Famous Rags Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Rags poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous rags poems. These examples illustrate what a famous rags poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Vasko Popa
Get out of my walled infinity
Of the star circle round my heart
Of my mouthful of sun
Get out of the comic sea of my blood
Of my flow of my ebb
Get out of my stranded silence
Get out I said get out
Get out of my living abyss
Of the bare father-tree within me
Get out how long must I cry get out
Get out of...Read more of this...
by
Edwin Muir
It was not meant for human eyes,
That combat on the shabby patch
Of clods and trampled turf that lies
Somewhere beneath the sodden skies
For eye of toad or adder to catch.
And having seen it I accuse
The crested animal in his pride,
Arrayed in all the royal hues
Which hide the claws he well can use
To tear the heart out of the side.
Body of...Read more of this...
by
Robert Browning
Just for a handful of silver he left us,
Just for a riband to stick in his coat—
Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us,
Lost all the others she lets us devote;
They, with the gold to give, doled him out silver,
So much was theirs who so little allowed:
How all our copper had gone for his service!
Rags—were they purple,...Read more of this...
by
Vasko Popa
Enough chattering violets enough sweet trash
I won't hear anything know anything
Enough enough of all
I'll say the last enough
Fill my mouth with earth
Grit my teeth
To break off you skull guzzler
To break off once for all
I'll just be what I am
Without root without branch without crown
I'll lean on myself
On my own bumps and bruises
I'll be the hawthorn stake through you
That's all...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
In rags mysterious as these
The shining Courtiers go --
Veiling the purple, and the plumes --
Veiling the ermine so.
Smiling, as they request an alms --
At some imposing door!
Smiling when we walk barefoot
Upon their golden floor!...Read more of this...
by
Adrienne Rich
In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to
But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but...Read more of this...
by
Vasko Popa
Just come to my mind
My thoughts will scratch out your face
Just come into my sight
My eyes will start snarling at you
Just open your mouth
My silence will smash your jaws
Just remind me of you
My remembering will paw up the ground under your feet
That's what it's come to between us...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
My rhymes are rough, and often in my rhyming
I've drifted, silver-sailed, on seas of dream,
Hearing afar the bells of Elfland chiming,
Seeing the groves of Arcadie agleam.
I was the thrall of Beauty that rejoices
From peak snow-diademed to regal star;
Yet to mine aerie ever pierced the voices,
The pregnant voices of the Things That Are.
The Here, the Now,...Read more of this...
by
Vasko Popa
Give me back my rags
My rags of pure dreaming
Of silk smiling of striped foreboding
Of my cloth of lace
My rags of spotted hope
Of burnished desire of chequered glances
Of skin from my face
Give me back my rags
Give me when I ask you nicely...Read more of this...
by
Leonard Cohen
Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by
You can spend the night beside her
And you know that she's half crazy
But that's why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges
That come all the way from China
And just when you mean to...Read more of this...
by
Sappho
That country girl has witched your wishes
all dressed up in her country clothes
and she hasn't got the sense
to hitch her rags above her ankles.
--Translated by Jim Powell ...Read more of this...
by
William Henry Davies
One night when I went down
Thames' side, in London Town,
A heap of rags saw I,
And sat me down close by.
That thing could shout and bawl,
But showed no face at all;
When any steamer passed
And blew a loud shrill blast,
That heap of rags would sit
And make a sound like it;
When struck...Read more of this...
by
Vachel Lindsay
I asked the old *****, "What is that bird that sings so well?" He answered: "That is the Rachel-Jane." "Hasn't it another name, lark, or thrush, or the like?" "No. Jus' Rachel-Jane."
I. IN WHICH A RACING AUTO COMES FROM THE EAST
This is the order of the music of the morning: —
First, from the far East comes but a crooning.
