Famous Played Poems by Famous Poets

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

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To Leonide Massine in ‘Cleopatra'

by Siegfried Sassoon
 O beauty doomed and perfect for an hour, 
Leaping along the verge of death and night, 
You show me dauntless Youth that went to fight 
Four long years past, discovering pride and power. 

You die but in our dreams, who watch you fall
Knowing that to-morrow you will dance again. 
But not to ebbing music were they slain 
Who sleep...Read more of this...

Incarnate Devil

by Dylan Thomas
 Incarnate devil in a talking snake,
The central plains of Asia in his garden,
In shaping-time the circle stung awake,
In shapes of sin forked out the bearded apple,
And God walked there who was a fiddling warden
And played down pardon from the heavens' hill.

When we were strangers to the guided seas,
A handmade moon half holy in a cloud,
The wisemen tell me that...Read more of this...

Alexander And Zenobia

by Anne Bronte
 Fair was the evening and brightly the sun
Was shining on desert and grove,
Sweet were the breezes and balmy the flowers
And cloudless the heavens above. 
It was Arabia's distant land
And peaceful was the hour;
Two youthful figures lay reclined
Deep in a shady bower.

One was a boy of just fourteen
Bold beautiful and bright;
Soft raven curls hung clustering round
A brow of marble white.

The...Read more of this...

The Piper And His Cow

by Mother Goose
There was a piper had a cow,
    And he had naught to give her;
He pulled out his pipes and played her a tune,
    And bade the cow consider.

The cow considered very well,
    And gave the piper a penny,
And bade him play the other tune,
    "Corn rigs are bonny."...Read more of this...

Hiawathas Friends

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 Two good friends had Hiawatha, 
Singled out from all the others, 
Bound to him in closest union, 
And to whom he gave the right hand 
Of his heart, in joy and sorrow; 
Chibiabos, the musician,
And the very strong man, Kwasind.
Straight between them ran the pathway, 
Never grew the grass upon it; 
Singing birds, that utter falsehoods, 
Story-tellers, mischief-makers, 
Found...Read more of this...

The Logger

by Robert William Service
 In the moonless, misty night, with my little pipe alight,
 I am sitting by the camp-fire's fading cheer;
Oh, the dew is falling chill on the dim, deer-haunted hill,
 And the breakers in the bay are moaning drear.
The toilful hours are sped, the boys are long abed,
 And I alone a weary vigil keep;
In the sightless, sullen sky I can...Read more of this...

Sonnet 24: Mine eye hath played the painter and hath stelled

by William Shakespeare
 Mine eye hath played the painter and hath stelled
Thy beauty's form in table of my heart;
My body is the frame wherein 'tis held,
And perspective it is best painter's art.
For through the painter must you see his skill
To find where your true image pictured lies,
Which in my bosom's shop is hanging still,
That hath his windows glazèd with thine eyes.
Now see...Read more of this...

The Cottage Hospital

by John Betjeman
 At the end of a long-walled garden in a red provincial town,
A brick path led to a mulberry- scanty grass at its feet.
I lay under blackening branches where the mulberry leaves hung down
Sheltering ruby fruit globes from a Sunday-tea-time heat.
Apple and plum espaliers basked upon bricks of brown;
The air was swimming with insects, and children played in the street.

Out...Read more of this...

The Clouds their Backs together laid

by Emily Dickinson
 The Clouds their Backs together laid
The North begun to push
The Forests galloped till they fell
The Lightning played like mice

The Thunder crumbled like a stuff
How good to be in Tombs
Where Nature's Temper cannot reach
Nor missile ever comes...Read more of this...

Hare Drummer

by Edgar Lee Masters
 Do the boys and girls still go to Siever's
For cider, after school, in late September?
Or gather hazel nuts among the thickets
On Aaron Hatfield's farm when the frosts begin?
For many times with the laughing girls and boys
Played I along the road and over the hills
When the sun was low and the air was cool,
Stopping to club the walnut tree
Standing leafless...Read more of this...

as the snow fell

by Rg Gregory
 the children played games
getting from here
to where the truth was
without touching a flake

needless to say
the only ones who got there
were liars

but while the honest ones
shrank back from
the touch of snow
the liars
were where the truth was...Read more of this...

Rapunzel

by Anne Sexton
 A woman 
who loves a woman 
is forever young. 
The mentor 
and the student 
feed off each other. 
Many a girl 
had an old aunt 
who locked her in the study 
to keep the boys away. 
They would play rummy 
or lie on the couch 
and touch and touch. 
Old breast against young breast... 
Let your dress fall down...Read more of this...

Minstrels

by William Wordsworth
The minstrels played their Christmas tune
To-night beneath my cottage-eaves;
While, smitten by a lofty moon,
The encircling laurels, thick with leaves,
Gave back a rich and dazzling sheen,
That overpowered their natural green.

