Famous Middle Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Middle poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous middle poems. These examples illustrate what a famous middle poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Anne Sexton
I am in a crate, the crate that was ours,
full of white shirts and salad greens,
the icebox knocking at our delectable knocks,
and I wore movies in my eyes,
and you wore eggs in your tunnel,
and we played sheets, sheets, sheets
all day, even in the bathtub like lunatics.
But today I set the bed afire
and smoke is filling the room,
it is getting...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
Because there was no other place
to flee to,
I came back to the scene of the disordered senses,
came back last night at midnight,
arriving in the thick June night
without luggage or defenses,
giving up my car keys and my cash,
keeping only a pack of Salem cigarettes
the way a child holds on to a toy.
I signed myself in where a stranger
puts the inked-in...Read more of this...
by
Katherine Mansfield
Now this is the story of Olaf
Who ages and ages ago
Lived right on the top of a mountain,
A mountain all covered with snow.
And he was quite pretty and tiny
With beautiful curling fair hair
And small hands like delicate flowers--
Cheeks kissed by the cold mountain air.
He lived in a hut made of pinewood
Just one little room and a door
A table, a...Read more of this...
by
Erica Jong
You open to me
a little,
then grow afraid
and close again,
a small boy
fearing to be hurt,
a toe stubbed
in the dark,
a finger cut
on paper.
I think I am free
of fears,
enraptured, abandoned
to the call
of the Bacchae,
my own siren,
tied to my own
mast,
both Circe
and her swine.
But I too
am afraid:
I know where
life leads.
The impulse
to join,
to confess all,
is followed
by the impulse
to renounce,
and love--
imperishable love--
must die,
in order
to be reborn.
We...Read more of this...
by
Robert Frost
`You know Orion always comes up sideways.
Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains,
And rising on his hands, he looks in on me
Busy outdoors by lantern-light with something
I should have done by daylight, and indeed,
After the ground is frozen, I should have done
Before it froze, and a gust flings a handful
Of waste leaves at my smoky lantern chimney
To...Read more of this...
by
Syl Cheney-Coker
After our bloody century, the sea will groan
under its weight, somewhere between breasts and anus.
Filled with toxins, her belly will not yield new islands
even though the orphans of East Timor wish it so.
The sea is only capable of so much history:
Noah's monologue, the Middle Passage's cargoes,
Darwin's examination of the turtle's ****,
the remains of the Titanic, and a diver's story
about how...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Hardy
To M. H.
WE passed where flag and flower
Signalled a jocund throng;
We said: "Go to, the hour
Is apt!"--and joined the song;
And, kindling, laughed at life and care,
Although we knew no laugh lay there.
We walked where shy birds stood
Watching us, wonder-dumb;
Their friendship met our mood;
We cried: "We'll often come:
We'll come morn, noon, eve, everywhen!"
--We doubted we should come again.
We joyed to...Read more of this...
by
Hilaire Belloc
Who was too Freely Moved to Tears, and thereby ruined his Political Career
Lord Lundy from his earliest years
Was far too freely moved to Tears.
For instance if his Mother said,
"Lundy! It's time to go to Bed!"
He bellowed like a Little Turk.
Or if his father Lord Dunquerque
Said "Hi!" in a Commanding Tone,
"Hi, Lundy! Leave the Cat alone!"
Lord Lundy, letting go...Read more of this...
by
Vernon Scannell
The appetite which leads him to her bed
Is not unlike the lust of boys for cake
Except he knows that after he has fed
He'll suffer more than simple belly-ache.
He'll groan to think what others have to pay
As price for his obsessive need to know
That he's a champion still, though slightly grey,
And both his...Read more of this...
by
William Cullen Bryant
STAND here by my side and turn, I pray,
On the lake below thy gentle eyes;
The clouds hang over it, heavy and gray,
And dark and silent the water lies;
And out of that frozen mist the snow 5
In wavering flakes begins to flow;
Flake after flake
They sink in the dark and silent lake.
See how in...Read more of this...
by
Isaac Watts
The business and blessedness of glorified saints.
Rev. 7:13ff.
"What happy men, or angels, these,
That all their robes are spotless white?
Whence did this glorious troop arrive
At the pure realms of heav'nly light?"
From torturing racks, and burning fires,
And seas of their own blood, they came;
But nobler blood has washed their robes,
Flowing from Christ the dying Lamb.
Now they approach th' Almighty throne
With...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
There was an unwanted child.
