Famous Point Out Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Carmel Point

by Robinson Jeffers
 The extraordinary patience of things! 
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of surburban houses-
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads-
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all...Read more of this...

from Jubilate Agno Fragment B lines 695-768

by Christopher Smart
 For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For is this done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which...Read more of this...

VERSES Occasioned by a Young Ladys asking the Author What was a Cure for Love?

by Thomas Godfrey
 From me, my Dear, O seek not to receive
What e'en deep-read Experience cannot give.
We may, indeed, from the Physician's skill
Some Med'cine find to cure the body's ill.
But who e'er found the physic for the soul,
Or made th' affections bend to his controul?
When thro' the blaze of passion objects show
How dark 's the shade! how bright the colours glow!
All the...Read more of this...

A Boy Named Sue

by Shel Silverstein
 Well, my daddy left home when I was three,
and he didn't leave much to Ma and me,
just this old guitar and a bottle of booze.
Now I don't blame him because he run and hid,
but the meanest thing that he ever did was
before he left he went and named me Sue.

Well, he must have thought it was quite a joke,
and...Read more of this...

An August Midnight

by Thomas Hardy
 I 

A shaded lamp and a waving blind, 
And the beat of a clock from a distant floor: 
On this scene enter--winged, horned, and spined - 
A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore; 
While 'mid my page there idly stands 
A sleepy fly, that rubs its hands . . . 

II 

Thus meet we five, in this still place,...Read more of this...

Long Point Light

by Mark Doty
 Long Pont's apparitional
this warm spring morning,
the strand a blur of sandy light,


and the square white
of the lighthouse-separated from us
by the bay's ultramarine


as if it were nowhere
we could ever go-gleams
like a tower's ghost, hazing


into the rinsed blue of March,
our last outpost in the huge
indetermination of sea.


It seems cheerful enough,
in the strengthening sunlight,
fixed point accompanying our walk

along the shore. Sometimes I...Read more of this...

The Man-Moth

by Elizabeth Bishop
 Man-Moth: Newspaper misprint for "mammoth."

 Here, above,
cracks in the buldings are filled with battered moonlight.
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,
and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.
He does not see the moon; he observes only her...Read more of this...

The Breaking Point

by Stephen Vincent Benet
 It was not when temptation came, 
Swiftly and blastingly as flame, 
And seared me white with burning scars; 
When I stood up for age-long wars 
And held the very Fiend at grips; 
When all my mutinous body rose 
To range itself beside my foes, 
And, like a greyhound in the slips, 
The Beast that dwells within me roared, 
Lunging...Read more of this...

We never joy enjoy to that full point

by Fernando Pessoa
We never joy enjoy to that full point

Regret doth wish joy had enjoyèd been,

Nor have the strength regret to disappoint

Recalling not past joy's thought, but its mien.

Yet joy was joy when it enjoyèd was

And after-enjoyed when as joy recalled,

It must have been joy ere its joy did pass

And, recalled, joy still, since its being-past galled.

Alas! All this is useless, for...Read more of this...

The universe is but a point in our poor round of life;

by Omar Khayyam
The universe is but a point in our poor round of life;
the Djeihoun [Oxus] but a feeble trace of tears and
blood; Hell but a spark of useless worry which we give
ourselves, and Paradise an instant of repose, which here
below we rarely catch....Read more of this...

Loon Point

by Amy Lowell
 Softly the water ripples
Against the canoe's curving side,
Softly the birch trees rustle
Flinging over us branches wide.
Softly the moon glints and glistens
As the water takes and leaves,
Like golden ears of corn
Which fall from loose-bound sheaves,
Or like the snow-white petals
Which drop from an overblown rose,
When Summer ripens to Autumn
And the freighted year must close.
From the shore come the scents of a...Read more of this...

I Remember I Remember

by Philip Larkin
 Coming up England by a different line
For once, early in the cold new year,
We stopped, and, watching men with number plates
Sprint down the platform to familiar gates,
'Why, Coventry!' I exclaimed. 'I was born here.'

I leant far out, and squinnied for a sign
That this was still the town that had been 'mine'
So long, but found I wasn't even clear
Which side...Read more of this...

The Ballad Of Pious Pete

by Robert William Service
 "The North has got him." --Yukonism.


I tried to refine that neighbor of mine, honest to God, I did.
I grieved for his fate, and early and late I watched over him like a kid.
I gave him excuse, I bore his abuse in every way that I could;
I swore to prevail; I camped on his trail; I plotted and planned for...Read more of this...

And Doth Not a Meeting Like This

by Thomas Moore
 And doth not a meeting like this make amends 
For all the long years I've been wandering away -- 
To see thus around me my youth's early friends, 
As smiling and kind as in that happy day? 
Though haply o'er some of your brows, as o'er mine, 
The snow -- fall of time may be stealing -- what then?...Read more of this...