The...Read more of this...
by
William Carlos (WCW) Williams
The pure products of America
go crazy—
mountain folk from Kentucky
or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and
valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between
devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure—
and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday
to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no
peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt
sheer rags-succumbing...Read more of this...
by
Obi Nwakanma
I
ICICLES fall from trees, molten with age,
without memory - they stand aloof in their
nakedness - they limber;
like the gods terrified into silence,
like tall brooding deities looming out of the
fog:
The forest hugs them
carves them into stones,
Etches them into the slow
eastern landscape: rivers, hills
the slow running water,
times broken inscapes…
The willows are...Read more of this...
by
Katherine Mansfield
Heavens above! here's an old tie of your--
Sea-green dragons stamped on a golden ground.
Ha! Ha! Ha! What children we were in those days.
Do you love me enough to wear it now?
Have you the courage of your pristine glories?
Ha! Ha! Ha! You laugh and shrug your shoulders.
Those were the days when a new tie spelt a fortune:
We wore it in...Read more of this...
by
Robert Herrick
THE FAIRY TEMPLE; OR, OBERON'S CHAPEL
DEDICATED TO MR JOHN MERRIFIELD,
COUNSELLOR AT LAW
RARE TEMPLES THOU HAST SEEN, I KNOW,
AND RICH FOR IN AND OUTWARD SHOW;
SURVEY THIS CHAPEL BUILT, ALONE,
WITHOUT OR LIME, OR WOOD, OR STONE.
THEN SAY, IF ONE THOU'ST SEEN MORE FINE
THAN THIS, THE FAIRIES' ONCE, NOW THINE.
THE TEMPLE
A way enchaced with glass and beads
There is, that to the Chapel...Read more of this...
by
Vasko Popa
I've wiped your face off my face
Ripped your shadow off my shadow
Leveled the hills in you
Turned your plains into hills
Set your seasons quarreling
Turned all the ends of the world from you
Wrapped the path of my life around you
My impenetrable my impossible path
Just try to meet me now...Read more of this...
by
Sir Walter Raleigh
Attend my words, my gentle knave,
And you shall learn from me
How boys at dinner may behave
With due propriety.
Guard well your hands: two things have been
Unfitly used by some;
The trencher for a tambourine,
The table for a drum.
We could not lead a pleasant life,
And 'twould be finished soon,
If peas were eaten...Read more of this...
by
Keith Douglas
Shall I get drunk or cut myself a piece of cake,
a pasty Syrian with a few words of English
or the Turk who says she is a princess--she dances
apparently by levitation? Or Marcelle, Parisienne
always preoccupied with her dull dead lover:
she has all the photographs and his letters
tied in a bundle and stamped Decede in mauve ink.
All this takes place in...Read more of this...
by
Mother Goose
Hark, hark! the dogs do bark!
Beggars are coming to town:
Some in jags, and some in rags,
And some in velvet gown....Read more of this...
by
Rg Gregory
(a)
they seek to celebrate the word
not to bring their knives out on a poem
dissecting it to find a heart
whose beat lies naked on a table
not to score in triumph on a line
no sensitive would put a nostril to
but simply to receive it as an
offering glimpsing the sacred there
poem probes the poet's once-intention
but each time said budges its truth
afresh (leaving...Read more of this...
by
John Davidson
I hang about the streets all day,
At night I hang about;
I sleep a little when I may,
But rise betimes the morning's scout;
For through the year I always hear
Afar, aloft, a ghostly shout.
My clothes are worn to threads and loops;
My skin shows here and there ;
About my face like seaweed droops
My tangled beard, my tangled hair;
From cavernous and shaggy brows
My...Read more of this...
by
Alan Seeger
Their strength had fed on this when Death's white arms
Came sleeved in vapors and miasmal dew,
Curling across the jungle's ferny floor,
Becking each fevered brain. On bleak divides,
Where Sleep grew niggardly for nipping cold
That twinged blue lips into a mouthed curse,
Not back to Seville and its sunny plains
Winged their brief-biding dreams, but once...Read more of this...
by
Lucy Maud Montgomery
Genius, like gold and precious stones,
is chiefly prized because of its rarity.
Geniuses are people who dash of weird, wild,
incomprehensible poems with astonishing facility,
and get booming drunk and sleep in the gutter.
Genius elevates its possessor to ineffable spheres
far above the vulgar world and fills his soul
with regal contempt for the gross and sordid...Read more of this...
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