Famous Notes Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Notes For a Speech

by Imamu Amiri Baraka
African blues
does not know me. Their steps, in sands
of their own
land. A country
in black & white, newspapers
blown down pavements
of the world. Does
not feel
what I am.

Strength

in the dream, an oblique
suckling of nerve, the wind
throws up sand, eyes
are something locked in
hate, of hate, of hate, to
walk abroad, they conduct
their deaths apart
from my own. Those
heads, I call
my "people."

(And who are they. People. To...Read more of this...

The Paris Commune

by Barry Tebb
 From the French of Andr? Fr?naud



France was born there and it is from there she sings

Of Joan of Ark and Varlin both.

We must dig deep, o motherland,

Beneath those heavy cobbles.

Country of the Commune, so dear to me,

My very own which make my blood burn

And that same blood will one day flow again

Between those very stones.

It is there when I...Read more of this...

Hymn 10

by Isaac Watts
 The blessedness of gospel times.

Isa. 52:2,7-10; Mt. 13:16,17. 

How beauteous are their feet
Who stand on Zion's hill!
Who bring salvation on their tongues,
And words of peace reveal!

How charming is their voice!
How sweet the tidings are!
"Zion, behold thy Savior King;
He reigns and triumphs here."

How happy are our ears
That hear this joyful sound,
Which kings and prophets waited for,
And sought, but never found!

How...Read more of this...

The Shepherd And The Calm

by Anne Kingsmill Finch
 Soothing his Passions with a warb'ling Sound, 
A Shepherd-Swain lay stretch'd upon the Ground;
Whilst all were mov'd, who their Attention lent,
Or with the Harmony in Chorus went,
To something less than Joy, yet more than dull Content. 
(Between which two Extreams true Pleasure lies, 
O'er-run by Fools, unreach'd-at by the Wise )
But yet, a fatal Prospect to the Sea
Wou'd often...Read more of this...

Aprils Charms

by William Henry Davies
 When April scatters charms of primrose gold 
Among the copper leaves in thickets old, 
And singing skylarks from the meadows rise, 
To twinkle like black stars in sunny skies;

When I can hear the small woodpecker ring 
Time on a tree for all the birds that sing; 
And hear the pleasant cuckoo, loud and long -- 
The simple bird that...Read more of this...

Blizzard Notes

by Carl Sandburg
 I DON’T blame the kettle drums—they are hungry.
And the snare drums—I know what they want—they are empty too.
And the harring booming bass drums—they are hungriest of all.. . .
The howling spears of the Northwest die down.
The lullabies of the Southwest get a chance, a mother song.
A cradle moon rides out of a torn hole in the ragbag top of...Read more of this...

Notes for Canto CXX

by Ezra Pound
 I have tried to write Paradise

Do not move
Let the wind speak
that is paradise.

Let the Gods forgive what I
have made
Let those I love try to forgive
what I have made....Read more of this...

Notes from the Other Side

by Jane Kenyon
 I divested myself of despair
and fear when I came here.

Now there is no more catching
one's own eye in the mirror,

there are no bad books, no plastic,
no insurance premiums, and of course

no illness. Contrition 
does not exist, nor gnashing

of teeth. No one howls as the first
clod of earth hits the casket.

The poor we no longer have with us. 
Our calm...Read more of this...

Snakecharmer

by Sylvia Plath
 As the gods began one world, and man another,
So the snakecharmer begins a snaky sphere
With moon-eye, mouth-pipe, He pipes. Pipes green. Pipes water.

Pipes water green until green waters waver
With reedy lengths and necks and undulatings.
And as his notes twine green, the green river

Shapes its images around his sons.
He pipes a place to stand on, but no rocks,
No floor: a...Read more of this...

The New Hieroglyphics

by Les Murray
 In the World language, sometimes called
Airport Road, a thinks balloon with a gondola
under it is a symbol for speculation.

Thumbs down to ear and tongue:
World can be written and read, even painted
but not spoken. People use their own words.

Latin letters are in it for names, for e.g.
OK and H2S O4, for musical notes,
but mostly it's diagrams: skirt-figure, trousered figure

have escaped...Read more of this...

Monolog From A Mattress

by Louis Untermeyer
Can that be you, la mouche? Wait till I lift
This palsied eye-lid and make sure... Ah, true.
Come in, dear fly, and pardon my delay
In thus existing; I can promise you
Next time you come you'll find no dying poet—
Without sufficient spleen to see me through,
The joke becomes too tedious a jest.
I am afraid my mind is dull to-day;
I have that—something—heavier on...Read more of this...

Not Love Perhaps

by A S J Tessimond
 This is not Love, perhaps, 
Love that lays down its life, 
that many waters cannot quench, 
nor the floods drown, 
But something written in lighter ink, 
said in a lower tone, something, perhaps, especially our own.

A need, at times, to be together and talk, 
And then the finding we can walk 
More firmly through dark narrow places, 
And meet...Read more of this...

A Description of the Morning

by Jonathan Swift
 Now hardly here and there a hackney-coach
Appearing, show'd the ruddy morn's approach.
Now Betty from her master's bed had flown,
And softly stole to discompose her own.
The slip-shod 'prentice from his master's door
Had par'd the dirt, and sprinkled round the floor.
Now Moll had whirl'd her mop with dext'rous airs,
Prepar'd to scrub the entry and the stairs.
The youth with broomy stumps began...Read more of this...

