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Famous Screens Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Fu, Du
...at the Jade Lake, From the east, Han pass is filled with purple vapour. Like shifting cloud, the pheasant tail screens of the palace open, Bathed in sun of dragon scales, I know the holy face. Now I lie by this cold river, amazed the year's so late, How many times by the blue chains was I there in the morning court?...Read more of this...



by Tebb, Barry
...one lit by a

Hundred bulbs but

Its graveyard

Shifted aside.



Where are the banked

Stones of the dead?

Behind screens they raised

Their bones and counted

Their skulls and moved

Them in barrows.

The railway’s banks

Are buttressed with the

Moved memorial stones

The diggers wore sacking

Over their faces and

Burned their shovels.





8



Every garden and park

Is a hypothesis for God

When I hear a distant buzz

I cannot tell if it is

A bee or saw.Read more of this...

by Reeser, Jennifer
...houlder, smoothing down my sleeve,
the Russian blizzards somehow less than bleak,
portrayed with whimsy on the backdrop screens
in dolloped watercolors as they are.
I ask if you know what their movement means.
You wish our situation not so far.

And everywhere, the audience defies
convention and conformity, some dressed
as though they had been made to improvise
at the last minute, some in black-tie best.

You’re happy, in new satin, having run
your fingers cou...Read more of this...

by Hope, Alec Derwent (A D)
...ll living, know that state of hell, 
And let me see them perish, Lord, and laugh. 

Let them be glued to television screens 
Till their minds fester and the trash they see 
Worm their dry hearts away to crackling shells; 
Let ends be so revenged upon their means 
That all that once was human grows to be 
A flaccid mass of phototropic cells; 

Let the dog love his vomit still, the swine 
Squelch in the slough; and let their only speech 
Be Babel; let the specious lies they...Read more of this...

by Fu, Du
...ed our hearts without shame or evasion. Golden orioles flit across the beams, Purple doves descend from lattice screens. Myself, I think I've found a place that suits, I walk by flowers at my own slow pace. Tangxiu lifts me from my sickly state, And smiling, asks me to write a poem....Read more of this...



by Rossetti, Christina
...ut from all his canvases,
     One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:
     We found her hidden just behind those screens,
That mirror gave back all her loveliness.
A queen in opal or in ruby dress,
     A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens,
     A saint, an angel—every canvas means
The same one meaning, neither more nor less.
He feeds upon her face by day and night,
     And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,
Fair as the moon and joyful as ...Read more of this...

by Gluck, Louise
...It is a summer evening.
The yellow moths sag
against the locked screens
and the faded curtains
suck over the window sills
and from another building
a goat calls in his dreams.
This is the TV parlor
in the best ward at Bedlam.
The night nurse is passing
out the evening pills.
She walks on two erasers,
padding by us one by one.
MY sleeping pill is white.
It is a splendid pearl;
it floats me out of mysel...Read more of this...

by Strand, Mark
...house.
Only the cricket will be up,
repeating its one shrill note
to the rotten boards of the porch,
to the rusted screens, to the air, to the rimless dark,
to the sea that keeps to itself.
Why should my mother awake?
The earth is not yet a garden
about to be turned. The stars
are not yet bells that ring
at night for the lost.
It is much too late....Read more of this...

by Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...ious eyes not yet sincere enough
To pierce the glimmered cloud that fluctuates
Between me and the glorifying light
That screens itself with knowledge, I discern
The searching rays of wisdom that reach through
The mist of shame's infirm credulity,
And infinitely wonder if hard words
Like mine have any message for the dead. 

XIII 

I grant you friendship is a royal thing,
But none shall ever know that royalty
For what it is till he has realized
His best friend in himself.<...Read more of this...

by Brautigan, Richard
...for the year to end. He had a

small room above the kitchen.

 It looked down on the bookstore and had Chinese screens

in front of it. The room contained a couch, a glass cabinet

with Chinese things in it and a table and three chairs. There

was a tiny bathroom fastened like a watch fob to the room.

 I was sitting on a stool in the bookstore one afternoon

reading a book that was in the shape of a chalice. The book

had clear pages like gin, and th...Read more of this...

by Plath, Sylvia
...e a mirror.

