Famous Pared Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The Thin People

by Sylvia Plath
 They are always with us, the thin people
Meager of dimension as the gray people

On a movie-screen. They
Are unreal, we say:

It was only in a movie, it was only
In a war making evil headlines when we

Were small that they famished and
Grew so lean and would not round

Out their stalky limbs again though peace
Plumped the bellies of the mice

Under the meanest...Read more of this...

When All My Five And Country Senses See

by Dylan Thomas
 When all my five and country senses see,
The fingers will forget green thumbs and mark
How, through the halfmoon's vegetable eye,
Husk of young stars and handfull zodiac,
Love in the frost is pared and wintered by,
The whispering ears will watch love drummed away
Down breeze and shell to a discordant beach,
And, lashed to syllables, the lynx tongue cry
That her fond wounds are...Read more of this...

A Farm-house On The Wei River

by Wang Wei
In the slant of the sun on the country-side, 
Cattle and sheep trail home along the lane; 
And a rugged old man in a thatch door 
Leans on a staff and thinks of his son, the herdboy. 
There are whirring pheasants? full wheat-ears, 
Silk-worms asleep, pared mulberry-leaves. 
And the farmers, returning with hoes on their shoulders, 
Hail one another familiarly....Read more of this...

Brother and Sister

by D. H. Lawrence
 The shorn moon trembling indistinct on her path,
Frail as a scar upon the pale blue sky, 
Draws towards the downward slope: some sorrow hath
Worn her down to the quick, so she faintly fares 
Along her foot-searched way without knowing why
She creeps persistent down the sky’s long stairs. 

Some day they see, though I have never seen, 
The dead moon...Read more of this...

There is no Breeze to Cool the Heat of Love

by Adela Florence Cory Nicolson
   As those who eat a Luscious Fruit, sunbaked,
     Full of sweet juice, with zest, until they find
   It finished, and their appetite unslaked,
     And so return and eat the pared-off rind;—

   We, who in Youth, set white and careless teeth
     In...Read more of this...

Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar

by T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
 Tra-la-la-la-la-la-laire—nil nisi divinum stabile est; caetera fumus—the gondola
stopped, the old palace was there, how charming its grey and pink—goats and
monkeys, with such hair too!—so the countess passed on until she came through the
little park, where Niobe presented her with a cabinet, and so departed.


BURBANK crossed a little bridge
Descending at a small hotel;
Princess Volupine arrived,
They were together, and he fell.

Defunctive...Read more of this...

Not I, but Varius (SCRIBERIS VARIO)

by Horace
     Not I, but Varius:—he, of Homer's brood
       A tuneful swan, shall bear you on his wing,
     Your tale of trophies, won by field or flood,
         Mighty alike to sing.
     Not mine such themes,...Read more of this...

The Break

by Anne Sexton
 It was also my violent heart that broke,
falling down the front hall stairs.
It was also a message I never spoke,
calling, riser after riser, who cares

about you, who cares, splintering up
the hip that was merely made of crystal,
the post of it and also the cup.
I exploded in the hallway like a pistol.

So I fell apart. So I came all undone.
Yes....Read more of this...

A Farmhouse on the Wei River

by Wang Wei
 In the slant of the sun on the country-side, 
Cattle and sheep trail home along the lane; 
And a rugged old man in a thatch door 
Leans on a staff and thinks of his son, the herdboy. 
There are whirring pheasants, full wheat-ears, 
Silk-worms asleep, pared mulberry-leaves. 
And the farmers, returning with hoes on their shoulders, 
Hail one another...Read more of this...

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