Famous Milky Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Letter From Li Po

...r
news of the heart in weather of the Bear,
slide down the rungs of Cassiopeia's Chair,
still on the nursery floor, the Milky Way;
and, if we question one, must question all.
What is this ‘man'? How far from him is ‘me'?
Who, in this conch-shell, locked the sound of sea?
We are the tree, yet sit beneath the tree,
among the leaves we are the hidden bird,
we are the singer and are what is heard.
What is this ‘world'? Not Li Po's Gorge alone,
and yet, this too might be. ‘The win...Read more of this...
by Aiken, Conrad


Charmides

...clear-voiced maidens 'gan to sing,
And to the altar each man brought some goodly offering,

A beechen cup brimming with milky foam,
A fair cloth wrought with cunning imagery
Of hounds in chase, a waxen honey-comb
Dripping with oozy gold which scarce the bee
Had ceased from building, a black skin of oil
Meet for the wrestlers, a great boar the fierce and white-tusked
spoil

Stolen from Artemis that jealous maid
To please Athena, and the dappled hide
Of a tall stag who in some ...Read more of this...
by Wilde, Oscar

Endymion: Book I

...k to strange overgrowth;
Bethinking thee, how melancholy loth
Thou wast to lose fair Syrinx--do thou now,
By thy love's milky brow!
By all the trembling mazes that she ran,
Hear us, great Pan!

 "O thou, for whose soul-soothing quiet, turtles
Passion their voices cooingly 'mong myrtles,
What time thou wanderest at eventide
Through sunny meadows, that outskirt the side
Of thine enmossed realms: O thou, to whom
Broad leaved fig trees even now foredoom
Their ripen'd fruitage; ye...Read more of this...
by Keats, John

Endymion: Book II

...brace,
By the most soft completion of thy face,
Those lips, O slippery blisses, twinkling eyes,
And by these tenderest, milky sovereignties--
These tenderest, and by the nectar-wine,
The passion"--------"O lov'd Ida the divine!
Endymion! dearest! Ah, unhappy me!
His soul will 'scape us--O felicity!
How he does love me! His poor temples beat
To the very tune of love--how sweet, sweet, sweet.
Revive, dear youth, or I shall faint and die;
Revive, or these soft hours will hurry b...Read more of this...
by Keats, John

Essay on Man

...
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind; 
His soul proud Science never taught to stray 
Far as the solar walk, or milky way; 
Yet simple Nature to his hope has giv'n, 
Behind the cloud-topt hill, an humbler heav'n; 
Some safer world in depth of woods embrac'd, 
Some happier island in the watry waste, 
Where slaves once more their native land behold, 
No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold! 
To Be, contents his natural desire, 
He asks no Angel's wing, no Serap...Read more of this...
by Pope, Alexander


Hospital Window

...ribbons past Chrysler Building's silver fins 
tapering delicately needletopped, Empire State's 
taller antenna filmed milky lit amid blocks 
black and white apartmenting veil'd sky over Manhattan, 
offices new built dark glassed in blueish heaven--The East 
50's & 60's covered with castles & watertowers, seven storied 
tar-topped house-banks over York Avenue, late may-green trees 
surrounding Rockefellers' blue domed medical arbor-- 
Geodesic science at the waters edg...Read more of this...
by Ginsberg, Allen

I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud

...beneath the trees, 
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. 

Continuous as the stars that shine 
And twinkle on the milky way, 
They stretched in never-ending line 
Along the margin of a bay: 
Ten thousand saw I at a glance, 
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. 

The waves beside them danced; but they 
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: 
A poet could not but be gay, 
In such a jocund company: 
I gazed - and gazed - but little thought 
What wealth the show...Read more of this...
by Wordsworth, William

Leaving Early

...ng the cut flowers
Sipping their liquids from assorted pots,
Pitchers and Coronation goblets
Like Monday drunkards. The milky berries
Bow down, a local constellation,
Toward their admirers in the tabletop:
Mobs of eyeballs looking up.
Are those petals of leaves you've paried with them ---
Those green-striped ovals of silver tissue?
The red geraniums I know.
Friends, friends. They stink of armpits
And the invovled maladies of autumn,
Musky as a lovebed the morning after.
My no...Read more of this...
by Plath, Sylvia

Paradise Lost: Book 05

...dinner savoury fruits, of taste to please 
True appetite, and not disrelish thirst 
Of nectarous draughts between, from milky stream, 
Berry or grape: To whom thus Adam called. 
Haste hither, Eve, and worth thy sight behold 
Eastward among those trees, what glorious shape 
Comes this way moving; seems another morn 
Risen on mid-noon; some great behest from Heaven 
To us perhaps he brings, and will vouchsafe 
This day to be our guest. But go with speed, 
And, what thy stores c...Read more of this...
by Milton, John

Song of Myself

...irm masculine colter, it shall be you. 

Whatever goes to the tilth of me, it shall be you! 
You my rich blood! Your milky stream, pale strippings of my life. 

Breast that presses against other breasts, it shall be you! 
My brain, it shall be your occult convolutions.