Through hill and valley every breeze
Had sunk to rest with folded wings:
Keen was the air, but could not freeze,
Nor check, the music of the strings;
So stout and hardy were the band
That scraped...Read more of this...

The Super

by Robert William Service
 When I was with a Shakespeare show
I played the part of Guildenstern,
Or Rosenkrantz - at least I know
It wasn't difficult to learn;
By Reader, do not at me scoff,
For futhermore I should explain
I was the understudy of
The understudy of the Dane.

Oh how it crabbed me just to think
They barred me from that role divine;
And how I longed to have them...Read more of this...

the shakes

by Rg Gregory
 now pay attention
(said the teacher)
and look up here

the children looked up

this is william shakespeare

four centuries up
on a pedestal
was shakespeare's head

he was what we call
a great man

the children got sore necks
looking up
and some began to look down

no no
you mustn't look down
(said the teacher)
apart from winston churchill
shakespeare was the greatest
englishman who ever lived

the children's eyes
drained to their feet
and their minds
played around...Read more of this...

The Children of the Night

by Edwin Arlington Robinson
 For those that never know the light, 
The darkness is a sullen thing; 
And they, the Children of the Night, 
Seem lost in Fortune's winnowing. 

But some are strong and some are weak, -- 
And there's the story. House and home 
Are shut from countless hearts that seek 
World-refuge that will never come. 

And if there be no other...Read more of this...

The Journey

by Rabindranath Tagore
 The morning sea of silence broke into ripples of bird songs; 
and the flowers were all merry by the roadside; 
and the wealth of gold was scattered through the rift of the clouds 
while we busily went on our way and paid no heed. 

We sang no glad songs nor played; 
we went not to the village for barter;...Read more of this...

The Widening Spell Of Leaves

by Larry Levis
 --The Carpathian Frontier, October, 1968
 --for my brother

Once, in a foreign country, I was suddenly ill.
I was driving south toward a large city famous
For so little it had a replica, in concrete,
In two-thirds scale, of the Arc de Triomphe stuck
In the midst of traffic, & obstructing it.
But the city was hours away, beyond the hills
Shaped like the bodies of...Read more of this...

Sweet hours have perished here;

by Emily Dickinson
 Sweet hours have perished here;
This is a mighty room;
Within its precincts hopes have played, --
Now shadows in the tomb....Read more of this...

The Boy And the Angel

by Robert Browning
 Morning, evening, noon and night,
``Praise God!; sang Theocrite.

Then to his poor trade he turned,
Whereby the daily meal was earned.

Hard he laboured, long and well;
O'er his work the boy's curls fell.

But ever, at each period,
He stopped and sang, ``Praise God!''

Then back again his curls he threw,
And cheerful turned to work anew.

Said Blaise, the listening monk, ``Well done;
``I doubt not thou...Read more of this...

The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon

by J R R Tolkien
 There is an inn, a merry old inn
beneath an old grey hill,
And there they brew a beer so brown
That the Man in the Moon himself came down
one night to drink his fill.

The ostler has a tipsy cat
that plays a five-stringed fiddle;
And up and down he saws his bow
Now squeaking high, now purring low,
now sawing in the middle.

The landlord keeps...Read more of this...

A Lady

by Amy Lowell
 You are beautiful and faded
Like an old opera tune
Played upon a harpsichord;
Or like the sun-flooded silks
Of an eighteenth-century boudoir.
In your eyes
Smoulder the fallen roses of out-lived minutes,
And the perfume of your soul
Is vague and suffusing,
With the pungence of sealed spice-jars.
Your half-tones delight me,
And I grow mad with gazing
At your blent colours.
My vigour is a new-minted penny,
Which I cast at...Read more of this...

Love Came to Us

by James Joyce
  Love Came to Us


 Love came to us in time gone by 
When one at twilight shyly played 
And one in fear was standing nigh -- - 
For Love at first is all afraid. 

We were grave lovers. Love is past 
That had his sweet hours many a one; 
Welcome to us now at the last 
The ways...Read more of this...

Queen Mab in the Village

by Vachel Lindsay
 Once I loved a fairy, 
Queen Mab it was. Her voice 
Was like a little Fountain 
That bids the birds rejoice. 
Her face was wise and solemn, 
Her hair was brown and fine. 
Her dress was pansy velvet, 
A butterfly design. 

To see her hover round me 
Or walk the hills of air, 
Awakened love's deep pulses 
And boyhood's...Read more of this...

A Birthday

by Aleister Crowley
 "Aug." 10, 1911.

Full moon to-night; and six and twenty years
Since my full moon first broke from angel spheres!
A year of infinite love unwearying ---
No circling seasons, but perennial spring!
A year of triumph trampling through defeat,
The first made holy and the last made sweet
By this same love; a year of wealth and woe,
Joy, poverty, health, sickness --- all one glow
In...Read more of this...

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