Famous On The Same Page Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Deborahs Parrot a Village Tale

by Mary Darby Robinson
 'Twas in a little western town
An ancient Maiden dwelt:
Her name was MISS, or MISTRESS, Brown,
Or DEBORAH, or DEBBY: She
Was doom'd a Spinster pure to be,
For soft delights her breast ne'er felt:
Yet, she had watchful Ears and Eyes
For ev'ry youthful neighbour,
And never did she cease to labour
A tripping female to surprize.

And why was she so wond'rous pure,
So stiff, so solemn--so...Read more of this...

How Solemn as One by One

by Walt Whitman
 HOW solemn, as one by one, 
As the ranks returning, all worn and sweaty—as the men file by where I stand; 
As the faces, the masks appear—as I glance at the faces, studying the masks; 
(As I glance upward out of this page, studying you, dear friend, whoever you are;) 
How solemn the thought of my whispering soul, to...Read more of this...

Psalm 71 part 1

by Isaac Watts
 v.5-9 
C. M.
The aged saint's reflection and hope.

My God, my everlasting hope,
I live upon thy truth;
Thine hands have held my childhood up,
And strengthened all my youth.

My flesh was fashioned by thy power,
With all these limbs of mine;
And from my mother's painful hour,
I've been entirely thine.

Still has my life new wonders seen
Repeated every year;
Behold, my days that yet remain,
I trust...Read more of this...

I Held A Shelley Manuscript

by Gregory Corso
 My hands did numb to beauty
as they reached into Death and tightened!

O sovereign was my touch
upon the tan-inks's fragile page!

Quickly, my eyes moved quickly,
sought for smell for dust for lace
for dry hair!

I would have taken the page
breathing in the crime!
For no evidence have I wrung from dreams--
yet what triumph is there in private credence?

Often, in some steep ancestral book,
when...Read more of this...

Self-Portrait

by Linda Pastan
 After Adam Zagajewski



I am child to no one, mother to a few,
wife for the long haul.
On fall days I am happy
with my dying brethren, the leaves,
but in spring my head aches
from the flowery scents.
My husband fills a room with Mozart
which I turn off, embracing
the silence as if it were an empty page
waiting for me alone to fill it.
He digs...Read more of this...

New Eyes Each Year

by Philip Larkin
 New eyes each year
Find old books here,
And new books,too,
Old eyes renew;
So youth and age
Like ink and page
In this house join,
Minting new coin....Read more of this...

The Riddle

by Richard Wilbur
 Shall I love God for causing me to be?
I was mere utterance; shall these words love me?

Yet when I caused His work to jar and stammer,
And one free subject loosened all His grammar,

I love Him that He did not in a rage
Once and forever rule me off the page,

But, thinking I might come to please Him yet,
Crossed out 'delete'...Read more of this...

Shut Not Your Doors andc

by Walt Whitman
 SHUT not your doors to me, proud libraries, 
For that which was lacking on all your well-fill’d shelves, yet needed most, I bring; 
Forth from the army, the war emerging—a book I have made, 
The words of my book nothing—the drift of it everything; 
A book separate, not link’d with the rest, nor felt by the intellect,
But you, ye...Read more of this...

Bards of Passion and of Mirth written on the Blank Page before Beaumont and Fletchers Tragi-Comedy The Fair Maid of the Inn

by John Keats
 BARDS of Passion and of Mirth, 
Ye have left your souls on earth! 
Have ye souls in heaven too, 
Doubled-lived in regions new? 
Yes, and those of heaven commune 
With the spheres of sun and moon; 
With the noise of fountains wondrous, 
And the parle of voices thund'rous; 
With the whisper of heaven's trees 
And one another, in soft...Read more of this...

Standardization

by Alec Derwent (A D) Hope
 When, darkly brooding on this Modern Age, 
The journalist with his marketable woes 
Fills up once more the inevitable page 
Of fatuous, flatulent, Sunday-paper prose; 

Whenever the green aesthete starts to whoop 
With horror at the house not made with hands 
And when from vacuum cleaners and tinned soup 
Another pure theosophist demands 

Rebirth in other, less industrial stars...Read more of this...

My Book

by Robert William Service
 Before I drink myself to death,
God, let me finish up my Book!
At night, I fear, I fight for breath,
And wake up whiter than a spook;
And crawl off to a bistro near,
And drink until my brain is clear.

Rare Absinthe! Oh, it gives me strength
To write and write; and so I spend
Day after day, until at length
With joy and pain I'll...Read more of this...

Spring Beauties

by Ruth Stone
The abandoned campus,
empty brick buildings and early June
when you came to visit me;
crossing the states midway,
the straggled belts of little roads;
hitchhiking with your portable typewriter.
The campus, an academy of trees,
under which some hand, the wind's I guess,
had scattered the pale light
of thousands of spring beauties,
petals stained with pink veins;
secret, blooming for themselves.
We sat among them.
Your long fingers, thin body,
and long...Read more of this...

An ODE

by Anne Killigrew
 ARise my Dove, from mid'st of Pots arise, 
 Thy sully'd Habitation leave, 
 To Dust no longer cleave, 
Unworthy they of Heaven that will not view the Skies. 
[Page 83]

 Thy native Beauty re-assume, 
 Prune each neglected Plume, 
 Till more than Silver white, 
 Then burnisht Gold more bright, 
Thus ever ready stand to take thy...Read more of this...

