Famous Patterned Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Patterned poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous patterned poems. These examples illustrate what a famous patterned poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
See also:
by
Tebb, Barry
...ighley
The track’s ribbon flaps
Like Margaret’s whirling and twirling
At ten with her pink-tied hair
And blue-check patterned frock
O my lost beloved
Mills fall like doomed fortresses
Their domes topple, stopped clocks
Chime midnight forever and ever
Amen to the lost hegemony of mill girls
Flocking through dawn fog, their clogs clacking,
Their beauty, only Vermeer could capture
O my lost beloved
In a field one foal tries to mount another,
The mare nibbling Apr...Read more of this...
by
Seeger, Alan
...Stretched on a sunny bank he lay at rest,
Ferns at his elbow, lilies round his knees,
With sweet flesh patterned where the cool turf pressed,
Flowerlike crept o'er with emerald aphides.
Single he couched there, to his circling flocks
Piping at times some happy shepherd's tune,
Nude, with the warm wind in his golden locks,
And arched with the blue Asian afternoon.
Past him, gorse-purpled, to the distant coast
Rolled the clear foothills. Ther...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...ypothesis for God
When I hear a distant buzz
I cannot tell if it is
A bee or saw.
That is what we must
Decide, patterned being
Or random chance, God
Or nothing, your choice
And mine.
9
The caf? by the lake was closed
But when I asked they opened.
Was it God or chance made hearts
Beat like a butterfly’s wing
In January cold?
Good and bad are choice not chance
At sixteen I decided to be a poet,
Writing another’s love poems,
Earning my first...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...
The maze memory grew
Into the road across
The Hollows, forty years
On I ran to meet you in
Your worn-out flower-
Patterned frock and
Black, laceless runners.
46
Reality is cold
And hard
And beautiful.
Summer’s running
Like a river
Into Crossgreen.
Euridyce, Euridyce,
Margaret, will you
Marry me?...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...covered cart jingling
Jangling as it jerked hundreds
Of cups on hooks pint and
Half pint mugs and stacks of
Willow-patterned plates
From Burmantofts.
20
We heard him a mile off
Nights in summer when
He trundled round the
Corner over the cobbles
Jamming the wood brake
Blocks whoaing the horses
With their gleaming brasses
And our mams were always
Waiting where he stopped.
21
Double summer-time made
The nights go on for ever
And no-one car...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...
Interminable blue
And I remember you,
Margaret, in your
Mauve blazer standing
By the river, your
Worn-out flower patterned
Frock and black
Laceless runners
12
Into the brewer’s yard
Stumbled the drayhorses
Armoured in leather
And clashing brass
Strident as Belshazzar’s
Feast, rich as yeast
On Auntie Nellie’s
Baking board, barrels
Banked on barrels
From the cooper’s yard.
13
Margaret, are you listening?
Are your eyes still distant
And dr...Read more of this...
by
Doolittle, Hilda
...- by an effort
comfort our hearts:
it is not waste all this,
not placed here in disgust,
street after street,
each patterned alike,
no grace to lighten
a single house of the hundred
crowded into one garden-space.
Crowded -- can we believe,
not in utter disgust,
in ironical play --
but the maker of cities grew faint
with the beauty of temple
and space before temple,
arch upon perfect arch,
of pillars and corridors that led out
to strange court-yards and p...Read more of this...
by
Lawrence, D. H.
...ugh the rounded flesh.
Oh my boys, bending over your books,
In you is trembling and fusing
The creation of a new-patterned dream, dream of a generation:
And I watch to see the Creator, the power that patterns the dream.
The old dreams are beautiful, beloved, soft-toned, and sure,
But the dream-stuff is molten and moving mysteriously,
Alluring my eyes; for I, am I not also dream-stuff,
Am I not quickening, diffusing myself in the pattern, shaping and shapen?
Here ...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...ut how beautifully dressed
Is this army! How impressed
Tommy is when at his heel
All his baggage wagons wheel
About the patterned carpet, and
Moving up his heavy guns
He sees them glow with diamond suns
Flashing all along each barrel.
And the gold and blue apparel
Of his gunners is a joy.
Tommy is a lucky boy.
Boom! Boom! Ta-ra!
The old mandarin nods under his purple umbrella. The
rose in his hand
shoots its petals up in thin quills of crimson. Then
the...Read more of this...
by
Parker, Dorothy
...Roses, rooted warm in earth,
Bud in rhyme, another age;
Lilies know a ghostly birth
Strewn along a patterned page;
Golden lad and chimbley sweep
Die; and so their song shall keep.
Wind that in Arcadia starts
In and out a couplet plays;
And the drums of bitter hearts
Beat the measure of a phrase.
