Famous Museum Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Museum poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous museum poems. These examples illustrate what a famous museum poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Russell Edson
In his travels he comes to a bridge made entirely of bones.
Before crossing he writes a letter to his mother: Dear mother,
guess what? the ape accidentally bit off one of his hands while
eating a banana. Just now I am at the foot of a bone bridge. I
shall be crossing it shortly. I don't know if...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
My God, my God, what ***** corner am I in?
Didn't I die, blood running down the post,
lungs gagging for air, die there for the sin
of anyone, my sour mouth giving up the ghost?
Surely my body is done? Surely I died?
And yet, I know, I'm here. What place is this?
Cold and *****, I sting...Read more of this...
by
Richard Wilbur
The good gray guardians of art
Patrol the halls on spongy shoes,
Impartially protective, though
Perhaps suspicious of Toulouse.
Here dozes one against the wall,
Disposed upon a funeral chair.
A Degas dancer pirouettes
Upon the parting of his hair.
See how she spins! The grace is there,
But strain as well is plain to see.
Degas loved the two together:
Beauty joined to energy.
Edgar Degas purchased once
A fine El...Read more of this...
by
Richard Aldington
I turn the page and read:
"I dream of silent verses where the rhyme
Glides noiseless as an oar."
The heavy musty air, the black desks,
The bent heads and the rustling noises
In the great dome
Vanish ...
And
The sun hangs in the cobalt-blue sky,
The boat drifts over the lake shallows,
The fishes skim like umber shades...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
A woman
who loves a woman
is forever young.
The mentor
and the student
feed off each other.
Many a girl
had an old aunt
who locked her in the study
to keep the boys away.
They would play rummy
or lie on the couch
and touch and touch.
Old breast against young breast...
Let your dress fall down...Read more of this...
by
Linda Pastan
Pierre Bonnard would enter
the museum with a tube of paint
in his pocket and a sable brush.
Then violating the sanctity
of one of his own frames
he'd add a stroke of vermilion
to the skin of a flower.
Just so I stopped you
at the door this morning
and licking my index finger, removed
an invisible crumb
from your vermilion mouth. As if
at the ritual moment of departure
I...Read more of this...
by
R S Thomas
All right, I was Welsh. Does it matter?
I spoke a tongue that was passed on
To me in the place I happened to be,
A place huddled between grey walls
Of cloud for at least half the year.
My word for heaven was not yours.
The word for hell had a sharp edge
Put on it by the hand of the wind
Honing, honing with a...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
A woman
who loves a woman
is forever young.
The mentor
and the student
feed off each other.
Many a girl
had an old aunt
who locked her in the study
to keep the boys away.
They would play rummy
or lie on the couch
and touch and touch.
Old breast against young breast...
Let your dress fall down...Read more of this...
by
Marge Piercy
The construction of a woman:
a woman is not made of flesh
of bone and sinew
belly and breasts, elbows and liver and toe.
She is manufactured like a sports sedan.
She is retooled, refitted and redesigned
every decade.
Cecile had been seduction itself in college.
She wriggled through bars like a satin eel,
her hips and ass promising, her...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
You always read about it:
the plumber with the twelve children
who wins the Irish Sweepstakes.
From toilets to riches.
That story.
Or the nursemaid,
some luscious sweet from Denmark
who captures the oldest son's heart.
from diapers to Dior.
That story.
Or a milkman who serves the wealthy,
eggs, cream, butter, yogurt, milk,
the white truck like an ambulance
who goes into real estate
and makes a pile.
From homogenized to martinis at...Read more of this...
by
Billy Collins
I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna
or on any river for that matter
to be perfectly honest.
Not in July or any month
have I had the pleasure -- if it is a pleasure --
of fishing on the Susquehanna.
I am more likely to be found
in a quiet room like this one --
a painting of a woman on the wall,
a bowl of...Read more of this...
by
W S Merwin
What is the head
A. Ash
What are the eyes
A. The wells have fallen in and have
Inhabitants
What are the feet
A. Thumbs left after the auction
No what are the feet
A. Under them the impossible road is moving
Down which the broken necked mice push
Balls of blood with their noses
What is the tongue
A. The black coat...Read more of this...
by
Larry Levis
--The Carpathian Frontier, October, 1968
--for my brother
Once, in a foreign country, I was suddenly ill.
I was driving south toward a large city famous
For so little it had a replica, in concrete,
In two-thirds scale, of the Arc de Triomphe stuck
In the midst of traffic, & obstructing it.
