Famous Overheard Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Overheard poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous overheard poems. These examples illustrate what a famous overheard poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
See also:
by
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Pamela was too gentle to deceive
Her roses. "Let the men stay where they are,"
She said, "and if Apollo's avatar
Be one of them, I shall not have to grieve."
And so she made all Tilbury Town believe
She sighed a little more for the North Star
Than over men, and only in so far
As she was...Read more of this...
by
Henry Van Dyke
A tale that the poet Rückert told
To German children, in days of old;
Disguised in a random, rollicking rhyme
Like a merry mummer of ancient time,
And sent, in its English dress, to please
The little folk of the Christmas trees.
A little fir grew in the midst of the wood
Contented and happy, as young trees should.
His body was straight and...Read more of this...
by
Anna Akhmatova
Not under foreign skies
Nor under foreign wings protected -
I shared all this with my own people
There, where misfortune had abandoned us.
[1961]
INSTEAD OF A PREFACE
During the frightening years of the Yezhov terror, I
spent seventeen months waiting in prison queues in
Leningrad. One day, somehow, someone 'picked me out'.
On that occasion there was a woman standing behind me,
her...Read more of this...
by
Edna St. Vincent Millay
OH, Prue she has a patient man,
And Joan a gentle lover,
And Agatha's Arth' is a hug-the-hearth,
But my true love's a rover!
Mig, her man's as good as cheese
And honest as a briar,
Sue tells her love what he's thinking of,
But my dear lad's a liar!
Oh, Sue and Prue and Agatha
Are thick with Mig and Joan!
They bite their threads and...Read more of this...
by
Harold Monro
Nymph, nymph, what are your beads?
Green glass, goblin. Why do you stare at them?
Give them me.
No.
Give them me. Give them me.
No.
Then I will howl all night in the reeds. Lie in the mud and howl for them.
Goblin, why do you love them so?
They are better than stars or water,
Better than voices of winds that sing,
Better than any man's...Read more of this...
by
Charles Bukowski
first time my father overheard me listening to
this bit of music he asked me,
"what is it?"
"it's called Love For Three Oranges,"
I informed him.
"boy," he said, "that's getting it
cheap."
he meant sex.
listening to it
I always imagined three oranges
sitting there,
you know how orange they can
get,
so mightily orange.
maybe Prokofiev had meant
what my father
thought.
if so, I preferred it the
other way
the most horrible thing
I could...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
Upon his Saddle sprung a Bird
And crossed a thousand Trees
Before a Fence without a Fare
His Fantasy did please
And then he lifted up his Throat
And squandered such a Note
A Universe that overheard
Is stricken by it yet --...Read more of this...
by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
[This song was also written for Lily. Goethe
mentions, at the end of his Autobiography, that he overheard her
singing it one evening after he had taken his last farewell of her.]
WHEREFORE drag me to yon glittering eddy,
With resistless might?
Was I, then, not truly blest already
In the silent night?
In my secret chamber refuge taking,
'Neath the moon's soft ray,
And her...Read more of this...
by
Frank Bidart
. . . telling those who swarm around him his desire
is that an appendage from each of them
fill, invade each of his orifices,—
repeating, chanting,
Oh yeah Oh yeah Oh yeah Oh yeah Oh yeah
until, as if in darkness he craved the sun, at last he reached
consummation.
—Until telling those who swarm around him begins again
(we are the wheel to which we...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Hardy
I
I saw a slowly-stepping train --
Lined on the brows, scoop-eyed and bent and hoar --
Following in files across a twilit plain
A strange and mystic form the foremost bore.
II
And by contagious throbs of thought
Or latent knowledge that within me lay
And had already stirred me, I was wrought
To consciousness of sorrow even as they.
III
The fore-borne shape, to my...Read more of this...
by
Ralph Waldo Emerson
IT fell in the ancient periods
Which the brooding soul surveys
Or ever the wild Time coin'd itself
Into calendar months and days.
This was the lapse of Uriel 5
Which in Paradise befell.
Once among the Pleiads walking
Sayd overheard the young gods talking;
And the treason too long pent
To his ears was evident. 10...Read more of this...
by
Jorie Graham
I have put on my great coat it is cold.
It is an outer garment.
Coarse, woolen.
Of unknown origin.
*
It has a fine inner lining but it is
as an exterior that you see it — a grace.
*
I have a coat I am wearing. It is a fine admixture.
The woman who threw the threads in the two directions
has made, skillfully,...Read more of this...
by
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Forth from Calais, at dawn of night, when sunset summer on autumn shone,
Fared the steamer alert and loud through seas whence only the sun was gone:
Soft and sweet as the sky they smiled, and bade man welcome: a dim sweet hour
Gleamed and whispered in wind and sea, and heaven was fair as a field in flower,
Stars fulfilled the desire...Read more of this...
Dont forget to view our wonderful member Overheard poems.