Sweets and woes but come to print
Quae cum ita sint....Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...I walk down the garden paths,
And all the daffodils
Are blowing, and the bright blue squills.
I walk down the patterned garden-paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.
With my powdered hair and jewelled fan,
I too am a rare
Pattern. As I wander down
The garden paths.
My dress is richly figured,
And the train
Makes a pink and silver stain
On the gravel, and the thrift
Of the borders.
Just a plate of current fashion,
Tripping by in high-heeled, ribboned shoes...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...us. . . .
And so the sunny sequels were a
Gay villa on the Riviera,
A bank account, a limousine, a
Life patterned dolce e divina.
Oh, yes, my lyric flight is flighty;
My muse is much more mite than mighty:
But poetry has been my friend,
And rhyming's saved me in the end....Read more of this...
by
Hardy, Thomas
...Guile.
So now, the remedy? Yea, this:
I gently swing the door
Here, of my fane--no soul to wis--
And cross the patterned floor
To the rood-screen
That stands between
The nave and inner chore.
The rich red windows dim the moon,
But little light need I;
I mount the prie-dieu, lately hewn
From woods of rarest dye;
Then from below
My garment, so,
I draw this cord, and tie
One end thereof around the beam
Midway 'twixt Cross and truss:
I noose the nether...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...r to a ruffian.
"But let me take my ship, with many bales
Of cotton stuffs dyed crimson, green, and blue,
Cunningly patterned, made to suit the taste
Of mandarin's ladies; when my battered sails
Open for home, such stores will I bring you
That all your former ventures will be counted waste.
13
Such light and foamy silks, like crinkled cream,
And indigo more blue than sun-whipped seas,
Spices and fragrant trees, a massive beam
Of sandalwood, and pungent China teas,
To...Read more of this...
by
Aiken, Conrad
...te violets,
Exquisite wreaths of dark green ivy leaves.
On this leaf, goes a dream I dreamed last night
Of two soft-patterned toads—I thought them stones,
Until they hopped! And then a great black spider,—
Tarantula, perhaps, a hideous thing,—
It crossed the room in one tremendous leap.
Here,—as I coil the stems between two leaves,—
It is as if, dwindling to atomy size,
I cried the secret between two universes . . .
A friend of mine took hasheesh once, and...Read more of this...
by
Aiken, Conrad
...te violets,
Exquisite wreaths of dark green ivy leaves.
On this leaf, goes a dream I dreamed last night
Of two soft-patterned toads—I thought them stones,
Until they hopped! And then a great black spider,—
Tarantula, perhaps, a hideous thing,—
It crossed the room in one tremendous leap.
Here,—as I coil the stems between two leaves,—
It is as if, dwindling to atomy size,
I cried the secret between two universes . . .
A friend of mine took hasheesh once, and...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...irgin vastitude, and dream.
The great sky soared exultantly, the great earth bared its breast,
All river-veined and patterned with the pine;
The heedless hordes of caribou were streaming to the West,
A land of lustrous mystery -- and mine.
Yea, mine to frame my Odyssey: Oh, little do they know
My conquest and the kingdom that I keep!
The meadows of the musk-ox, where the laughing grasses grow,
The rivers where the careless conies leap.
Beyond the silent Circle, w...Read more of this...
by
Piercy, Marge
...br>
Barons of hogfat, railroads and wheat
are postmarked with angels and lambs.
But the Getty tomb: white, snow patterned
in a triangle of trees swims dappled with leaf shadow,
sketched light arch within arch
delicate as fingernail moons.
The green doors should not be locked.
Doors of fern and flower should not be shut.
Louis Sullivan, I sit on your grave.
It is not now good weather for prophets.
Sun eddies on the steelsmoke air like sinkin...Read more of this...
by
Akhmatova, Anna
...d blue
And showed me the path to keep.
You saw the queen's garden,
White palace, luxurious one,
And the black patterned fence
Before resounding stone perron.
You went, not knowing the way,
And thinking, "Faster, faster!
If only to find her now,
Not wake before meeting her."
And the janitor at the red gate
Shouted at you, "Where to, alack!"
The ice crackled and broke,
Underfoot, water went black.
"This is the lake, and inside
There's an i...Read more of this...
by
Akhmatova, Anna
...And I grew up in patterned tranquillity,
In the cool nursery of the young century.
And the voice of man was not dear to me,
But the voice of the wind I could understand.
But best of all the silver willow.
And obligingly, it lived
With me all my life; it's weeping branches
Fanned my insomnia with dreams.
And strange!--I outlived it.
There the stum...Read more of this...
Dont forget to view our wonderful member Patterned poems.