Root of wash’d sweet flag! timorous pond-snipe! nest of guarded duplicate
 eggs! it shall be you! 
Mix’d tussled hay of head, beard, brawn, it shall be you! 
Trickling sap of maple! fibre of manly w...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt

Sunflower Sutra

...eir rusty tongues alack, what more could I name, the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs & sphincters of dynamos--all these

entangled in your mummied roots--and you standing before me in the sunset, all your glory in your form!

A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited grasping in the ...Read more of this...
by Ginsberg, Allen

The Double Image

...rst time, all wrapped and moist
and strange at my heavy breast.
I needed you. I didn't want a boy,
only a girl, a small milky mouse
of a girl, already loved, already loud in the house
of herself. We named you Joy.
I, who was never quite sure
about being a girl, needed another
life, another image to remind me.
And this was my worst guilt; you could not cure
or soothe it. I made you to find me....Read more of this...
by Sexton, Anne

The Female Vagrant

...et, the yellow sheaf  In every vale for their delight was stowed:  For them, in nature's meads, the milky udder flowed,   Semblance, with straw and panniered ass, they made  Of potters wandering on from door to door:  But life of happier sort to me pourtrayed,  And other joys my fancy to allure;  The bag-pipe dinning on the midnight moor  In barn uplighted, and companions boon  We...Read more of this...
by Wordsworth, William

The Holy Grail

...
An outraged maiden sprang into the hall 
Crying on help: for all her shining hair 
Was smeared with earth, and either milky arm 
Red-rent with hooks of bramble, and all she wore 
Torn as a sail that leaves the rope is torn 
In tempest: so the King arose and went 
To smoke the scandalous hive of those wild bees 
That made such honey in his realm. Howbeit 
Some little of this marvel he too saw, 
Returning o'er the plain that then began 
To darken under Camelot; whence the Kin...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord

The Lovers of the Poor

...
Judge it high time that fiftyish fingers felt
Beneath the lovelier planes of enterprise.
To resurrect. To moisten with milky chill.
To be a random hitching post or plush.
To be, for wet eyes, random and handy hem.
Their guild is giving money to the poor.
The worthy poor. The very very worthy
And beautiful poor. Perhaps just not too swarthy?
Perhaps just not too dirty nor too dim
Nor--passionate. In truth, what they could wish
Is--something less than derelict or dull.
Not sta...Read more of this...
by Brooks, Gwendolyn

The Princess (part 2)

...we crost the court 
To Lady Psyche's: as we entered in, 
There sat along the forms, like morning doves 
That sun their milky bosoms on the thatch, 
A patient range of pupils; she herself 
Erect behind a desk of satin-wood, 
A quick brunette, well-moulded, falcon-eyed, 
And on the hither side, or so she looked, 
Of twenty summers. At her left, a child, 
In shining draperies, headed like a star, 
Her maiden babe, a double April old, 
Aglaïa slept. We sat: the Lady glanced: 
Th...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord

The Science Of The Night

...ow from outer space,
Still fastened desperately to my side;
Through gulfs of streaming air
Bring me the mornings of the milky ways
Down to my threshold in your drowsy eyes;
And by the virtue of your honeyed word
Restore the liquid language of the moon,
That in gold mines of secrecy you delve.
Awake!
 My whirling hands stay at the noon,
Each cell within my body holds a heart
And all my hearts in unison strike twelve....Read more of this...
by Kunitz, Stanley

The Shadow

...came
And hovered over his candle flame.
In the morning he selected all
His perfect jacinths. One large opal
Hung like a milky, rainbow moon
In the centre, and blown in loose festoon
The red stones quivered on silver threads
To the outer edge, where a single, fine
Band of mother-of-pearl the line
Completed. On the other side,
The creamy porcelain of the face
Bore diamond hours, and no lace
Of cotton or silk could ever be
Tossed into being more airily
Than the filmy golden hand...Read more of this...
by Lowell, Amy

The Wanderer

..., 
How, when her canvas had been sheeted home, 
Her quivering length would sweep into her stride, 
Making the greenness milky with her foam. 

But when we rose next morning, we discerned 
Her beauty once again a shattered thing; 
Towing to dock the Wanderer returned, 
A wounded sea-bird with a broken wing. 

A spar was gone, her rigging's disarray 
Told of a worse disaster than the last; 
Like draggled hair dishevelled hung the stay, 
Drooping and beating on the broken mast. ...Read more of this...
by Masefield, John

The Water-Nymph

...ack
With meekest prayer to the Almighty.
The grove was turning slowly black;
Above the lake a mist was lifting;
Through milky clouds across the sky
The ruddy moon was softly drifting,
When water drew the friar's eye...

He's looking puzzled, full of trouble,
Of fear he cannot quite explain,
He sees the waves begin to bubble
And suddenly grow calm again.
Then -- white as first snow in the highlands,
Light-footed as nocturnal shade,
There comes ashore, and sits in silence
Upon ...Read more of this...
by Pushkin, Alexander

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