Song of the Future

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 'Tis strange that in a land so strong 
So strong and bold in mighty youth, 
We have no poet's voice of truth 
To sing for us a wondrous song. 
Our chiefest singer yet has sung 
In wild, sweet notes a passing strain, 
All carelessly and sadly flung 
To that dull world he thought so vain. 

"I care for nothing,...Read more of this...

Weltschmertz

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
You ask why I am sad to-day,
I have no cares, no griefs, you say?
Ah, yes, 't is true, I have no grief—
But—is there not the falling leaf?
The bare tree there is mourning left
With all of autumn's gray bereft;
It is not what has happened me,
Think of the bare, dismantled tree.
The birds go South along the sky,
I hear their lingering, long good-bye.
Who...Read more of this...

Like A Scarf

by Edward Taylor
 The directions to the lunatic asylum were confusing,
more likely they were the random associations
and confused ramblings of a lunatic.
We arrived three hours late for lunch
and the lunatics were stacked up on their shelves,
quite neatly, I might add, giving credit where credit is due.
The orderlies were clearly very orderly, and they
should receive all the credit that is their due.
When I...Read more of this...

Editorial Impressions

by Siegfried Sassoon
 He seemed so certain ‘all was going well’, 
As he discussed the glorious time he’d had 
While visiting the trenches.
‘One can tell 
You’ve gathered big impressions!’ grinned the lad 
Who’d been severely wounded in the back
In some wiped-out impossible Attack. 
‘Impressions? Yes, most vivid! I am writing 
A little book called Europe on the Rack, 
Based on notes made...Read more of this...

joy-notes

by Rg Gregory
 when the time comes
yield
to the forces outside you
images simply
of your inner compulsions

when the time comes
invite
your enemies inside you
inversions simply
of your face on the world

when the time comes
die
from the fears that hold you
the action simply
of seceding old skins

when the time comes
arise
that marsh birds greet you
rendering simply
the raw joy-notes of dawn...Read more of this...

Berck-Plage

by Sylvia Plath
(1)

This is the sea, then, this great abeyance.
How the sun's poultice draws on my inflammation.

Electrifyingly-colored sherbets, scooped from the freeze
By pale girls, travel the air in scorched hands.

Why is it so quiet, what are they hiding?
I have two legs, and I move smilingly..

A sandy damper kills the vibrations;
It stretches for miles, the shrunk voices

Waving and crutchless, half their old size.
The...Read more of this...

To Sir Annual Tilter

by Ben Jonson
XXIX. ? TO SIR ANNUAL TILTER.     TILTER, the most may admire thee, though not I ;  And thou, right guiltless, may'st plead to it,               Why ? For thy late sharp device.  I say 'tis fit  All brains, at times of triumph, should run wit : For then our water-conduits do run wine ;  But that's put in,...Read more of this...

Baltic Fog Notes

by Carl Sandburg
 (Bergen)SEVEN days all fog, all mist, and the turbines pounding through high seas.
I was a plaything, a rat’s neck in the teeth of a scuffling mastiff.
Fog and fog and no stars, sun, moon.
Then an afternoon in fjords, low-lying lands scrawled in granite languages on a gray sky,
A night harbor, blue dusk mountain shoulders against a night sky,
And a circle...Read more of this...

Notes For The Legend Of Salad Woman

by Michael Ondaatje
 Since my wife was born
she must have eaten
the equivalent of two-thirds
of the original garden of Eden.
Not the dripping lush fruit
or the meat in the ribs of animals
but the green salad gardens of that place.
The whole arena of green
would have been eradicated
as if the right filter had been removed
leaving only the skeleton of coarse brightness.

All green ends up eventually
churning in...Read more of this...

83. The Cotter's Saturday Night

by Robert Burns
 MY lov’d, my honour’d, much respected friend!
 No mercenary bard his homage pays;
With honest pride, I scorn each selfish end,
 My dearest meed, a friend’s esteem and praise:
 To you I sing, in simple Scottish lays,
The lowly train in life’s sequester’d scene,
 The native feelings strong, the guileless ways,
What Aiken in a cottage would have been;
Ah! tho’ his worth...Read more of this...

Octaves

by Edwin Arlington Robinson
 I 

We thrill too strangely at the master's touch;
We shrink too sadly from the larger self
Which for its own completeness agitates
And undetermines us; we do not feel -- 
We dare not feel it yet -- the splendid shame
Of uncreated failure; we forget,
The while we groan, that God's accomplishment
Is always and unfailingly at hand. 

II 

Tumultuously void of a clean...Read more of this...

Sonnet 17 - My poet thou canst touch on all the notes

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
 My poet, thou canst touch on all the notes
God set between his After and Before,
And strike up and strike off the general roar
Of the rushing worlds a melody that floats
In a serene air purely. Antidotes
Of medicated music, answering for
Mankind's forlornest uses, thou canst pour
From thence into their ears. God's will devotes
Thine to such ends, and mine to wait on...Read more of this...

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