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Famous Mirrored Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Baudelaire, Charles
...ed, 
Where mighty pillars, in majestic rows, 
Seemed like basaltic caves when day expired. 

The rolling surge that mirrored all the skies 
Mingled its music, turbulent and rich, 
Solemn and mystic, with the colours which 
The setting sun reflected in my eyes. 

And there I lived amid voluptuous calms, 
In splendours of blue sky and wandering wave, 
Tended by many a naked, perfumed slave, 

Who fanned my languid brow with waving palms. 
They were my slaves--the on...Read more of this...



by Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...s though mighty heart
Dare the unpastured dragon in his den?
Defenceless as thou wert, oh, where was then
Wisdom the mirrored shield, or scorn the spear?
Or hadst thou waited the full cycle, when
Thy spirit should have filled its crescent sphere,
The monsters of life's waste had fled from thee like deer.

"The herded wolves, bold only to pursue;
The obscene ravens, clamorous o'er the dead;
The vultures to the conqueror's banner true
Who feed where Desolation fi...Read more of this...

by Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...d had she sat 
Before a looking glass, the deeps of it 
Could not have shown more clearly to her then 
Than one thought-mirrored little glimpse had shown, 
The pang that wrenched her face and filled her eyes
With anguish and intolerable mist. 
The blow that she had vaguely thrust aside 
Like fright so many times had found her now: 
Clean-thrust and final it had come to her 
From a child’s lips at last, as it had come
Never before, and as it might be felt 
Never again....Read more of this...

by Wilde, Oscar
...ures his monstrous
flocks.

And tremulous opal-hued anemones
Will wave their purple fringes where we tread
Upon the mirrored floor, and argosies
Of fishes flecked with tawny scales will thread
The drifting cordage of the shattered wreck,
And honey-coloured amber beads our twining limbs will deck.'

But when that baffled Lord of War the Sun
With gaudy pennon flying passed away
Into his brazen House, and one by one
The little yellow stars began to stray
Across the field...Read more of this...

by Seeger, Alan
...Stood where the Seine flowed down between its quiet quais? 


The city's voice was hushed; the placid, lustrous waters 
Mirrored the walls across where orange windows burned. 
Out of the starry south provoking rumors brought us 
Far promise of the spring already northward turned. 


And breast drew near to breast, and round its soft desire 
My arm uncertain stole and clung there unrepelled. 
I thought that nevermore my heart would hover nigher 
To the last flower ...Read more of this...



by Belloc, Hilaire
...bandman, but now
Shall bear a nobler foison than the plough;
To where, festooned along the tall elm trees,
Tendrils are mirrored in Tyrrhenian seas;
To where the South awaits them; even to where
Stark, African informed of burning air,
Upturned to Heaven the broad Hipponian plain
Extends luxurious and invites the main.
Guelma's a mother: barren Thaspsa breeds;
And northward in the valleys, next the meads
That sleep by misty river banks, the Vines
Have struck to spread belo...Read more of this...

by Wilde, Oscar
...the world's vain phantasies go by with unbowed head.

Alas! that serene brow, those eloquent lips,
Those eyes that mirrored all eternity,
Rest in their own Colonos, an eclipse
Hath come on Wisdom, and Mnemosyne
Is childless; in the night which she had made
For lofty secure flight Athena's owl itself hath strayed.

Nor much with Science do I care to climb,
Although by strange and subtle witchery
She drew the moon from heaven: the Muse Time
Unrolls her gorgeous-coloure...Read more of this...

by Duhamel, Denise
...in her 
on the kitcen table until she grew dizzy. Anything,
anything, they both said to the other's requests,
their mirrored desires bubbling from the most unlikely places....Read more of this...

by John, David St
...to where she
Stood at one end of the patio, watching
The breakers flatten along the beach below,
Her body reflected and mirrored
Perfectly in the bedroom's sliding black glass
Door. He stared at her
Reflection for a while, then looked up at me
And said, Jordan, I think that I must be
 Like a pool of water in a cave that sometimes
 She steps into...
Later, as I drove him back into the city,
He hummed a Bessie Smith tune he'd sing
For her, but he didn't say a wo...Read more of this...

by Meredith, George
...he squirrel and wayward as the swallow,
Swift as the swallow along the river's light
Circleting the surface to meet his mirrored winglets,
Fleeter she seems in her stay than in her flight.
Shy as the squirrel that leaps among the pine-tops,
Wayward as the swallow overhead at set of sun,
She whom I love is hard to catch and conquer,
Hard, but O the glory of the winning were she won!

