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Famous Shaven Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry
...vate life.

The artless Aide-de-camp was mute, the shining Staff were still,
And red and ever redder grew the General's shaven gill.
And this is what he said at last (his feelings matter not): --
"I think we've tapped a private line. Hi! Threes about there! Trot!"

All honour unto Bangs, for ne'er did Jones thereafter know
By word or act official who read off that helio.
But the tale is on the Frontier, and from Michni to Mooltan
They know the worthy General as "that most imm...Read more of this...
by Kipling, Rudyard



...Fresh-shaven, past months & a picture in New York
of Beard Two, I did have Three took off. Well. .
Shadow & act, shadow & act,
Better get white or you' get whacked,
or keep so-called black
& raise new hell.

I've had enough of this dying.
You've done me a dozen goodnesses; get well.
Fight again for our own.
Henry felt baffled, in the middle of the thing.
He spent ...Read more of this...
by Berryman, John
...id to those that dwell therein.

A ship then new they built for him
of mithril and of elven glass
with shining prow; no shaven oar
nor sail she bore on silver mast:
the Silmaril as lantern light
and banner bright with living flame
to gleam thereon by Elbereth
herself was set, who thither came
and wings immortal made for him,
and laid on him undying doom,
to sail the shoreless skies and come
behind the Sun and light of Moon.

From Evergreen's lofty hills
where softly silver fo...Read more of this...
by Tolkien, J R R
..."the cure of souls." Henry James


The radiant soda of the seashore fashions
Fun, foam and freedom. The sea laves
The Shaven sand. And the light sways forward
On self-destroying waves. 

The rigor of the weekday is cast aside with shoes,
With business suits and traffic's motion;
The lolling man lies with the passionate sun,
Or is drunken in the ocean. 

A socialist health take should of the adult,
He is stripped of his class in the bathing-suit,
He returns to the children d...Read more of this...
by Schwartz, Delmore
...who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, w...Read more of this...
by Ginsberg, Allen



...!
Thee, chauntress, oft the woods among
I woo, to hear thy even-song;
And, missing thee,I walk unseen
On the dry smooth-shaven green,
To behold the wandering moon,
Riding near her highest noon,
Like one that had been led astray
Through the heaven's wide pathless way,
And oft, as if her head she bowed,
Stooping through a fleecy cloud.
Oft, on a plat of rising ground,
I hear the far-off curfew sound,
Over some wide-watered shore,
Swinging slow with sullen roar;
Or, if the air w...Read more of this...
by Milton, John
...ing,
Repetitive adorning
The rockeried roundabout;

For every raw obscenity
Must have its small 'amenity,'
Its patch of shaven green,
And hoardings look a wonder
In banks of floribunda
With floodlights in between.

Leave no old village standing
Which could provide a landing
For aeroplanes to roar,
But spare such cheap defacements
As huts with shattered casements
Unlived-in since the war.

Let no provincial High Street
Which might be your or my street
Look as it used to do,
Bu...Read more of this...
by Betjeman, John
...it tasted like them all;
The figures I have seen
Set orderly, for burial,
Reminded me of mine,

As if my life were shaven
And fitted to a frame,
And could not breathe without a key;
And 't was like midnight, some,

When everything that ticked has stopped,
And space stares, all around,
Or grisly frosts, first autumn morns,
Repeal the beating ground.

But most like chaos,--stopless, cool,--
Without a chance or spar,--
Or even a report of land
To justify despai...Read more of this...
by Dickinson, Emily
...the two directions
has made, skillfully, something dark-true,
as the evening calls the bird up into
the branches of the shaven hedgerows,
to twitter bodily
a makeshift coat — the boxelder cut back stringently by the owner 
that more might grow next year, and thicker, you know — 
the birds tucked gestures on the inner branches — 
and space in the heart, 
not shade-giving, not 
chronological...Oh transformer, logic, where are you here in this fold, 
my name being called-out now...Read more of this...
by Graham, Jorie
...human weight upon his frame had cast. 

XI 

Himself he propped, limbs, body, and pale face, 
Upon a long grey staff of shaven wood: 
And, still as I drew near with gentle pace, 
Upon the margin of that moorish flood 
Motionless as a cloud the old Man stood, 
That heareth not the loud winds when they call 
And moveth all together, if it move at all. 

XII 

At length, himself unsettling, he the pond 
Stirred with his staff, and fixedly did look 
Upon the muddy water, which he...Read more of this...
by Wordsworth, William
...human weight upon his frame had cast. 