But the city was hours away, beyond the hills
Shaped like the bodies of...Read more of this...
by
Oliver Wendell Holmes
How the mountains talked together,
Looking down upon the weather,
When they heard our friend had planned his
Little trip among the Andes
How they'll bare their snowy scalps
To the climber of the Alps
When the cry goes through their passes,
"Here comes the great Agassiz!"
"Yes, I'm tall," says Chimborazo,
"But I wait for him to say so,--
That's the only thing that lacks,-- he
Must see me,...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Hardy
I
Here's the mould of a musical bird long passed from light,
Which over the earth before man came was winging;
There's a contralto voice I heard last night,
That lodges with me still in its sweet singing.
II
Such a dream is Time that the coo of this ancient bird
Has perished not, but is blent, or will be blending
Mid...Read more of this...
by
Ben Jonson
A Vienna ci sono dieci ragazze,
una spalla dove piange la morte
e un bosco di colombe disseccate.
C'e' un frammento del mattino
nel museo della brina.
C'è un salone con mille vetrate.
Ahi! Ahi! Ahi! Ahi!
Prendi questo valzer con la bocca chiusa.
Questo valzer, questo valzer, questo valzer,
di sì, di morte e di cognac
che si bagna la coda nel mare.
Io ti amo, io...Read more of this...
by
Anthony Hecht
Third Avenue in sunlight. Nature's error.
Already the bars are filled and John is there.
Beneath a plentiful lady over the mirror
He tilts his glass in the mild mahogany air.
I think of him when he first got out of college,
Serious, thin, unlikely to succeed;
For several months he hung around the Village,
Boldly T-shirtet, unfettered but unfreed.
Now he confides to a stranger, "I...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
1.
Mother, my Mary Gray,
once resident of Gloucester
and Essex County,
a photostat of your will
arrived in the mail today.
This is the division of money.
I am one third
of your daughters counting my bounty
or I am a queen alone
in the parlor still,
eating the bread and honey.
It is Good Friday.
Black birds pick at my window sill.
Your coat in my closet,
your bright stones on my...Read more of this...
by
Jackie Kay
I am only nineteen
My whole life is changing
Tonight I see her
Shuttered eyes in my dreams
I cannot pretend she's never been
My stitches pull and threaten to snap
My own body a witness
Leaking blood to sheets milk to shirts
My stretch marks
Record that birth
Though I feel like somebody is dying
I stand up in my bed
And wail like a banshee
II
On the second night
I shall...Read more of this...
by
Richard Aldington
I
The bitterness. the misery, the wretchedness of childhood
Put me out of love with God.
I can't believe in God's goodness;
I can believe
In many avenging gods.
Most of all I believe
In gods of bitter dullness,
Cruel local gods
Who scared my childhood.
II
I've seen people put
A chrysalis in a match-box,
"To see," they...Read more of this...
by
David Lehman
The last Campbell's tomato soup can
of the twentieth century is going to
the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh
That is an example of a sentence
Another is this from a CEO in Fortune
"You die in either case, but this way you get
to do it proactively," where the adverb
makes the sentence I'm walking amid
the tourists...Read more of this...
by
Federico García Lorca
In Vienna there are ten little girls,
a shoulder for death to cry on,
and a forest of dried pigeons.
There is a fragment of tomorrow
in the museum of winter frost.
There is a thousand-windowed dance hall.
Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Take this close-mouthed waltz.
Little waltz, little waltz, little waltz,
of itself of death, and of brandy
that dips its tail in the sea.
I love you, I...Read more of this...
by
Andrew Barton Paterson
Down along the Snakebite River, where the overlanders camp,
Where the serpents are in millions, all of the most deadly stamp;
Where the station-cook in terror, nearly every time he bakes,
Mixes up among the doughboys half-a-dozen poison-snakes:
Where the wily free-selector walks in armour-plated pants,
And defies the stings of scorpions, and the bites of bull-dog ants:
Where...Read more of this...
by
Margaret Atwood
He was the sort of man
who wouldn't hurt a fly.
Many flies are now alive
while he is not.
He was not my patron.
He preferred full granaries, I battle.
My roar meant slaughter.
Yet here we are together
in the same museum.
That's not what I see, though, the fitful
crowds of staring children
learning the lesson of multi-
cultural obliteration, sic transit
and so on.
I see the temple where...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
Notice how he has numbered the blue veins
in my breast. Moreover there are ten freckles.
Now he goes left. Now he goes right.
He is buiding a city, a city of flesh.
He's an industrialist. He has starved in cellars
and, ladies and gentlemen, he's been broken by iron,
by the blood, by the metal, by the triumphant
iron of his mother's death. But he...Read more of this...
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