Famous Portraits Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Portraits poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous portraits poems. These examples illustrate what a famous portraits poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Erica Jong
If you ask him he will talk for hours--
how at fourteen he hammered signs, fingers
raw with cold, and later painted bowers
in ladies' boudoirs; how he played checkers
for two weeks in jail, and lived on dark bread;
how he fled the border to a country
which disappeared wars ago; unfriended
crossed a continent while this century
began. He seldom speaks of painting now.
Young men...Read more of this...
by
Jim Carroll
1/
Genius is not a generous thing
In return it charges more interest than any amount of royalties can cover
And it resents fame
With bitter vengeance
Pills and powdres only placate it awhile
Then it puts you in a place where the planet's poles reverse
Where the currents of electricity shift
Your Body becomes a magnet and pulls to it despair and rotten teeth,
Cheese...Read more of this...
by
Rainer Maria Rilke
Suddenly from all the green around you
something-you don't know what-has disappeared;
you feel it creeping closer to the window
in total silence. From the nearby wood
you hear the urgent whistling of a plover
reminding you of someone's Saint Jerome:
so much solitude and passion come
from that one voice whose fierce request the downpour
will grant. The walls with their ancient portraits glide
away from us cautiously...Read more of this...
by
Billy Collins
Remember the 1340's? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called "Find the Cow."
Everything was...Read more of this...
by
William Butler Yeats
I. Ancestral Houses
Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns,
Amid the rustle of his planted hills,
Life overflows without ambitious pains;
And rains down life until the basin spills,
And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains
As though to choose whatever shape it wills
And never stoop to a mechanical
Or servile shape, at others' beck and call.
Mere dreams, mere dreams! Yet Homer had...Read more of this...
by
Erica Jong
"...a frozen memory, like any photo,
where nothing is missing, not even,
and especially, nothingness..."
-- Julio Cortázar, "Blow Up"
Mirror-mad,
he photographed reflections:
sunstorms in puddles,
cities in canals,
double portraits framed
in sunglasses,
the fat phantoms who dance
on the flanks of cars.
Nothing caught his eye
unless it bent
or glistered
over something else.
He trapped clouds in bottles
the way kids
trap grasshoppers.
Then one misty day
he was stopped
by the windshield.
Behind him,
an avenue of...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
I
Through my bedroom window
The coal carts jolted over the cobbles
A slow heavy rhythm full,
Light and fast returning empty.
The coal office manager was a dwarf
With sixty year old skin
On a ten year old’s body and
Hornrims on a wizened wizard’s face.
The enormous shire horses neighed
In warning if you went near,
Their polished brasses gleaming,
Their worn blinkers waxed;
When they brought in lorries
A two...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
Portraits are to daily faces
As an Evening West,
To a fine, pedantic sunshine --
In a satin Vest!...Read more of this...
by
Billy Collins
In most self-portraits it is the face that dominates:
Cezanne is a pair of eyes swimming in brushstrokes,
Van Gogh stares out of a halo of swirling darkness,
Rembrant looks relieved as if he were taking a breather
from painting The Blinding of Sampson.
But in this one Goya stands well back from the mirror
and is seen posed in the clutter of his studio
addressing...Read more of this...
by
Rainer Maria Rilke
I held myself too open, I forgot
that outside not just things exist and animals
fully at ease in themselves, whose eyes
reach from their lives' roundedness no differently
than portraits do from frames; forgot that I
with all I did incessantly crammed
looks into myself; looks, opinion, curiosity.
Who knows: perhaps eyes form in space
and look on everywhere. Ah, only plunged toward you
does my face...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
RESPONDEZ! Respondez!
(The war is completed—the price is paid—the title is settled beyond recall;)
Let every one answer! let those who sleep be waked! let none evade!
Must we still go on with our affectations and sneaking?
Let me bring this to a close—I pronounce openly for a new distribution of roles;
Let that which stood in front go behind!...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
1.
I am thirty this November.
You are still small, in your fourth year.
We stand watching the yellow leaves go *****,
flapping in the winter rain.
falling flat and washed. And I remember
mostly the three autumns you did not live here.
They said I'd never get you back again.
I tell you what you'll never really know:
all the medical hypothesis
that explained my brain will never...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
From out her shabby rain-coat pocket
The little Jew girl in the train
Produced a dinted silver locket
With pasted in it portraits twain.
"These are my parents, sir" she said;
"Or were, for now I fear they're dead.
"I know to Belsen they were sent;
I never heard of them again.
So many were like that - they went,
Our woeful quest was all in vain.
I was...Read more of this...
by
Charlotte Bronte
ARRANGING long-locked drawers and shelves
Of cabinets, shut up for years,
What a strange task we've set ourselves !
How still the lonely room appears !
How strange this mass of ancient treasures,
Mementos of past pains and pleasures;
These volumes, clasped with costly stone,
With print all faded, gilding gone;
These fans of leaves, from Indian trees
These...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
I watched one day a parrot grey - 'twas in a barber shop.
"Cuckold!" he cried, until I sighed: "You feathered devil, stop!"
Then balefully he looked at me, and slid along his perch,
With sneering eye that seemed to pry me very soul to search.
So fierce, so bold, so grim, so cold, so agate was his stare:
And then that bird I...Read more of this...
by
William Butler Yeats
I
Around me the images of thirty years:
An ambush; pilgrims at the water-side;
Casement upon trial, half hidden by the bars,
Guarded; Griffith staring in hysterical pride;
Kevin O'Higgins' countenance that wears
A gentle questioning look that cannot hide
A soul incapable of remorse or rest;
A revolutionary soldier kneeling to be blessed;
II
An Abbot or Archbishop with an upraised hand
Blessing the Tricolour. 'This is not,'...Read more of this...
by
Richard Aldington
I
The bitterness. the misery, the wretchedness of childhood
Put me out of love with God.
I can't believe in God's goodness;
I can believe
In many avenging gods.
Most of all I believe
In gods of bitter dullness,
Cruel local gods
Who scared my childhood.
II
I've seen people put
A chrysalis in a match-box,
"To see," they...Read more of this...
by
Derek Walcott
There were still shards of an ancient pastoral
in those shires of the island where the cattle drank
their pools of shadow from an older sky,
surviving from when the landscape copied such objects as
"Herefords at Sunset in the valley of the Wye."
The mountain water that fell white from the mill wheel
sprinkling like petals from the...Read more of this...
by
David Lehman
The old war is over the new one has begun
between drivers and pedestrians on a Friday
in New York light is the variable and structure
the content according to Rodrigo Moynihan's
self-portraits at the Robert Miller Gallery where
the painter is serially pictured holding a canvas,
painting his mirror image, shirtless in summer,
with a nude, etc., it's two o'clock and I'm walking
at top speed...Read more of this...
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