Famous Playing Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Playing poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous playing poems. These examples illustrate what a famous playing poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Shakespeare, William
...g in eternal love.
''But, O my sweet, what labour is't to leave
The thing we have not, mastering what not strives,
Playing the place which did no form receive,
Playing patient sports in unconstrained gyves?
She that her fame so to herself contrives,
The scars of battle 'scapeth by the flight,
And makes her absence valiant, not her might.
''O, pardon me, in that my boast is true:
The accident which brought me to her eye
Upon the moment did her force subdue,
And now s...Read more of this...
by
Brackenridge, Hugh Henry
...ls one half the year in shades.
Or that Aurora which the sailor sees
Beneath the pole in dancing beams of light,
Playing its gambols on the northern hills.
That light is vain and gives no genial heat,
To warm the tenants of those frozen climes,
Or give that heav'nly vigour to the soul,
Which truth divine and revelation brings;
And but for which each heart must still remain,
Hard as the rock on Scandanavia's shore,
Cold as the ice which bridges up her streams...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...eola around your head;
No more of soft astral, but dazzling and fierce,
With war’s flames, and the lambent lightnings playing,
And your port immovable where you stand;
With still the inextinguishable glance, and the clench’d and lifted fist,
And your foot on the neck of the menacing one, the scorner, utterly crush’d beneath
you;
The menacing, arrogant one, that strode and advanced with his senseless scorn, bearing the
murderous knife;
—Lo! the wide swelling one, the b...Read more of this...
by
Keats, John
...no one near to help me? No fair dawn
Of life from charitable voice? No sweet saying
To set my dull and sadden'd spirit playing?
No hand to toy with mine? No lips so sweet
That I may worship them? No eyelids meet
To twinkle on my bosom? No one dies
Before me, till from these enslaving eyes
Redemption sparkles!--I am sad and lost."
Thou, Carian lord, hadst better have been tost
Into a whirlpool. Vanish into air,
Warm mountaineer! for canst thou only bear
A woman's si...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...the sea keeps rocking in
and she wants to talk to God.
Interrogator:
Why talk to God?
Anne:
It's better than playing bridge.
*
Learning to talk is a complex business.
My daughter's first word was utta,
meaning button.
Before there are words
do you dream?
In utero
do you dream?
Who taught you to suck?
And how come?
You don't need to be taught to cry.
The soul presses a button.
Is the cry saying something?
Does it mean help?
Or he...Read more of this...
by
Plath, Sylvia
...es,
caper with candles in their heads;
the leaves applaud, and santa claus flies in
scattering candy from a zeppelin,
playing his prodigal charades.
The moon leans down to took; the tilting fish
in the rare river wink and laugh; we lavish
blessings right and left and cry
hello, and then hello again in deaf
churchyard ears until the starlit stiff
graves all carol in reply.
Now kiss again: till our strict father leans
to call for curtain on our thousand scenes;
...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
..., Walt Whitman?
What waves and soils exuding?
What climes? what persons and lands are here?
Who are the infants? some playing, some slumbering?
Who are the girls? who are the married women?
Who are the groups of old men going slowly with their arms about each other’s necks?
What rivers are these? what forests and fruits are these?
What are the mountains call’d that rise so high in the mists?
What myriads of dwellings are they, fill’d with dwellers?
2
Within me latitud...Read more of this...
by
Frost, Robert
...I would go to no such length.
At the same time you can’t deny it makes
It not a mite worse, sitting here, we three,
Playing our fancy, to have the snowline run
So high across the pane outside. There where
There is a sort of tunnel in the frost
More like a tunnel than a hole—way down
At the far end of it you see a stir
And quiver like the frayed edge of the drift
Blown in the wind. I like that—I like that.
Well, now I leave you, people.”
“Come, Meserve,
We...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...se together—they slowly circle around.
I believe in those wing’d purposes,
And acknowledge red, yellow, white, playing within me,
And consider green and violet, and the tufted crown, intentional;
And do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else;
And the jay in the woods never studied the gamut, yet trills pretty well to me;
And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me.
14
The wild gander leads his flock through the co...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...y up
wuntil they become flour,
snowing themselves onto the table
beside the drone of the refrigerator,
beside the radio playing Frankie
(as often as FM will allow)
snowing lightly, a tremor sinking from the ceiling--
as twenty-five years split from my side
like a growth that I sliced off like a melanoma.
It is six P.M. as I water these tiny weeds
and their little half-life,
their numbered days
that raged like a secret radio,
recalling love that I picked up innoce...Read more of this...
by
Masefield, John
...
