Home » Famous Poems » Scales

Famous Scales Poems by Famous Poets

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

Hero And Leander

by Friedrich von Schiller

 See you the towers, that, gray and old,
Frown through the sunlight's liquid gold,
Steep sternly fronting steep?
The Hellespont beneath them swells,
And roaring cleaves the Dardanelles,
The rock-gates of the deep!
Hear you the sea, whose stormy wave,
From Asia, Europe clove in thunder?
That sea which rent a world, cannot
Rend love from love asunder!

In Hero's, in Leander's heart,
Thrills the sweet anguish of the dart
Whose...Read more of this...

Form: Narrative

For the Union Dead

by Robert Lowell

 "Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam." 

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I...Read more of this...

Marriage And Feasts

by Victor Hugo

 ("La salle est magnifique.") 
 
 {IV. Aug. 23, 1839.} 


 The hall is gay with limpid lustre bright— 
 The feast to pampered palate gives delight— 
 The sated guests pick at the spicy food, 
 And drink profusely, for the cheer is good; 
 And at that table—where the wise are few— 
 Both sexes and all...Read more of this...

daughter

by Suheir Hammad

 leaves and leaving call october home
her daughter releases wood
smoke from her skin
rich in scorpio
blood survived the first
flood each new year marks
a circle around her
thick bark middle
this the month summer and
winter fall into each
other and leave orange
yellow ashes
the vibrancy of death
carry it all
coiled in my belly
cut on the cusp 
of libra tail 
tips the scales
tonight it is raining in
the tradition...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...

Form: Free verse

Ode To an Artichoke

by Pablo Neruda

 The artichoke
of delicate heart
erect
in its battle-dress, builds
its minimal cupola;
keeps
stark
in its scallop of
scales.
Around it,
demoniac vegetables
bristle their thicknesses,
devise
tendrils and belfries,
the bulb's agitations;
while under the subsoil
the carrot
sleeps sound in its
rusty mustaches.
Runner and filaments
bleach in the vineyards,
whereon rise the vines.
The sedulous cabbage
arranges its petticoats;
oregano
sweetens a world;
and the artichoke
dulcetly there in a gardenplot,
armed for a skirmish,
goes proud
in its pomegranate
burnishes.
Till, on a day,
each by the...Read more of this...

Letters From A Man In Solitary

by Nazim Hikmet

 1
I carved your name on my watchband
with my fingernail.
Where I am, you know,
I don't have a pearl-handled jackknife
(they won't give me anything sharp)
 or a plane tree with its head in the clouds.
Trees may grow in the yard,
but I'm not allowed
 to see the sky overhead...
How many others are in this place?
I don't know.
I'm alone far from them,
they're all...Read more of this...

Plegaria (Prayer)

by Delmira Agustini

Spanish    –Eros: acaso no sentiste nuncaPiedad de las estatuas?Se dirían crisálidas de piedraDe yo no sé qué formidable razaEn una eterna espera inenarrable.Los cráteres dormidos de sus bocasDan la ceniza negra del Silencio,Mana de las columnas de sus hombrosLa mortaja copiosa de la CalmaY fluye de sus órbitas la noche;Victimas del Futuro o del Misterio,En capullos terribles y magníficosEsperan a la...Read more of this...

There was an Old Person of Sparta

by Edward Lear

There was an Old Person of Sparta,Who had twenty-five sons and one "darter;"He fed them on Snails, and weighed them in scales,That wonderful Person of Sparta. ...Read more of this...

At the Fishhouses

by Elizabeth Bishop

Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one's nose run and one's eyes water.
The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs
and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up
to storerooms in the gables
for the wheelbarrows to...Read more of this...

The Lake Isle

by Ezra Pound

 O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves, 
Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop, 
With the little bright boxes
piled up neatly upon the shelves
And the loose fragment cavendish
and the shag, 
And the bright Virginia
loose under the bright glass cases, 
And a pair of scales
not too greasy, 
And the votailles dropping in for a...Read more of this...

Cloris Charmes Dissolved by EUDORA

by Anne Killigrew

 NOt that thy Fair Hand 
Should lead me from my deep Dispaire, 
Or thy Love, Cloris, End my Care, 
 And back my Steps command: 
But if hereafter thou Retire, 
To quench with Tears, thy Wandring Fire, 
 This Clue I'll leave behinde, 
 By which thou maist untwine
 The Saddest Way, 
 To shun the Day,
 That ever...Read more of this...