The Imperfect Enjoyment

by John Wilmot
 Naked she lay, clasped in my longing arms,
I filled with love, and she all over charms;
Both equally inspired with eager fire,
Melting through kindness, flaming in desire.
With arms,legs,lips close clinging to embrace,
She clips me to her breast, and sucks me to her face.
Her nimble tongue, Love's lesser lightening, played
Within my mouth, and to my thoughts conveyed
Swift orders that I should...Read more of this...

While The Bannock Bakes

by Robert William Service
 Light up your pipe again, old chum, and sit awhile with me;
I've got to watch the bannock bake -- how restful is the air!
You'd little think that we were somewhere north of Sixty-three,
Though where I don't exactly know, and don't precisely care.
The man-size mountains palisade us round on every side;
The river is a-flop with fish, and ripples silver-clear;
The midnight...Read more of this...

The Vantage Point

by Robert Frost
 If tired of trees I seek again mankind,
Well I know where to hie me--in the dawn,
To a slope where the cattle keep the lawn.
There amid lolling juniper reclined,
Myself unseen, I see in white defined
Far off the homes of men, and farther still,
The graves of men on an opposing hill,
Living or dead, whichever are to mind.

And if by noon I...Read more of this...

Apostasy

by Charlotte Bronte
 THIS last denial of my faith, 
Thou, solemn Priest, hast heard; 
And, though upon my bed of death,
I call not back a word.
Point not to thy Madonna, Priest,­
Thy sightless saint of stone; 
She cannot, from this burning breast,
Wring one repentant moan. 

Thou say'st, that when a sinless child, 
I duly bent the knee,
And prayed to what in marble smiled...Read more of this...

Tortoise Shell

by D. H. Lawrence
 The Cross, the Cross
Goes deeper in than we know,
Deeper into life;
Right into the marrow
And through the bone.
Along the back of the baby tortoise
The scales are locked in an arch like a bridge,
Scale-lapping, like a lobster's sections
Or a bee's.

Then crossways down his sides
Tiger-stripes and wasp-bands.

Five, and five again, and five again,
And round the edges twenty-five little ones,
The sections of the...Read more of this...

A Poetry Reading At West Point

by William Matthews
 I read to the entire plebe class,
in two batches. Twice the hall filled
with bodies dressed alike, each toting
a copy of my book. What would my
shrink say, if I had one, about
such a dream, if it were a dream?

Question and answer time.
"Sir," a cadet yelled from the balcony,
and gave his name and rank, and then,
closing his parentheses, yelled
"Sir" again. "Why...Read more of this...

The Purse-Seine

by Robinson Jeffers
 Our sardine fishermen work at night in the dark
 of the moon; daylight or moonlight
They could not tell where to spread the net, 
 unable to see the phosphorescence of the 
 shoals of fish.
They work northward from Monterey, coasting 
 Santa Cruz; off New Year's Point or off 
 Pigeon Point
The look-out man will see some lakes of...Read more of this...

The Battle of Waterloo

by William Topaz McGonagall
 'Twas in the year 1815, and on the 18th day of June,
That British cannon, against the French army, loudly did boom,
Upon the ever memorable bloody field of Waterloo;
Which Napoleon remembered while in St. Helena, and bitterly did rue. 
The morning of the 18th was gloomy and cheerless to behold,
But the British soon recovered from the severe cold
That they had...Read more of this...

Love Compared To A Game Of Tables

by William Strode
 Love is a game at tables where the dye
Of mayds affections doth by fancie fly:
If once you catch their fancie in a blott
It's tenne to one if then you enter not:
You being a gamester then may boldly venter,
And if you finde the point lye open enter:
But marke them well, for by false playing then,
Doe what you can they will...Read more of this...

The Capture of Lucknow

by William Topaz McGonagall
 'Twas near the Begum Kothie the battle began,
Where innocent blood as plentiful as water ran;
The Begum Kothie was a place of honour given to the 93rd,
Which heroically to a man they soon did begird. 

And the 4th Punjaub Rifles were their companions in glory,
And are worthy of their names enrolled in story,
Because they performed prodigious wonders in the fight,
By...Read more of this...

What the Captain Said at the Point-to-Point

by Siegfried Sassoon
 I’ve had a good bump round; my little horse 
Refused the brook first time, 
Then jumped it prime; 
And ran out at the double, 
But of course
There’s always trouble at a double: 
And then—I don’t know how 
It was—he turned it up 
At that big, hairy fence before the plough; 
And some young silly pup
(I don’t know which), 
Near...Read more of this...

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