Famous Shapes Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Shapes poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous shapes poems. These examples illustrate what a famous shapes poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Randall Jarrell
Looking back in my mind I can see
The white sun like a tin plate
Over the wooden turning of the weeds;
The street jerking --a wet swing--
To end by the wall the children sang.
The thin grass by the girls' door,
Trodden on, straggling, yellow and rotten,
And the gaunt field with its one tied cow--
The...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
YEARS of the modern! years of the unperform’d!
Your horizon rises—I see it parting away for more august dramas;
I see not America only—I see not only Liberty’s nation, but other nations
preparing;
I see tremendous entrances and exits—I see new combinations—I see the solidarity
of
races;
I see that force advancing with irresistible power on the world’s stage;
(Have...Read more of this...
by
Percy Bysshe Shelley
I
The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark--now glittering--now reflecting gloom--
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters--with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume,
In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
Where woods...Read more of this...
by
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Eros, from rest in isles far-famed,
With rising Anthesterion rose,
And all Hellenic heights acclaimed
Eros.
The sea one pearl, the shore one rose,
All round him all the flower-month flamed
And lightened, laughing off repose.
Earth's heart, sublime and unashamed,
Knew, even perchance as man's heart knows,
The thirst of all men's nature named
Eros.
II.
Eros, a fire of heart untamed,
A light of spirit in sense that glows,
Flamed heavenward...Read more of this...
by
Robert Graves
'But that was nothing to what things came out
From the sea-caves of Criccieth yonder.'
'What were they? Mermaids? dragons? ghosts?'
'Nothing at all of any things like that.'
'What were they, then?'
'All sorts of ***** things,
Things never seen or heard or written about,
Very strange, un-Welsh, utterly peculiar
Things. Oh, solid enough they seemed to touch,
Had anyone dared it. Marvellous creation,
All various shapes...Read more of this...
by
Victor Hugo
("Dans les vieilles forêts.")
{X., April 20, 1837.}
Through ancient forests—where like flowing tide
The rising sap shoots vigor far and wide,
Mounting the column of the alder dark
And silv'ring o'er the birch's shining bark—
Hast thou not often, Albert Dürer, strayed
Pond'ring, awe-stricken—through the half-lit glade,
Pallid and...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
AMONG the bumble-bees in red-top hay, a freckled field of brown-eyed Susans dripping yellow leaves in July,
I read your heart in a book.
And your mouth of blue pansy—I know somewhere I have seen it rain-shattered.
And I have seen a woman with her head flung between her naked knees, and her head held there listening to the sea, the...Read more of this...
by
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
In those days said Hiawatha,
"Lo! how all things fade and perish!
From the memory of the old men
Pass away the great traditions,
The achievements of the warriors,
The adventures of the hunters,
All the wisdom of the Medas,
All the craft of the Wabenos,
All the marvellous dreams and visions
Of the Jossakeeds, the Prophets!
"Great men die and are forgotten,
Wise men speak; their words of wisdom
Perish...Read more of this...
by
Alan Seeger
First, London, for its myriads; for its height,
Manhattan heaped in towering stalagmite;
But Paris for the smoothness of the paths
That lead the heart unto the heart's delight. . . .
Fair loiterer on the threshold of those days
When there's no lovelier prize the world displays
Than, having beauty and your twenty years,
You have the means...Read more of this...
by
Paul Laurence Dunbar
By rugged ways and thro' the night
We struggle blindly toward the light;
And groping, stumbling, ever pray
For sight of long delaying day.
The cruel thorns beside the road
Stretch eager points our steps to goad,
And from the thickets all about
Detaining hands reach threatening out.
"Deliver us, oh, Lord," we cry,
Our hands uplifted to the sky.
No answer save the thunder's peal,
And onward, onward, still we...Read more of this...
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...
by
Aleister Crowley
Hear me, Lord of the Stars!
For thee I have worshipped ever
With stains and sorrows and scars,
With joyful, joyful endeavour.
Hear me, O lily-white goat!
O crisp as a thicket of thorns,
With a collar of gold for Thy throat,
A scarlet bow for Thy horns!
Here, in the dusty air,
I build Thee a shrine of yew.
All green is the garland I wear,
But I feed...Read more of this...
by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
To be like a fish,
Brisk and quick, is my wish;
If thou cam'st with thy line.
Thou wouldst soon make me thine.
To be like a fish,
Brisk and quick, is my wish.
Oh, were I a steed!
Thou wouldst love me indeed.
Oh, were I a car
Fit to bear thee afar!
