Famous Scrawled Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Spring Rain

by Sara Teasdale
 I thought I had forgotten,
 But it all came back again
To-night with the first spring thunder
 In a rush of rain.

I remembered a darkened doorway
 Where we stood while the storm swept by,
Thunder gripping the earth
 And lightning scrawled on the sky.

The passing motor busses swayed,
 For the street was a river of rain,
Lashed into little golden waves
 In...Read more of this...

Clarence Darrow

by Edgar Lee Masters
 This is Darrow, 
Inadequately scrawled, with his young, old heart, 
And his drawl, and his infinite paradox 
And his sadness, and kindness, 
And his artist sense that drives him to shape his life 
To something harmonious, even against the schemes of God....Read more of this...

Going Back to School

by Stephen Vincent Benet
 The boat ploughed on. Now Alcatraz was past 
And all the grey waves flamed to red again 
At the dead sun's last glimmer. Far and vast 
The Sausalito lights burned suddenly 
In little dots and clumps, as if a pen 
Had scrawled vague lines of gold across the hills; 
The sky was like a cup some rare wine fills,...Read more of this...

Yes the Dead Speak to Us

by Carl Sandburg
 YES, the Dead speak to us.
This town belongs to the Dead, to the Dead and to the Wilderness.

Back of the clamps on a fireproof door they hold the papers of the Dead in a house here
And when two living men fall out, when one says the Dead spoke a Yes, and the other says the Dead spoke a No,...Read more of this...

The Furies

by Weldon Kees
 Not a third that walks beside me,
But five or six or more.
Whether at dusk or daybreak
Or at blinding noon, a retinue
Of shadows that no door
Excludes.--One like a kind of scrawl,
Hands scrawled trembling and blue,
A harelipped and hunchbacked dwarf
With a smile like a grapefruit rind,
Who jabbers the way I do
When the brain is empty and tired
And the guests no longer...Read more of this...

In the Pink

by Siegfried Sassoon
 So Davies wrote: ' This leaves me in the pink. ' 
Then scrawled his name: ' Your loving sweetheart Willie ' 
With crosses for a hug. He'd had a drink 
Of rum and tea; and, though the barn was chilly, 
For once his blood ram warm; he had pay to spend, 
Winter was passing; soon the year would mend....Read more of this...

Bag Of Mice

by Nick Flynn
 I dreamt your suicide note
was scrawled in pencil on a brown paperbag,
& in the bag were six baby mice. The bag
opened into darkness,
smoldering
from the top down. The mice,
huddled at the bottom, scurried the bag
across a shorn field. I stood over it
& as the burning reached each carbon letter
of what you'd written
your voice released into the night
like a song, &...Read more of this...

Modern Love: I

by George Meredith
 By this he knew she wept with waking eyes:
That, at his hand's light quiver by her head,
The strange low sobs that shook their common bed
Were called into her with a sharp surprise,
And strangled mute, like little gaping snakes,
Dreadfully venomous to him. She lay
Stone-still, and the long darkness flowed away
With muffled pulses. Then, as midnight makes
Her giant heart of Memory...Read more of this...

Portrait of a Boy

by Stephen Vincent Benet
 After the whipping he crawled into bed, 
Accepting the harsh fact with no great weeping. 
How funny uncle's hat had looked striped red! 
He chuckled silently. The moon came, sweeping 
A black, frayed rag of tattered cloud before 
In scorning; very pure and pale she seemed, 
Flooding his bed with radiance. On the floor 
Fat motes danced. He sobbed,...Read more of this...

Baltic Fog Notes

by Carl Sandburg
 (Bergen)SEVEN days all fog, all mist, and the turbines pounding through high seas.
I was a plaything, a rat’s neck in the teeth of a scuffling mastiff.
Fog and fog and no stars, sun, moon.
Then an afternoon in fjords, low-lying lands scrawled in granite languages on a gray sky,
A night harbor, blue dusk mountain shoulders against a night sky,
And a circle...Read more of this...

Thangbrand the Priest

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 Short of stature, large of limb,
Burly face and russet beard,
All the women stared at him,
When in Iceland he appeared.
"Look!" they said,
With nodding head,
"There goes Thangbrand, Olaf's Priest."

All the prayers he knew by rote,
He could preach like Chrysostome,
From the Fathers he could quote,
He had even been at Rome.
A learned clerk,
A man of mark,
Was this Thangbrand, Olaf's Priest.

He was quarrelsome and...Read more of this...

Interim

by Edna St. Vincent Millay
 The room is full of you!—As I came in
And closed the door behind me, all at once
A something in the air, intangible,
Yet stiff with meaning, struck my senses sick!—

Sharp, unfamiliar odors have destroyed
Each other room's dear personality.
The heavy scent of damp, funereal flowers,—
The very essence, hush-distilled, of Death—
Has strangled that habitual breath of home
Whose expiration leaves all houses dead;
And...Read more of this...

A Song of Defeat

by G K Chesterton
 The line breaks and the guns go under, 
The lords and the lackeys ride the plain; 
I draw deep breaths of the dawn and thunder, 
And the whole of my heart grows young again. 
For our chiefs said 'Done,' and I did not deem it; 
Our seers said 'Peace,' and it was not peace; 
Earth will grow worse till...Read more of this...

Unity

by George William Russell
 ONE thing in all things have I seen:
One thought has haunted earth and air:
Clangour and silence both have been
Its palace chambers. Everywhere


I saw the mystic vision flow
And live in men and woods and streams,
Until I could no longer know
The dream of life from my own dreams.


Sometimes it rose like fire in me
Within the depths of my own mind,
And spreading...Read more of this...

The Dead Heart

by Anne Sexton
 After I wrote this, a friend scrawled on this page, "Yes." 

And I said, merely to myself, "I wish it could be for a 
different seizure--as with Molly Bloom and her ‘and 
yes I said yes I will Yes."

It is not a turtle 
hiding in its little green shell. 
It is not a stone 
to pick up and put...Read more of this...

Hélas

by Oscar Wilde
To drift with every passion till my soul
Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play,
Is it for this that I have given away
Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control?
Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll
Scrawled over on some boyish holiday
With idle songs for pipe and virelay,
Which do but mar the secret of the whole.
Surely there was a time I...Read more of this...

The Quarry

by William Vaughn Moody
 Between the rice swamps and the fields of tea
I met a sacred elephant, snow-white.
Upon his back a huge pagoda towered
Full of brass gods and food of sacrifice.
Upon his forehead sat a golden throne,
The massy metal twisted into shapes
Grotesque, antediluvian, such as move
In myth or have their broken images
Sealed in the stony middle of the hills.
A peacock spread his thousand...Read more of this...

Modern Love I: By This He Knew She Wept

by George Meredith
 By this he knew she wept with waking eyes:
That, at his hand's light quiver by her head,
The strange low sobs that shook their common bed
Were called into her with a sharp surprise,
And strangled mute, like little gaping snakes,
Dreadfully venomous to him. She lay
Stone-still, and the long darkness flowed away
With muffled pulses. Then, as midnight makes
Her giant heart of Memory...Read more of this...

Helas!

by Oscar Wilde
 To drift with every passion till my soul
Is a stringed lute on which can winds can play,
Is it for this that I have given away
Mine ancient wisdom and austere control?
Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll
Scrawled over on some boyish holiday
With idle songs for pipe and virelay,
Which do but mar the secret of the whole.
Surely there was a time...Read more of this...

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