XI 

Himself he propped, limbs, body, and pale face, 
Upon a long grey staff of shaven wood: 
And, still as I drew near with gentle pace, 
Upon the margin of that moorish flood 
Motionless as a cloud the old Man stood, 
That heareth not the loud winds when they call 
And moveth all together, if it move at all. 

XII 

At length, himself unsettling, he the pond 
Stirred with his staff, and fixedly did look 
Upon the muddy water, which he...Read more of this...
by Wordsworth, William
...butterflies of a monster size--then I knew it for the Dead.
Its face was rubbed and slicked and scrubbed as smooth as a shaven pate;
In the silver snakes that the water makes it gleamed like a dinner-plate.

It gurgled near, and clear and clear and large and large it grew;
It stood upright in a ring of light and it looked me through and through.
It weltered round with a woozy sound, and ere I could retreat,
With the witless roll of a sodden soul it wantoned to my feet.

And h...Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William
...ouch and swing around the ring
We trod the Fools' Parade!
We did not care: we knew we were
The Devil's Own Brigade:
And shaven head and feet of lead
Make a merry masquerade.

We tore the tarry rope to shreds
With blunt and bleeding nails;
We rubbed the doors, and scrubbed the floors,
And cleaned the shining rails:
And, rank by rank, we soaped the plank,
And clattered with the pails.

We sewed the sacks, we broke the stones,
We turned the dusty drill:
We banged the tins, and b...Read more of this...
by Wilde, Oscar
...waded fresh from foam,
Before they were turned to women
By the god of the nails from Rome;

"But since you bent to the shaven men,
Who neither lust nor smite,
Thunder of Thor, we hunt you
A hare on the mountain height."

King Guthrum smiled a little,
And said, "It is enough,
Nephew, let Elf retune the string;
A boy must needs like bellowing,
But the old ears of a careful king
Are glad of songs less rough."

Blue-eyed was Elf the minstrel,
With womanish hair and ring,
Yet hea...Read more of this...
by Chesterton, G K
...
but even asleep I was shocked out of narrative

by your face, the physical fact of your face:
inches from mine, smooth-shaven, loving, alert.
Why so difficult, remembering the actual look
of you? Without a photograph, without strain?

So when I saw your unguarded, reliable face,
your unmistakable gaze opening all the warmth
and clarity of you—warm brown tea—we held
each other for the time the dream allowed.

Bless you. You came back so I could see you
once more, plainly, so ...Read more of this...
by Doty, Mark
...ellous nice,
Shaved as thou wert ear-barber by profession!"
Whereat one witling cries, "'tis monstrous fit,
In sooth, a shaven-pated priest should have
A shaven-eared audience;" and another,
"Give thanks, thou Jacques, to this most gracious Duke
That rids thee of the life-long dread of loss
Of thy two ears, by cropping them at once;
And now henceforth full safely thou may'st dare
The powerfullest Lord in France to touch
An ear of thine;" and now the knave o' the knife
Seizes ...Read more of this...
by Lanier, Sidney
...my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
“Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore—
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!”
            Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

    Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning—little relevancy bore;
    For we ...Read more of this...
by Poe, Edgar Allan
...vants turned terribly every way,
And the gold of the King's Servants rose higher every day.
They burnt the homes of the shaven men, that had been quaint and kind,
Till there was no bed in a monk's house, nor food that man could find.
The inns of God where no man paid, that were the wall of the weak.
The King's Servants ate them all. And still we did not speak.

And the face of the King's Servants grew greater than the King:
He tricked them, and they trapped him, and stood rou...Read more of this...
by Chesterton, G K
...te an exile from her shore, 
Against his countrymen he bore 
The arms they taught to bear; and now 
The turban girt his shaven brow. 
Through many a change had Corinth pass'd 
With Greece to Venice' rule at last; 
And here, before her walls, with those 
To Greece and Venice equal foes, 
He stood a foe, with all the zeal 
Which young and fiery converts feel, 
Within whose heated bosom throngs 
The memory of a thousand wrongs. 
To him had Venice ceased to be 
Her ancient civic ...Read more of this...
by Byron, George (Lord)
...te;
She to the austral waters took her way,
Beyond the fabulous Thamondocana.

Where, like a meadow which no scythe has shaven,
Which rain could never bend or whirlblast shake,
With the antarctic constellations paven,
Canopus and his crew, lay the austral lake--
There she would build herself a windless haven
Out of the clouds whose moving turrets make
The bastions of the storm, when through the sky
The spirits of the tempest thundered by:--

A haven beneath whose translucent ...Read more of this...
by Shelley, Percy Bysshe

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry