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Famous Metrical Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Holmes, Oliver Wendell
...o' the bards you so greatly admire.

As for subjects of verse, they are only too plenty
For ringing the changes on metrical chimes;
A maiden, a moonbeam, a lover of twenty 
Have filled that great basket with bushels of rhymes.

Let me show you a picture--'t is far from irrelevant--
By a famous old hand in the arts of design;
'T is only a photographed sketch of an elephant,--
The name of the draughtsman was Rembrandt of Rhine.

How easy! no troublesome colors to l...Read more of this...



by Whitman, Walt
...me of Ceres, I see the modern Greeks dancing, 
I hear them clapping their hands, as they bend their bodies, 
I hear the metrical shuffling of their feet. 

I see again the wild old Corybantian dance, the performers wounding each other;
I see the Roman youth, to the shrill sound of flageolets, throwing and catching their
 weapons, 
As they fall on their knees, and rise again. 

I hear from the Mussulman mosque the muezzin calling; 
I see the worshippers within, (nor fo...Read more of this...

by Scott, Sir Walter
...CANTO FIRST.

The Chase.

     Harp of the North! that mouldering long hast hung
        On the witch-elm that shades Saint Fillan's spring
     And down the fitful breeze thy numbers flung,
        Till envious ivy did around thee cling,
     Muffling with verdant ringlet every string,—
        O Minstrel Harp, still must thine accents sleep?
   ...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...brass, and silvery steel; 
Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating, shuttling at thy sides;
Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar—now tapering in the distance; 
Thy great protruding head-light, fix’d in front; 
Thy long, pale, floating vapor-pennants, tinged with delicate purple; 
The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke-stack; 
Thy knitted frame—thy springs and valves—the tremulous twinkle of thy wheels;
Thy train of cars behind, obed...Read more of this...

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