Aborted by three modern methods
she hung on to the womb,
hooked onto I
building her house into it
and it was to no avail,
to black her out.
At her birth
she did not cry,
spanked indeed,
but did not yell--
instead snow fell out of her mouth.
As she grew, year by year,
her hair turned like a rose in a vase,
and bled down her...Read more of this...
by
Robert Hayden
I
Jesús, Estrella, Esperanza, Mercy:
Sails flashing to the wind like weapons,
sharks following the moans the fever and the dying;
horror the corposant and compass rose.
Middle Passage:
voyage through death
to life upon these shores.
"10 April 1800--
Blacks rebellious. Crew uneasy. Our linguist says
their moaning is a prayer for death,
our and their own. Some...Read more of this...
by
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Want to trade me, do you, mistah? Oh, well, now, I reckon not,
W'y you could n't buy my Sukey fu' a thousan' on de spot.
Dat ol' mare o' mine?
Yes, huh coat ah long an' shaggy, an' she ain't no shakes to see;
Dat's a ring-bone, yes, you right, suh, an' she got a on'ry knee,
But dey ain't no use in talkin',...Read more of this...
by
Siegfried Sassoon
I heard a clash, and a cry,
And a horseman fleeing the wood.
The moon hid in a cloud.
Deep in shadow I stood.
‘Ugly work!’ thought I,
Holding my breath.
‘Men must be cruel and proud,
‘Jousting for death’.
With gusty glimmering shone
The moon; and the wind blew colder.
A man went over the hill,
Bent to his horse’s...Read more of this...
by
Sidney Lanier
My crippled sense fares bow'd along
His uncompanioned way,
And wronged by death pays life with wrong
And I wake by night and dream by day.
And the Morning seems but fatigued Night
That hath wept his visage pale,
And the healthy mark 'twixt dark and light
In sickly sameness out doth fail.
And the woods stare strange, and the wind is dumb,
-- O Wind, pray talk...Read more of this...
by
Nazim Hikmet
Taut, thick fingers punch
the teeth of my typewriter.
Three words are down on paper
in capitals:
SPRING
SPRING
SPRING...
And me -- poet, proofreader,
the man who's forced to read
two thousand bad lines
every day
for two liras--
why,
since spring
has come, am I
still sitting here
like a ragged
black chair?
My head puts on its cap by itself,
I fly out...Read more of this...
by
Ogden Nash
When I remember bygone days
I think how evening follows morn;
So many I loved were not yet dead,
So many I love were not yet born....Read more of this...
by
John Berryman
He lay in the middle of the world, and twicht.
More Sparine for Pelides,
human (half) & down here as he is,
with probably insulting mail to open
and certainly unworthy words to hear
and his unforgiving memory.
-”I seldom go to films. They are too exciting,
said the Honourable Possum.
-”It takes me so long to read the 'paper,
said to me one day a novelist hot...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
Yearly, with tent and rifle, our careless white men go
By the Pass called Muttianee, to shoot in the vale below.
Yearly by Muttianee he follows our white men in --
Matun, the old blind beggar, bandaged from brow to chin.
Eyeless, noseless, and lipless -- toothless, broken of speech,
Seeking a dole at the doorway he mumbles his tale to each;
Over and over...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
Empty chocolate boxes, a pillowcase with an orange at the bottom,
Nuts and tinsel with its idiosyncratic rustle and brilliant sheen
And the reflection in it of paper-chains hand-made and stuck with
Flour-paste stretching from the light-bowl to every corner of the room.
Father Christmas himself was plastic and his vast stomach painted red
With a bulging sack behind his back and he was...Read more of this...
by
Donald Hall
To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on...Read more of this...
by
Ezra Pound
Kung walked
by the dynastic temple
and into the cedar grove,
and then out by the lower river,
And with him Khieu Tchi
and Tian the low speaking
And "we are unknown," said Kung,
"You will take up charioteering?
"Then you will become known,
"Or perhaps I should take up charioterring, or archery?
"Or the practice of public speaking?"
And Tseu-lou said, "I would put the...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Lux
More like a vault -- you pull the handle out
and on the shelves: not a lot,
and what there is (a boiled potato
in a bag, a chicken carcass
under foil) looking dispirited,
drained, mugged. This is not
a place to go in hope or hunger.
But, just to the right of the middle
of the middle door shelf, on fire, a lit-from-within red,
heart red, sexual...Read more of this...
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...
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