When her mother tends her before the laughing mirror,
Tying up her laces, looping up her h...Read more of this...

by Brautigan, Richard
...creek

crashing through the children's toy section. At the beginning

of the pool the water was like cream, then it mirrored out

and reflected the shadow of a large tree. By this time the

sun was up. You could see it coming down the mountain.

 I cast into the cream and let my fly drift down onto along

branch of the tree, next to a bird.

 Go-wham !

 I set the hook and the trout started jumping.

 "Giraffe races at Kilimanjaro!" he shouted, and eve...Read more of this...

by Pessoa, Fernando
...nt to go beyond Boyador
Have to go beyond pain.
God overboard danger and the abyss gave
But it was in it that he mirrored the sky....Read more of this...

by Wilde, Oscar
...ian in the chase,
White-limbed and terrible, with look of pride,
And leash of boar-hounds leaping at her side!
Or Hylas mirrored in the perfect stream.

O idle heart! O fond Hellenic dream!
Ere long, with melancholy rise and swell,
The evening chimes, the convent's vesper bell,
Struck on mine ears amid the amorous flowers.
Alas! alas! these sweet and honied hours
Had whelmed my heart like some encroaching sea,
And drowned all thoughts of black Gethsemane.


VI.Read more of this...

by Ashbery, John
...osen, meant for me and materialized
In the disguising radiance of my room.
We have seen the city; it is the gibbous
Mirrored eye of an insect. All things happen
On its balcony and are resumed within,
But the action is the cold, syrupy flow
Of a pageant. One feels too confined,
Sifting the April sunlight for clues,
In the mere stillness of the ease of its
Parameter. The hand holds no chalk
And each part of the whole falls off
And cannot know it knew, except
Her...Read more of this...

by Troupe, Quincy
...ice sheets sweep this slick mirrored dark place
space as keys that turn in tight, trigger
pain of situations
where we move ever so slowly
so gently into time — traced agony
the bright turning of imagination
so slowly
grooved through revolving doors, opening up to enter
mountains where spirits walk voices, ever so slowly
swept by cold, breathing fire
as these elliptical moments of illus...Read more of this...

by Ginsberg, Allen
...and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery.

The only water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves rheumy-eyed and hung-over like old bums on the riverbank, tired and wily.

Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust--

--I rus...Read more of this...

by Wilde, Oscar
...might seek in vain for over-grows
Our hedges like a wanton courtesan
Unthrifty of its beauty; lilies too
Ilissos never mirrored star our streams, and cockles blue

Dot the green wheat which, though they are the 
signs
For swallows going south, would never spread
Their azure tents between the Attic vines;
Even that little weed of ragged red,
Which bids the robin pipe, in Arcady
Would be a trespasser, and many an unsung elegy

Sleeps in the reeds that fringe our winding Thames...Read more of this...

by Gibran, Kahlil
...and in your sleep your dreams were my dreams. 

And oftentimes I was among you a lake among the mountains. 

I mirrored the summits in you and the bending slopes, and even the passing flocks of your thoughts and your desires. 

And to my silence came the laughter of your children in streams, and the longing of your youths in rivers. 

And when they reached my depth the streams and the rivers ceased not yet to sing. 

But sweeter still than laughter and gr...Read more of this...

by Hopkins, Gerard Manley
...t; his mate a hussy. 
And I that die these deaths, that feed this flame, 
That … in smooth spoons spy life’s masque mirrored: tame
My tempests there, my fire and fever fussy....Read more of this...

by Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...there lay calm
Old age with snow-bright hair and folded palm.

But other troubled forms of sleep she saw,
Not to be mirrored in a holy song,--
Distortions foul of supernatural awe,
And pale imaginings of visioned wrong,
And all the code of Custom's lawless law
Written upon the brows of old and young.
"This," said the Wizard Maiden, "is the strife
Which stirs the liquid surface of man's life."

And little did the sight disturb her soul.
We, the weak mariners of...Read more of this...

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