Famous Phenomenon Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The City of Dreadful Thirst

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 The stranger came from Narromine and made his little joke-- 
"They say we folks in Narromine are narrow-minded folk. 
But all the smartest men down here are puzzled to define 
A kind of new phenomenon that came to Narromine. 

"Last summer up in Narromine 'twas gettin' rather warm-- 
Two hundred in the water bag, and lookin' like a storm--...Read more of this...

April 18

by Sylvia Plath
 the slime of all my yesterdays
rots in the hollow of my skull

and if my stomach would contract
because of some explicable phenomenon
such as pregnancy or constipation

I would not remember you

or that because of sleep
infrequent as a moon of greencheese
that because of food
nourishing as violet leaves
that because of these

and in a few fatal yards of grass
in a few spaces of sky...Read more of this...

Afterlife Light

by Dejan Stojanovic
That star in the night sky 
Is not there anymore
But we see it and will see it
For millions of years yet to come.
Did the star die? 
Did it live? 
In life, we call this phenomenon
A ghost, a hallucination.
(Is life a ghost too?) 
What if the star never lived? 
Or maybe its death dies
While the star continues to live, 
Cheating death
With...Read more of this...

First Child ... Second Child

by Ogden Nash
 FIRST

Be it a girl, or one of the boys,
It is scarlet all over its avoirdupois,
It is red, it is boiled; could the obstetrician
Have possibly been a lobstertrician?
His degrees and credentials were hunky-dory,
But how's for an infantile inventory?
Here's the prodigy, here's the miracle!
Whether its head is oval or spherical,
You rejoice to find it has only one,
Having dreaded a two-headed daughter...Read more of this...

That Day

by Anne Sexton
 This is the desk I sit at
and this is the desk where I love you too much
and this is the typewriter that sits before me
where yesterday only your body sat before me
with its shoulders gathered in like a Greek chorus,
with its tongue like a king making up rules as he goes,
with its tongue quite openly like a cat lapping...Read more of this...

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