you are all; 
Bend your proud neck to the long-off mother, now sending messages over the archipelagoes
 to
 you; 
Bend your proud neck low for once, young Libertad. 

9
Were the children straying westward so long? so wide the tramping? 
Were the precedent dim ages debouching westward from Paradise so long?
Were the centuries steadily footing it that way, all the while unknown, for you, for
 reasons? 

They are justified—they ar...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt


An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow

...s nothing,
the man who weeps ignores us, and cries out
of his writhen face and ordinary body

not words, but grief, not messages, but sorrow,
hard as the earth, sheer, present as the sea -
and when he stops, he simply walks between us
mopping his face with the dignity of one
man who has wept, and now has finished weeping.

Evading believers, he hurries off down Pitt Street....Read more of this...
by Murray, Les

Anna Who Was Mad

...Anna who was mad,
I have a knife in my armpit.
When I stand on tiptoe I tap out messages.
Am I some sort of infection?
Did I make you go insane?
Did I make the sounds go sour?
Did I tell you to climb out the window?
Forgive. Forgive.
Say not I did.
Say not.
Say.

Speak Mary-words into our pillow.
Take me the gangling twelve-year-old
into your sunken lap.
Whisper like a buttercup.
Eat me. Eat me up like cream pudding.
Take me in.
Take me...Read more of this...
by Sexton, Anne

Avons Harvest

...lity, 
If so you must. But when I found his name 
Among the dead, I trusted once the news;
And after that there were no messages 
In ambush waiting for me on my birthday. 
There was no vestige yet of any fear, 
You understand—if that’s why you are smiling.” 

I said that I had not so much as whispered
The name aloud of any fear soever, 
And that I smiled at his unwonted plunge 
Into the perilous pool of Dionysus. 
“Well, if you are so easily diverted 
As that,” he said, drumm...Read more of this...
by Robinson, Edwin Arlington

Endymion: Book III

...ot bent
Towards her with the Muses in thine heart;
As if the ministring stars kept not apart,
Waiting for silver-footed messages.
O Moon! the oldest shades 'mong oldest trees
Feel palpitations when thou lookest in:
O Moon! old boughs lisp forth a holier din
The while they feel thine airy fellowship.
Thou dost bless every where, with silver lip
Kissing dead things to life. The sleeping kine,
Couched in thy brightness, dream of fields divine:
Innumerable mountains rise, and ris...Read more of this...
by Keats, John


Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape

...The first of the undecoded messages read: "Popeye sits 
in thunder,
Unthought of. From that shoebox of an apartment,
From livid curtain's hue, a tangram emerges: a country."
Meanwhile the Sea Hag was relaxing on a green couch: "How 
pleasant
To spend one's vacation en la casa de Popeye," she 
scratched
Her cleft chin's solitary hair. She remembered spinach

And was going to ask Wimpy ...Read more of this...
by Ashbery, John

For My Son Noah Ten Years Old

...
So I am proud only of those days that pass in undivided tenderness 
when you sit drawing or making books stapled with messages to the world 
or coloring a man with fire coming out of his hair.
Or we sit at a table with small tea carefully poured.
So we pass our time together calm and delighted....Read more of this...
by Bly, Robert

from crossing the line

...im)
  the image of that cross
is grit within him - the arch reflects in
microscopic waves through fleshly aeons
beaming messages to nerves and typing fingers

both ends of me are broken - in frantic storms
hanging over cliffs i fight to mend them
the job cannot be done - i die though
if i stop
 how cynical i may be (how apt
with metaphor or joke to thrust my fate
grotesquely into print) the fact is that
i live until i stop - i can't sit down then
crying let me die or death is...Read more of this...
by Gregory, Rg

How Butterflies Are Born

...send to dreamy Mays, 
 Of the proud hearts within a billet bound, 
 Of all the soft silk paper that men wound, 
 The messages of love that mortals write, 
 Filled with intoxication of delight, 
 Written in April, and before the Maytime 
 Shredded and flown, playthings for the winds' playtime. 
 We dream that all white butterflies above, 
 Who seek through clouds or waters souls to love, 
 And leave their lady mistress to despair, 
 To flirt with flowers, as tender a...Read more of this...
by Hugo, Victor

My Daughter at 14 Christmas Dance 1981

...like me you are.


After the dance,
I see your happiness; he holds
your hand. Though you barely speak,
your body pulses messages I can read


all too well. He kisses you goodnight,
his body moving toward yours, and yours
responding. I am frightened, guard my
tongue for fear my mother will pop out


of my mouth. "He is not shy," I say. You giggle,
a little girl again, but you tell me he
kissed you on the dance floor. "Once?"
I ask. "No, a lot."


