Famous Shelf Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Shelf poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous shelf poems. These examples illustrate what a famous shelf poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
See also:
...ing, as you propose.
But it's all of no use, and I'm sorry I've written,--
I shall see your thin volume some day on my shelf;
For the rhyming tarantula surely has bitten,
And music must cure you, so pipe it yourself....Read more of this...
by
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
...: so they are!
An India screen is pretty furniture,
A piano-forte is a fine resource,
All Balzac's novels occupy one shelf,
The new edition fifty volumes long;
And little Greek books, with the funny type
They get up well at Leipsic, fill the next:
Go on! slabbed marble, what a bath it makes!
And Parma's pride, the Jerome, let us add!
'T were pleasant could Correggio's fleeting glow
Hang full in face of one where'er one roams,
Since he more than the others brings wi...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Robert
...mselves to her body. I could tell you about her ass. We went
into the kitchen.
She took a jar of instant coffee off the shelf and put it on the table. She placed a
cup next to it, and a spoon. I looked at them. She put a pan full of water on the stove
and turned the gas on under it.
All this time she did not say a word. Her clothes adjusted themselves to her body. I
won't. She left the kitchen.
Then she went down the stairs and outside to see if she had any mail. I didn't rem...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...th his old sea-friend,
Bought Annie goods and stores, and set his hand
To fit their little streetward sitting-room
With shelf and corner for the goods and stores.
So all day long till Enoch's last at home,
Shaking their pretty cabin, hammer and axe,
Auger and saw, while Annie seem'd to hear
Her own death-scaffold raising, shrill'd and rang,
Till this was ended, and his careful hand,--
The space was narrow,--having order'd all
Almost as neat and close as Nature packs
Her bloss...Read more of this...
by
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...friend! Come, take thy place on the settle
Close by the chimney-side, which is always empty without thee;
Take from the shelf overhead thy pipe and the box of tobacco;
Never so much thyself art thou as when through the curling
Smoke of the pipe or the forge thy friendly and jovial face gleams
Round and red as the harvest moon through the mist of the marshes."
Then, with a smile of content, thus answered Basil the blacksmith,
Taking with easy air the accustomed seat by the fir...Read more of this...
by
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...g icebergs crunch as they go.
This is a face of bitter herbs—this an emetic—they need no label;
And more of the drug-shelf, laudanum, caoutchouc, or hog’s-lard.
This face is an epilepsy, its wordless tongue gives out the unearthly cry,
Its veins down the neck distended, its eyes roll till they show nothing but their whites,
Its teeth grit, the palms of the hands are cut by the turn’d-in nails,
The man falls struggling and foaming to the ground while he speculates well....Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...
in the Louvre
my days are all the same
like the six sides of a wood cube.
My head is full of sharp smells
like the shelf of a medicine cabinet.
20 March
I admire those Flemish painters:
is it easy to give the air of a naked goddess
to the plump ladies
of milk and sausage merchants?
But
even if you wear silk panties,
cow + silk panties = cow.
Last night
a window
was left open.
The naked Flemish goddesses caught cold.
All day
today,
turning their bare
mountain-li...Read more of this...
by
Hikmet, Nazim
...y the big silence of the piano and say it.
I say it in front of a painting of the sea.
I tap out its rhythm on an empty shelf.
I listen to myself saying it,
then I say it without listening,
then I hear it without saying it.
And when the dog looks up at me,
I kneel down on the floor
and whisper it into each of his long white ears.
It's the one about the one-ton temple bell
with the moth sleeping on its surface,
and every time I say it, I feel the excruciating
pressure of t...Read more of this...
by
Collins, Billy
...e rule every host and hostess ought to keep with the comb and nail file and bicarbonate and aromatic spirits on a handy shelf,
Which is don't spoil the denouement by telling the guests everything is terrible, but let them have the thrill of finding it out for themselves....Read more of this...
by
Nash, Ogden
..., sun-winged June morning spread itself Over
the quiet garden. And they packed
Full twenty baskets with the fruit. "My shelf Of
cordials will be stored with what it lacked.
In future, none of us will drink strong ale, But cherry-brandy." "Vastly
good, I vow,"
And Gervase gave the tree another shake. The
cherries seemed to flow
Out of the sky in cloudfuls, like blown hail.
Swift Lady Eunice ran, her farthingale,
Unnoticed, tangling in a fallen rake.