The Human Face

by Paul Eluard

 I. Soon 

Of all the springtimes of the world 
This one is the ugliest 
Of all of my ways of being 
To be trusting is the best 

Grass pushes up snow 
Like the stone of a tomb 
But I sleep within the storm 
And awaken eyes bright 

Slowness, brief time ends 
Where all streets must pass 
Through my innermost...Read more of this...

Autumn Meditations (7)

by Du Fu

 Kunming lake water Han time achievement Martial emperor banners flags at eye in Weaver girl loom thread empty moon night Stone whale scale armour move autumn wind Wave toss wild rice seed sink cloud black Dew cold lotus pod fall powder red Pass fortified limit sky but bird road River lake fill earth one fisher old manRead more of this...

I Have Dreamed of You so Much

by Robert Desnos

 I have dreamed of you so much that you are no longer real.
Is there still time for me to reach your breathing body, to kiss your mouth and make
your dear voice come alive again?

I have dreamed of you so much that my arms, grown used to being crossed on my 
chest as I hugged your shadow, would perhaps not...Read more of this...

The House Of Dust: Part 02: 11: Snow falls. The sky is grey and sullenly glares

by Conrad Aiken

 Snow falls. The sky is grey, and sullenly glares
With purple lights in the canyoned street.
The fiery sign on the dark tower wreathes and flares . . .
The trodden grass in the park is covered with white,
The streets grow silent beneath our feet . . .
The city dreams, it forgets its past to-night.

And one, from his high bright window looking...Read more of this...

The Swimmer

by Adam Lindsay Gordon

 With short, sharp violent lights made vivid,
To the southward far as the sight can roam,
Only the swirl of the surges livid,
The seas that climb and the surfs that comb,
Only the crag and the cliff to nor'ward,
And rocks receding, and reefs flung forward,
And waifs wreck'd seaward and wasted shoreward
On shallows sheeted with flaming foam.

A grim grey coast and a seaboard...Read more of this...

The Rape of the Lock: Canto 5

by Alexander Pope

 She said: the pitying audience melt in tears, 
But Fate and Jove had stopp'd the Baron's ears.
In vain Thalestris with reproach assails,
For who can move when fair Belinda fails?
Not half so fix'd the Trojan could remain,
While Anna begg'd and Dido rag'd in vain.
Then grave Clarissa graceful wav'd her fan;
Silence ensu'd, and thus the nymph began.
"Say, why are beauties prais'd...Read more of this...

Faithless Sally Brown

by Thomas Hood

 Young Ben he was a nice young man,
A carpenter by trade;
And he fell in love with Sally Brown,
That was a lady's maid.

But as they fetch'd a walk one day,
They met a press-gang crew;
And Sally she did faint away,
Whilst Ben he was brought to.

The Boatswain swore with wicked words,
Enough to shock a saint,
That though she did seem in a fit,
'Twas...Read more of this...

The Disquieting Muses

by Sylvia Plath

 Mother, mother, what ill-bred aunt
Or what disfigured and unsightly
Cousin did you so unwisely keep
Unasked to my christening, that she
Sent these ladies in her stead
With heads like darning-eggs to nod
And nod and nod at foot and head
And at the left side of my crib?

Mother, who made to order stories
Of Mixie Blackshort the heroic bear,
Mother, whose witches always, always
Got baked into...Read more of this...

Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte

by George (Lord) Byron

 I 
'Tis done -- but yesterday a King! 
And arm'd with Kings to strive -- 
And now thou art a nameless thing: 
So abject -- yet alive! 
Is this the man of thousand thrones, 
Who strew'd our earth with hostile bones, 
And can he thus survive? 
Since he, miscall'd the Morning Star, 
Nor man nor fiend hath fallen so...Read more of this...

The Peaceful Shepherd

by Robert Frost

 If heaven were to do again,
And on the pasture bars,
I leaned to line the figures in
Between the dotted starts,

I should be tempted to forget,
I fear, the Crown of Rule,
The Scales of Trade, the Cross of Faith,
As hardly worth renewal.

For these have governed in our lives,
And see how men have warred.
The Cross, the Crown, the Scales may all
As well have...Read more of this...

Regeneration

by Henry Vaughan

 1.

Award, and still in bonds, one day 
I stole abroad, 
It was high-spring, and all the way 
Primros'd, and hung with shade; 
Yet, was it frost within, 
And surly winds 
Blasted my infant buds, and sin 
Like clouds eclips'd my mind.

2.

Storm'd thus; I straight perceiv'd my spring 
Mere stage, and show, 
My walk a monstrous, mountain's thing 
Rough-cast with...Read more of this...

Pompeii And Herculaneum