We ride through rain-shining 1...Read more of this...
by Gillan, Maria Mazziotti

My Philosophy of Life

...omes the traveler.Nearby
are the public toilets where weary pilgrims have carved
their names and addresses, and perhaps messages as well,
messages to the world, as they sat
and thought about what they'd do after using the toilet
and washing their hands at the sink, prior to stepping out
into the open again.Had they been coaxed in by principles,
and were their words philosophy, of however crude a sort?
I confess I can move no farther along this train of thought--
something's b...Read more of this...
by Ashbery, John

Salut au Monde

..., and blossoms and corn; 
I see the tracks of ancient and modern expeditions. 

I see the nameless masonries, venerable messages of the unknown events, heroes, records of
 the
 earth. 

I see the places of the sagas;
I see pine-trees and fir-trees torn by northern blasts; 
I see granite boulders and cliffs—I see green meadows and lakes; 
I see the burial-cairns of Scandinavian warriors; 
I see them raised high with stones, by the marge of restless oceans, that the dead men’s
...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt

Self-Portrait At 28

...ould go into some deeper stuff here.

IV four

There are things I've given up on
like recording funny answering machine messages.
It's part of growing older
and the human race as a group
has matured along the same lines.
It seems our comedy dates the quickest.
If you laugh out loud at Shakespeare's jokes
I hope you won't be insulted
if I say you're trying too hard.
Even sketches from the original Saturday Night Live
seem slow-witted and obvious now.

It's just that our advanc...Read more of this...
by Berman, David

September 1, 1939

...he nightOur world in stupor lies;Yet, dotted everywhere,Ironic points of lightFlash out wherever the JustExchange their messages:May I, composed like themOf Eros and of dust,Beleaguered by the sameNegation and despair,Show an affirming flame....Read more of this...
by Auden, Wystan Hugh (W H)

So Long

...re using, 
At random glancing, each as I notice absorbing, 
Swiftly on, but a little while alighting,
Curious envelop’d messages delivering, 
Sparkles hot, seed ethereal, down in the dirt dropping, 
Myself unknowing, my commission obeying, to question it never daring, 
To ages, and ages yet, the growth of the seed leaving, 
To troops out of me, out of the army, the war arising—they the tasks I have set
 promulging,
To women certain whispers of myself bequeathing—their affecti...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt

Song Of An Old General

...use away with wine. 
...War-clouds are spreading, under the Helan Range; 
Back and forth, day and night, go feathered messages; 
In the three River Provinces, the governors call young men -- 
And five imperial edicts have summoned the old general. 
So he dusts his iron coat and shines it like snow- 
Waves his dagger from its jade hilt in a dance of starry steel. 
He is ready with his strong northern bow to smite the Tartar chieftain -- 
That never a foreign war-dress ...Read more of this...
by Wei, Wang

Song of Myself

...f powder-parcels, strong scent, 
Delicate sniffs of sea-breeze, smells of sedgy grass and fields by the shore,
 death-messages given in charge to survivors, 
The hiss of the surgeon’s knife, the gnawing teeth of his saw,
Wheeze, cluck, swash of falling blood, short wild scream, and long, dull,
 tapering groan; 
These so—these irretrievable. 

37
O Christ! This is mastering me! 
In at the conquer’d doors they crowd. I am possess’d. 

I embody all presences outlaw’d...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt

The Symphony

...half odor, forth did float,
As if a rose might somehow be a throat:
"When Nature from her far-off glen
Flutes her soft messages to men,
The flute can say them o'er again;
Yea, Nature, singing sweet and lone,
Breathes through life's strident polyphone
The flute-voice in the world of tone.
Sweet friends,
Man's love ascends
To finer and diviner ends
Than man's mere thought e'er comprehends
For I, e'en I,
As here I lie,
A petal on a harmony,
Demand of Science whence and why
Man'...Read more of this...
by Lanier, Sidney

Three Songs For Mayday Morning

...' went to every VC in England in a

Single day. When she sat on the English lawn Park Honan

Flew paper aeroplanes with messages down and

And when she was in Classics they took away her chair

So she sat on the floor reading Virgil and the Chairman of the

Department sent her an official Christmas card

'For six weeks on the university lawn, learning the

Hebrew alphabet'.





And that was just the beginning: in Oxford Magdalen College

School turned our son away for the Le...Read more of this...
by Tebb, Barry

Troilus And Criseyde: Book 02

...aleys riden,
Fro the scarmuch, of the whiche I tolde,
And in his chaumbre sit, and hath abiden 
Til two or three of his messages yeden
For Pandarus, and soughten him ful faste,
Til they him founde and broughte him at the laste.

This Pandarus com leping in at ones,
And seiyde thus: 'Who hath ben wel y-bete 
To-day with swerdes, and with slinge-stones,
But Troilus, that hath caught him an hete?'
And gan to Iape, and seyde, 'Lord, so ye swete!
But rys, and lat us soupe and go t...Read more of this...
by Chaucer, Geoffrey

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