XXXI
She gave a little...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...could thither come, and whence;
So that it seems a thing endued with sense:
Like a sea-beast crawled forth, that on a shelf
Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself;
X
Such seemed this Man, not all alive nor dead,
Nor all asleep--in his extreme old age:
His body was bent double, feet and head
Coming together in life's pilgrimage;
As if some dire constraint of pain, or rage
Of sickness felt by him in times long past,
A more than human weight upon his frame ha...Read more of this...
by
Wordsworth, William
...
Its kings and barons proud—its priests, and warlike lords, and courtly dames;
Pass’d to its charnel vault—laid on the shelf—coffin’d, with Crown and Armor on,
Blazon’d with Shakspeare’s purple page,
And dirged by Tennyson’s sweet sad rhyme.
I say I see, my friends, if you do not, the Animus of all that World,
Escaped, bequeath’d, vital, fugacious as ever, leaving those dead remains, and now this
spot
approaching, filling;
—And I can hear what maybe you do not—a terri...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...wn feet have tried it well.
Allons! be not detain’d!
Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopen’d!
Let the tools remain in the workshop! let the money remain unearn’d!
Let the school stand! mind not the cry of the teacher!
Let the preacher preach in his pulpit! let the lawyer plead in the court, and the judge
expound
the
law.
Mon enfant! I give you my hand!
I give you my love, more precious than money,
I give you myself, before pr...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...fragile, which told aright
The vows of an eighteenth-century knight.
The cruder tones of old Dutch jugs
Glared from one shelf, where Toby mugs
Endlessly drank the foaming ale,
Its froth grown dusty, awaiting sale.
The glancing light of the burning wood
Played over a group of jars which stood
On a distant shelf, it seemed the sky
Had lent the half-tones of his blazonry
To paint these porcelains with unknown hues
Of reds dyed purple and greens turned blues,
Of lustres with so e...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
..., with a fancy so unkind to mirth,
A sense so hard, a style so worn and bare,
Look ye for any welcome anywhere
From any shelf or heart-home on the earth?
Should others ask you this, say then I yearn'd
To write you such as once, when I was young,
Finding I should have loved and thereto turn'd.
'Twere something yet to live again among
The gentle youth beloved, and where I learn'd
My art, be there remember'd for my song.
52
Who takes the census of the living dead,
Ere the day...Read more of this...
by
Bridges, Robert Seymour
...k and craggy boss
Of that huge cliff whose ample verge
Tradition calls the Hero's Targe.
Couched on a shelf beneath its brink,
Close where the thundering torrents sink,
Rocking beneath their headlong sway,
And drizzled by the ceaseless spray,
Midst groan of rock and roar of stream,
The wizard waits prophetic dream.
Nor distant rests the Chief;—but hush!
See, gliding slow through mist and bush,
The hermit gains ...Read more of this...
by
Scott, Sir Walter
...nt,
And down the way you use to come,
She look'd with discontent.
"She left the novel half-uncut
Upon the rosewood shelf;
She left the new piano shut:
She could not please herseif
"Then ran she, gamesome as the colt,
And livelier than a lark
She sent her voice thro' all the holt
Before her, and the park.
"A light wind chased her on the wing,
And in the chase grew wild,
As close as might be would he cling
About the darling child:
"But light as any wind that ...Read more of this...
by
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...r own rottenness, light as an elf,
Or wisp that flits o'er a morass: he lurks,
It may be, still, like dull books on a shelf,
In his own den, to scrawl some 'Life' or 'Vision,'
As Welborn says — 'the devil turn'd precisian.'
CVI
As for the rest, to come to the conclusion
Of this true dream, the telescope is gone
Which kept my optics free from all delusion,
And show'd me what I in my turn have shown;
All I saw farther, in the last confusion,
Was, that King George s...Read more of this...
by
Byron, George (Lord)
...got nobody in all this world,
Ain't got nobody but ma self.
I's gwine to quit ma frownin'
And put ma troubles on the shelf."
Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more--
"I got the Weary Blues
And I can't be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can't be satisfied--
I ain't happy no mo'
And I wish that I had died."
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped ...Read more of this...
by
Hughes, Langston
...nswer,
The children come hurried and weeping, and the brothers and sisters are sent for,
Medicines stand unused on the shelf—(the camphor-smell has long pervaded the rooms,)
The faithful hand of the living does not desert the hand of the dying,
The twitching lips press lightly on the forehead of the dying,
The breath ceases, and the pulse of the heart ceases,
The corpse stretches on the bed, and the living look upon it,
It is palpable as the living are palpable.
The li...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
Dont forget to view our wonderful member Shelf poems.