Famous Models Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Phenomenal Woman

by Maya Angelou
Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I'm telling lies.
I say,
It's in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to...Read more of this...

Paris

by Alan Seeger
 First, London, for its myriads; for its height, 
Manhattan heaped in towering stalagmite; 
But Paris for the smoothness of the paths 
That lead the heart unto the heart's delight. . . . 


Fair loiterer on the threshold of those days 
When there's no lovelier prize the world displays 
Than, having beauty and your twenty years, 
You have the means...Read more of this...

My Brothers

by Robert William Service
 While I make rhymes my brother John
Makes shiny shoes which dames try on,
And finding to their fit and stance
They buy and wear with elegance;
But mine is quite another tale,--
 For song there is no sale.

My brother Tom a tailor shop
Is owner of, and ladies stop
To try the models he has planned,
And richly pay, I understand:
Yet not even a dingy...Read more of this...

Respectability

by Robert Browning
 I.

Dear, had the world in its caprice
Deigned to proclaim ``I know you both,
``Have recognized your plighted troth,
Am sponsor for you: live in peace!''---
How many precious months and years
Of youth had passed, that speed so fast,
Before we found it out at last,
The world, and what it fears?

II.

How much of priceless life were spent
With men that every virtue decks,
And women models...Read more of this...

City of Ships

by Walt Whitman
 CITY of ships! 
(O the black ships! O the fierce ships! 
O the beautiful, sharp-bow’d steam-ships and sail-ships!) 
City of the world! (for all races are here; 
All the lands of the earth make contributions here;)
City of the sea! city of hurried and glittering tides! 
City whose gleeful tides continually rush or recede, whirling in and out, with eddies...Read more of this...

On Looking for Models

by Alan Dugan
 The trees in time
have something else to do
besides their treeing. What is it.
I'm a starving to death
man myself, and thirsty, thirsty
by their fountains but I cannot drink
their mud and sunlight to be whole.
I do not understand these presences
that drink for months
in the dirt, eat light,
and then fast dry in the cold.
They stand it out somehow,
and how, the Botanists will...Read more of this...

My Madonna

by Robert William Service
 I haled me a woman from the street,
 Shameless, but, oh, so fair!
I bade her sit in the model's seat
 And I painted her sitting there.

I hid all trace of her heart unclean;
 I painted a babe at her breast;
I painted her as she might have been
 If the Worst had been the Best.

She laughed at my picture and...Read more of this...

Thoughts

by Walt Whitman
 1
OF these years I sing, 
How they pass and have pass’d, through convuls’d pains as through parturitions; 
How America illustrates birth, muscular youth, the promise, the sure fulfillment, the
 Absolute
 Success, despite of people—Illustrates evil as well as good; 
How many hold despairingly yet to the models departed, caste, myths, obedience,
 compulsion, and
 to infidelity; 
How few see the...Read more of this...

My Madonna

by Robert W Service
I haled me a woman from the street, 
Shameless, but, oh, so fair! 
I bade her sit in the model's seat 
And I painted her sitting there. 

I hid all trace of her heart unclean; 
I painted a babe at her breast; 
I painted her as she might have been 
If the Worst had been the Best. 

She laughed at...Read more of this...

Vehicles

by W S Merwin
 This is a place on the way after the distances
 can no longer be kept straight here in this dark corner
of the barn a mound of wheels has convened along
 raveling courses to stop in a single moment
and lie down as still as the chariots of the Pharaohs
 some in pairs that rolled as one over the same roads
to...Read more of this...

Hymn 95

by Isaac Watts
 Regeneration.

John 1:13; 3:3, etc. 

Not all the outward forms on earth,
Nor rites that God has giv'n,
Nor will of man, nor blood, nor birth,
Can raise a soul to heav'n.

The sovereign will of God alone
Creates us heirs of grace
Born in the image of his Son,
A new, peculiar race.

The Spirit, like some heav'nly wind,
Blows on the sons of flesh,
New-models all the carnal...Read more of this...

The Pangolin

by Marianne Moore
 Another armored animal--scale
 lapping scale with spruce-cone regularity until they
form the uninterrupted central
 tail-row! This near artichoke with head and legs and grit-equipped
 gizzard,
the night miniature artist engineer is,
 yes, Leonardo da Vinci's replica--
 impressive animal and toiler of whom we seldom hear.
 Armor seems extra. But for him,
 the closing ear-ridge--
 or bare ear lacking even this small
...Read more of this...

Bad Day At The Beauty Salon

by Maggie Estep
 I was a 20 year old unemployed receptionist with
dyed orange dreadlocks sprouting out of my skull. I needed a job, but first,
I needed a haircut.

So I head for this beauty salon on Avenue B.
I'm gonna get a hairdo.
I'm gonna look just like those hot Spanish haircut models, become brown
and bodacious, grow some 7 inch fingernails painted ***** red and...Read more of this...

Youth and Art

by Robert Browning
 1 It once might have been, once only:
2 We lodged in a street together,
3 You, a sparrow on the housetop lonely,
4 I, a lone she-bird of his feather.

5 Your trade was with sticks and clay,
6 You thumbed, thrust, patted and polished,
7 Then laughed 'They will see some day
8 Smith made, and Gibson demolished.'

9 My business was song, song, song;
10...Read more of this...

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