Oh, were I a steed!
Thou wouldst love me indeed.
I would I were gold
That thy fingers...Read more of this...
by
Ruth Stone
It is so hard to see where it is,
but it is there even in the morning
when the miracle of shapes
assemble and become familiar,
but not quite; and the echo
of a voice, now changed,
utterly dissociated, as though
all warmth and shared sweetness
had never been. It is this alien
space, not stark as the moon,
but lush and almost identical
to the space that was. But it...Read more of this...
by
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I have read, in some old, marvellous tale,
Some legend strange and vague,
That a midnight host of spectres pale
Beleaguered the walls of Prague.
Beside the Moldau's rushing stream,
With the wan moon overhead,
There stood, as in an awful dream,
The army of the dead.
White as a sea-fog, landward bound,
The spectral camp was seen,
And, with a sorrowful, deep sound,
The river flowed between.
No other voice...Read more of this...
by
Vernon Scannell
And now another autumn morning finds me
With chalk dust on my sleeve and in my breath,
Preoccupied with vague, habitual speculation
On the huge inevitability of death.
Not wholly wretched, yet knowing absolutely
That I shall never reacquaint myself with joy,
I sniff the smell of ink and chalk and my mortality
And think of when I rolled, a gormless boy,
And rollicked round the playground...Read more of this...
by
Amy Lowell
See! I give myself to you, Beloved!
My words are little jars
For you to take and put upon a shelf.
Their shapes are quaint and beautiful,
And they have many pleasant colours and lustres
To recommend them.
Also the scent from them fills the room
With sweetness of flowers and crushed grasses.
When I shall have given you the last one,
You will have the whole of...Read more of this...
by
Paul Celan
The line
that remained, that
became true: . . . your
house in Paris -- become
the alterpiece of your hands.
Breathed through thrice,
shone through thrice.
...................
It's turning dumb, turning deaf
behind our eyes.
I see the poison flower
in all manner of words and shapes.
Go. Come.
Love blots out its name: to
you it ascribes itself.
Tr. Michael Hamburger...Read more of this...
by
Sylvia Plath
It is no night to drown in:
A full moon, river lapsing
Black beneath bland mirror-sheen,
The blue water-mists dropping
Scrim after scrim like fishnets
Though fishermen are sleeping,
The massive castle turrets
Doubling themselves in a glass
All stillness. Yet these shapes float
Up toward me, troubling the face
Of quiet. From the nadir
They rise, their limbs ponderous
With richness, hair heavier
Than sculptured marble. They sing
Of a world more...Read more of this...
by
William Butler Yeats
A little Indian temple in the Golden Age. Around it a garden;
around that the forest. Anashuya, the young priestess, kneeling
within the temple.
Anashuya. Send peace on all the lands and flickering
corn. -
O, may tranquillity walk by his elbow
When wandering in the forest, if he love
No other. - Hear, and may the indolent flocks
Be plentiful. - And if he love another,
May...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Hardy
THIS love puts all humanity from me;
I can but maledict her, pray her dead,
For giving love and getting love of thee--
Feeding a heart that else mine own had fed!
How much I love I know not, life not known,
Save as some unit I would add love by;
But this I know, my being is but thine own--
Fused from its separateness by...Read more of this...
by
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Lift not the painted veil which those who live
Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there,
And it but mimic all we would believe
With colours idly spread,--behind, lurk Fear
And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave
Their shadows, o'er the chasm, sightless and drear.
I knew one who had lifted it--he sought,
For his lost heart was...Read more of this...
by
Sylvia Plath
'Perspective betrays with its dichotomy:
train tracks always meet, not here, but only
in the impossible mind's eye;
horizons beat a retreat as we embark
on sophist seas to overtake that mark
where wave pretends to drench real sky.'
'Well then, if we agree, it is not odd
that one man's devil is another's god
or that the solar spectrum is
a multitude of...Read more of this...
by
William Blake
1. Lo, a shadow of horror is risen
In Eternity! Unknown, unprolific!
Self-closd, all-repelling: what Demon
Hath form'd this abominable void
This soul-shudd'ring vacuum?--Some said
"It is Urizen", But unknown, abstracted
Brooding secret, the dark power hid.
2. Times on times he divided, & measur'd
Space by space in his ninefold darkness
Unseen, unknown! changes appeard
In his desolate mountains rifted furious
By the black winds of perturbation
3. For...Read more of this...
by
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five:
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
He said to his friend, "If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry-arch
Of the...Read more of this...
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