At this facet the bridegroom arrives
Lord of the mirrors!
It is himself he guides

In among these silk
Screens, these rustling appurtenances.
I breathe, and the mouth

Veil stirs its curtain
My eye
Veil is

A concatenation of rainbows.
I am his.
Even in his

Absence, I
Revolve in my
Sheath of impossibles,

Priceless and quiet
Among these parrakeets, macaws!
O chatterers

Attendants of the eyelash!
I shall unloose
One feather, like the peacock....Read more of this...

by Sandburg, Carl
...ted czars straddling vermillion balloons;
I saw then the fires flash one by one: good-by: then smoke, smoke;
And in the screens the great sisters of night and cool stars, sitting women arranging their hair,
Waiting in the sky, waiting with slow easy eyes, waiting and half-murmuring:
 “Since you know all
 and I know nothing,
 tell me what I dreamed last night.”

Pearl cobwebs in the windy rain,
in only a flicker of wind,
are caught and lost and never known again.

A po...Read more of this...

by Hope, Alec Derwent (A D)
...ll living, know that state of hell, 
And let me see them perish, Lord, and laugh. 

Let them be glued to television screens 
Till their minds fester and the trash they see 
Worm their dry hearts away to crackling shells; 
Let ends be so revenged upon their means 
That all that once was human grows to be 
A flaccid mass of phototropic cells; 

Let the dog love his vomit still, the swine 
Squelch in the slough; and let their only speech 
Be Babel; let the specious lies they...Read more of this...

by Betjeman, John
...walls resound
With the tap upon polished parquet of inflexible nurses' feet
Shall I myself by lying when they range the screens around?
And say shall I groan in dying, as I twist the sweaty sheet?
Or gasp for breath uncrying, as I feel my senses drown'd
While the air is swimming with insects and children play in the street?...Read more of this...

by Frost, Robert
...ght to be a view around the world 
From such a mountain--if it isn't wooded 
Clear to the top." I saw through leafy screens 
Great granite terraces in sun and shadow, 
Shelves one could rest a knee on getting up-- 
With depths behind him sheer a hundred feet; 
Or turn and sit on and look out and down, 
With little ferns in crevices at his elbow. 
"As to that I can't say. But there's the spring, 
Right on the summit, almost like a fountain. 
That ought to be wo...Read more of this...

by Cowper, William
...and, in bright apparel clad
And fledg'd with icy feathers, nod superb.
The cattle mourn in corners where the fence
Screens them, and seem half petrified to sleep
In unrecumbent sadness. There they wait
Their wonted fodder; not like hung'ring man,
Fretful if unsupply'd; but silent, meek,
And patient of the slow-pac'd swain's delay.
He from the stack carves out th' accustom'd load,
Deep-plunging, and again deep-plunging oft,
His broad keen knife into the solid mass...Read more of this...

by Reeser, Jennifer
...turned to the sky,

reflecting on my dresser
from mirror-fine sateens:
the Great Bear with the Lesser…
I dream of Shoji screens,

and when desire becomes
an overlaying itch,
the throbbing in my thumbs
untenable to stitch,

sleek, fitted, with the passion
of Shaka Zulu’s face,
reversed and fringe-of-fashion,
I put it on, in place

of achromatic egrets,
the vacant crystal ball.
Victoria has secrets.
I am her baby doll....Read more of this...

by Plath, Sylvia
...e white and stopped, like clocks.
Voices stand back and flatten. Their visible hieroglyphs
Flatten to parchment screens to keep the wind off.
They paint such secrets in Arabic, Chinese!

I am dumb and brown. I am a seed about to break.
The brownness is my dead self, and it is sullen:
It does not wish to be more, or different.
Dusk hoods me in blue now, like a Mary.
O color of distance and forgetfulness!--
When will it be, the second when Time break...Read more of this...

by Stevenson, Robert Louis
...The bones of antelope, the wings of albatross, 
The pied and painted birds and beans, 
The junks and bangles, beads and screens, 
The gods and sacred bells, 
And the load-humming, twisted shells! 
The level of the parlour floor 
Was honest, homely, Scottish shore; 
But when we climbed upon a chair, 
Behold the gorgeous East was there! 
Be this a fable; and behold 
Me in the parlour as of old, 
And Minnie just above me set 
In the quaint Indian cabinet!...Read more of this...

by Tebb, Barry
...n? Come and join us

What’s your name?" Age has driven my shyness away 

As I join the crowd beneath the turning purple screens 

Bannered ‘****** lasts for ever’ and sip unending 

Halves of bitter, as I circulate among the crowd, 

Being complete in itself and out for a good night out,

A relief from factory, shop floor and market stall

Running from the reality of the ward where my son 

Pounds the ledge with his fist and seems out to blast

My very existence with words li...Read more of this...

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Book: Shattered Sighs