Famous Metallic Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Plymouth Rock Joe

by Edgar Lee Masters
 Why are you running so fast hither and thither
Chasing midges or butterflies?
Some of you are standing solemnly scratching for grubs;
Some of you are waiting for corn to be scattered.
This is life, is it?
Cock-a-doodle-do! Very well, Thomas Rhodes,
You are cock of the walk, no doubt.
But here comes Elliott Hawkins,
Gluck, Gluck, Gluck, attracting political followers.
Quah! quah! quah! why so poetical, Minerva,
This...Read more of this...

Roosters

by Elizabeth Bishop
 At four o'clock
in the gun-metal blue dark
we hear the first crow of the first cock

just below
the gun-metal blue window
and immediately there is an echo

off in the distance,
then one from the backyard fence,
then one, with horrible insistence,

grates like a wet match 
from the broccoli patch,
flares,and all over town begins to catch.

Cries galore
come from the water-closet door,
from the dropping-plastered henhouse floor,

where...Read more of this...

The Opening of the Piano

by Oliver Wendell Holmes
 IN the little southern parlor of tbe house you may have seen
With the gambrel-roof, and the gable looking westward to the green,
At the side toward the sunset, with the window on its right,
Stood the London-made piano I am dreaming of to-night!

Ah me! how I remember the evening when it came!
What a cry of eager voices, what a group of...Read more of this...

The Intruder

by Carolyn Kizer
 My mother-- preferring the strange to the tame:
Dove-note, bone marrow, deer dung,
Frog's belly distended with finny young,
Leaf-mould wilderness, hare-bell, toadstool,
Odd, small snakes loving through the leaves,
Metallic beetles rambling over stones: all
Wild and natural -flashed out her instinctive love,
and quick, she
Picked up the fluttering. bleeding bat the cat laid at her feet,
And held the little horror to the mirror, where
He...Read more of this...

My Mothers Body

by Marge Piercy
 1. 

The dark socket of the year 
the pit, the cave where the sun lies down 
and threatens never to rise, 
when despair descends softly as the snow 
covering all paths and choking roads: 

then hawkfaced pain seized you 
threw you so you fell with a sharp 
cry, a knife tearing a bolt of silk. 
My father heard the...Read more of this...

An Aquarium

by Amy Lowell
 Streaks of green and yellow iridescence,
Silver shiftings,
Rings veering out of rings,
Silver -- gold --
Grey-green opaqueness sliding down,
With sharp white bubbles
Shooting and dancing,
Flinging quickly outward.
Nosing the bubbles,
Swallowing them,
Fish.
Blue shadows against silver-saffron water,
The light rippling over them
In steel-bright tremors.
Outspread translucent fins
Flute, fold, and relapse;
The threaded light prints through them on the pebbles
In scarcely tarnished twinklings.
Curving of spotted spines,
Slow up-shifts,
Lazy convolutions:
Then a...Read more of this...

The Revolutionary

by D. H. Lawrence
 Look at them standing there in authority 
The pale-faces, 
As if it could have any effect any more. 

Pale-face authority,
Caryatids, 
Pillars of white bronze standing rigid, lest the skies fall. 

What a job they've got to keep it up. 
Their poor, idealist foreheads naked capitals 
To the entablature of clouded heaven. 

When the skies are going to fall, fall...Read more of this...

Variation On A Theme By Rilke

by Denise Levertov
 A certain day became a presence to me;
there it was, confronting me--a sky, air, light:
a being. And before it started to descend
from the height of noon, it leaned over
and struck my shoulder as if with
the flat of a sword, granting me
honor and a task. The day's blow
rang out, metallic--or it was I, a bell awakened,
and what I heard was...Read more of this...

The Cry Of The Children

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
 Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,
Ere the sorrow comes with years?
They are leaning their young heads against their mothers,
And that cannot stop their tears.
The young lambs are bleating in the meadows,
The young birds are chirping in the nest,
The young fawns are playing with the shadows,
The young flowers are blowing toward the west— 
But the young, young...Read more of this...