To Brenda Williams ‘writing Against The Grain'

by Barry Tebb
 It was Karl Shapiro who wrote in his ‘Defence of Ignorance’ how many poets

Go mad or seem to be so and the majority think we should all be in jail

Or mental hospital and you have ended up in both places - fragile as bone china,

Your pale skin taut, your fingers clasped tight round a cup, sitting in a pool

Of...Read more of this...

The Page And The Millers Daughter

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 PAGE.

WHERE goest thou? Where?
Miller's daughter so fair!

Thy name, pray?--

MILLER'S DAUGHTER.

'Tis 
Lizzy.

PAGE.
Where goest thou? Where?
With the rake in thy hand?

MILLER'S DAUGHTER.
Father's meadows and land

To visit, I'm busy.

PAGE.
Dost go there alone?

MILLER'S DAUGHTER.
By this rake, sir, 'tis shown

That we're making the hay;
And the pears ripen fast
In the garden at last,

So I'll pick them to-day.

PAGE.
Is't a silent thicket I yonder view?

MILLER'S DAUGHTER.
Oh, yes!...Read more of this...

Theme For English B

by Langston Hughes
 The instructor said,

 Go home and write
 a page tonight.
 And let that page come out of you--
 Then, it will be true.

I wonder if it's that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham, then here
to this college on the hill above Harlem.
I am the only colored student in my class.
The steps from...Read more of this...

The Critick and the Writer of Fables

by Anne Kingsmill Finch
 Weary, at last, of the Pindarick way, 
Thro' which advent'rously the Muse wou'd stray; 
To Fable I descend with soft Delight, 
Pleas'd to Translate, or easily Endite: 
Whilst aery Fictions hastily repair 
To fill my Page, and rid my Thoughts of Care, 
As they to Birds and Beasts new Gifts impart, 
And Teach, as Poets shou'd, whilst they Divert....Read more of this...

February

by Thomas Chatterton
 Begin, my muse, the imitative lay, 
Aonian doxies sound the thrumming string; 
Attempt no number of the plaintive Gay, 
Let me like midnight cats, or Collins sing. 
If in the trammels of the doleful line 
The bounding hail, or drilling rain descend; 
Come, brooding Melancholy, pow'r divine, 
And ev'ry unform'd mass of words amend. 

Now the rough goat withdraws...Read more of this...

Preamble (A Rough Draft For An Ars Poetica)

by Jean Cocteau
 ...Preamble

A rough draft 
for an ars poetica

. . . . . . . 

Let's get our dreams unstuck

The grain of rye
free from the prattle of grass
et loin de arbres orateurs

I 

plant

it

It will sprout


But forget about 
the rustic festivities

For the explosive word 
falls harmlessly
eternal through
the compact generations 

and except for you

 nothing 
 denotates

its sweet-scented dynamite

Greetings
I discard eloquence
the empty sail
and...Read more of this...

Poems Potatoes

by Sylvia Plath
 The word, defining, muzzles; the drawn line
Ousts mistier peers and thrives, murderous,
In establishments which imagined lines

Can only haunt. Sturdy as potatoes,
Stones, without conscience, word and line endure,
Given an inch. Not that they're gross (although

Afterthought often would have them alter
To delicacy, to poise) but that they
Shortchange me continuously: whether

More or other, they still dissatisfy.
Unpoemed, unpictured, the potato
Bunches its knobby browns...Read more of this...

Sonnet 05: If I Should Learn In Some Quite Casual Way

by Edna St. Vincent Millay
 If I should learn, in some quite casual way,
 That you were gone, not to return again—
Read from the back-page of a paper, say,
 Held by a neighbor in a subway train,
How at the corner of this avenue
 And such a street (so are the papers filled)
A hurrying man—who happened to be you—
 At noon to-day had happened to...Read more of this...

My Aviary

by Oliver Wendell Holmes
 THROUGH my north window, in the wintry weather,--
My airy oriel on the river shore,--
I watch the sea-fowl as they flock together
Where late the boatman flashed his dripping oar.

The gull, high floating, like a sloop unladen,
Lets the loose water waft him as it will;
The duck, round-breasted as a rustic maiden,
Paddles and plunges, busy, busy still.

I see the solemn gulls in...Read more of this...

From an Essay on Man

by Alexander Pope
 Heav'n from all creatures hides the book of fate,
All but the page prescrib'd, their present state:
From brutes what men, from men what spirits know:
Or who could suffer being here below?
The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed today,
Had he thy reason, would he skip and play?
Pleas'd to the last, he crops the flow'ry food,
And licks the hand just rais'd to...Read more of this...

A Word dropped careless on a Page

by Emily Dickinson
 A Word dropped careless on a Page
May stimulate an eye
When folded in perpetual seam
The Wrinkled Maker lie

Infection in the sentence breeds
We may inhale Despair
At distances of Centuries
From the Malaria --...Read more of this...

Take Back the Virgin Page

by Thomas Moore
 Written on Returning a Blank Book


Take back the virgin page, 
White and unwritten still; 
Some hand, more calm and sage, 
The leaf must fill. 
Thoughts come, as pure as light 
Pure as even you require; 
But, oh! each word I write 
Love turns to fire. 

Yet let me keep the book: 
Oft shall my heart renew, 
When on its...Read more of this...

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