And shook him like a dog a rat.
"I can't turn round but what you're straying.
I'll give you tales and gipsy playing.
I'll give you wand'ring off like this
And listening to whatever 'tis,
You'll laugh the little side of the can,
You'll have the whip for his, my man;
And not a bite of meat nor bread
You'll touch before you go to bed.
Some day you'll break your mother's heart,
After God knows she done her part,
Working her arms off day and night
Try...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Robert
...tree.
When, in a moment, my ear was arrested
By---was it singing, or was it saying,
Or a strange musical instrument playing
In the chamber?---and to be certain
I pushed the lattice, pulled the curtain,
And there lay Jacynth asleep,
Yet as if a watch she tried to keep,
In a rosy sleep along the floor
With her head against the door;
While in the midst, on the seat of state,
Was a queen---the Gipsy woman late,
With head and face downbent
On the lady's head and face intent:
F...Read more of this...
by
Jonson, Ben
...the glass,
By atoms moved;
Could you believe that this the body was
Of one that loved?
And in his mistress' flame, playing like a fly,
Turned to cinders by her eye:
Yes; and in death, as life, unblessed,
To have it expressed,
Even ashes of lovers find no rest....Read more of this...
by
Wordsworth, William
...all, Or in the castle he's pursuing, Among the ghosts, his own undoing; Or playing with the waterfall," At poor old Susan then she railed, While to the town she posts away; "If Susan had not been so ill, Alas! I should have had him still, My Johnny, till my dying day." Poor Betty! in this sad distemper, The d...Read more of this...
by
Chaucer, Geoffrey
...n,
Of which I tolde you, and telle shall),
Was even joinant* to the garden wall, *adjoining
There as this Emily had her playing.
Bright was the sun, and clear that morrowning,
And Palamon, this woful prisoner,
As was his wont, by leave of his gaoler,
Was ris'n, and roamed in a chamber on high,
In which he all the noble city sigh*, *saw
And eke the garden, full of branches green,
There as this fresh Emelia the sheen
Was in her walk, and roamed up and down.
This sorrow...Read more of this...
by
Chaucer, Geoffrey
...ing" -- not very far from Spelman's rendering.
39. He had more tow on his distaff: a proverbial saying: he was
playing a deeper game, had more serious business on hand.
40. Ere: before; German, "eher."
41. Sell: sill of the door, threshold; French, "seuil," Latin,
"solum," the ground. Read more of this...
by
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...em with facts. One reared a font of stone
And drew, from butts of water on the slope,
The fountain of the moment, playing, now
A twisted snake, and now a rain of pearls,
Or steep-up spout whereon the gilded ball
Danced like a wisp: and somewhat lower down
A man with knobs and wires and vials fired
A cannon: Echo answered in her sleep
From hollow fields: and here were telescopes
For azure views; and there a group of girls
In circle waited, whom the electric shock...Read more of this...
by
Miller, Alice Duer
...ohn bought a pipe from Bacon,
And I acquired there
The Anecdotes of Painting
From a handcart in the square.
The Playing fields at sunset
Were vivid emerald green,
The elms were tall and mighty,
And many youths were seen,
Carefree young gentlemen
In the Spring of 'Fourteen.
XI
London, just before dawn-immense and dark—
Smell of wet earth and growth from the empty Park,
Pall Mall vacant-Whitehall deserted. Johnnie and I
Strolling together, averse to saying g...Read more of this...
by
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...breathing, beating, warm, and undecaying,
Like one asleep in a green hermitage,--
With gentle smiles about its eyelids playing,
And living in its dreams beyond the rage
Of death or life; while they were still arraying
In liveries ever new the rapid, blind,
And fleeting generations of mankind.
And she would write strange dreams upon the brain
Of those who were less beautiful, and make
All harsh and crooked purposes more vain
Than in the desert is the serpent's wake
Which...Read more of this...
by
Ferlinghetti, Lawrence
...mon tabernacles washed away like barnacles
Coyotes are confounded & swim nowhere
An orchestra onstage in Omaha
keeps on playing Handel's Water Music
Horns fill with water
ans bass players float away on their instruments
clutching them like lovers horizontal
Chicago's Loop becomes a rollercoaster
Skyscrapers filled like water glasses
Great Lakes mixed with Buddhist brine
Great Books watered down in Evanston
Milwaukee beer topped with sea foam
Beau Fleuve of Buffalo suddenly be...Read more of this...
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