It came at last but prompter Death

by Emily Dickinson
 It came at last but prompter Death
Had occupied the House --
His pallid Furniture arranged
And his metallic Peace --

Oh faithful Frost that kept the Date
Had Love as punctual been
Delight had aggrandized the Gate
And blocked the coming in....Read more of this...

That after Horror -- that twas us

by Emily Dickinson
 That after Horror -- that 'twas us --
That passed the mouldering Pier --
Just as the Granite Crumb let go --
Our Savior, by a Hair --

A second more, had dropped too deep
For Fisherman to plumb --
The very profile of the Thought
Puts Recollection numb --

The possibility -- to pass
Without a Moment's Bell --
Into Conjecture's presence --
Is like a Face of Steel...Read more of this...

from Proverbs of Hell

by Rg Gregory
 (a) radical

ban all fires
and places where people congregate
to create comfort
put an end to sleep
good cooking
and the delectation of wine
tear lovers apart
piss on the sun and moon
degut all heavenly harmony
strike out across the bitter ice
and the poisonous marshes

make (if you dare) a better world

(b) expect poison from standing water
  (iii)
lake erie
why not as a joke one night
pick up your...Read more of this...

Variations on the Word Love

by Margaret Atwood
 This is a word we use to plug
holes with. It's the right size for those warm
blanks in speech, for those red heart-
shaped vacancies on the page that look nothing
like real hearts. Add lace
and you can sell
it. We insert it also in the one empty
space on the printed form
that comes with no instructions. There are whole
magazines with not much in...Read more of this...

Favrile

by Mark Doty
 Glassmakers,
at century's end,
compounded metallic lusters

in reference
to natural sheens (dragonfly
and beetle wings,

marbled light on kerosene)
and invented names
as coolly lustrous

as their products'
scarab-gleam: Quetzal,
Aurene, Favrile.

Suggesting,
respectively, the glaze
of feathers,

that sun-shot fog
of which halos
are composed,

and -- what?
What to make of Favrile,
Tiffany's term

for his coppery-rose
flushed with gold
like the alchemized

atmosphere of sunbeams
in a Flemish room?
Faux Moorish,

fake Japanese,
his lamps illumine
chiefly themselves,

copying waterlilies'
bronzy stems,
wisteria or trout scales;

surfaces burnished
like...Read more of this...

from imperfect Eden

by Rg Gregory
 (1)
and off to scott's (the dockers' restaurant)
burly men packed in round solid tables
but what the helle (drowned in hellespont)
this place for me was rich in its own fables
i'll be the lover sunk if that enables
an awesome sense of just how deep the spells
that put scotts for me beyond the dardanelles

lace-curtained windows (or memory plays me false)
no capped odysseus could...Read more of this...

Crossing Nation

by Allen Ginsberg
 Under silver wing
 San Francisco's towers sprouting
 thru thin gas clouds,
 Tamalpais black-breasted above Pacific azure
 Berkeley hills pine-covered below--
Dr Leary in his brown house scribing Independence
 Declaration
 typewriter at window
 silver panorama in natural eyeball--

Sacramento valley rivercourse's Chinese 
 dragonflames licking green flats north-hazed
 State Capitol metallic rubble, dry checkered fields
 to Sierras- past Reno, Pyramid Lake's 
...Read more of this...

Ode to Valour

by Mary Darby Robinson
 Inscribed to Colonel Banastre Tarleton]


TRANSCENDENT VALOUR! ­godlike Pow'r! 
Lord of the dauntless breast, and stedfast mien! 
Who, rob'd in majesty sublime, 
Sat in thy eagle-wafted car, 
And led the hardy sons of war, 
With head erect, and eye serene, 
Amidst the arrowy show'r; 
When unsubdued, from clime to clime, 
YOUNG AMMON taught exulting Fame 
O'er earth's vast space to...Read more of this...

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