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Famous Short Beauty Poems

Famous Short Beauty Poems. Short Beauty Poetry by Famous Poets. A collection of the all-time best Beauty short poems


by William Butler Yeats
 Earth in beauty dressed
Awaits returning spring.
All true love must die,
Alter at the best
Into some lesser thing.
Prove that I lie.

Such body lovers have,
Such exacting breath,
That they touch or sigh.
Every touch they give,
Love is nearer death.
Prove that I lie.



by Langston Hughes
Ah,
My black one,
Thou art not beautiful
Yet thou hast
A loveliness
Surpassing beauty.

Oh,
My black one,
Thou art not good
Yet thou hast
A purity
Surpassing goodness.

Ah,
My black one,
Thou art not luminous
Yet an altar of jewels,
An altar of shimmering jewels,
Would pale in the light
Of thy darkness,
Pale in the light
Of thy nightness.

by Edgar Allan Poe
Helen thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore 
That gently o'er a perfumed sea 
The weary wayworn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.

On desperate seas long wont to roam 
Thy hyacinth hair thy classic face 
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome.

Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand 
The agate lamp within thy hand!
Ah Psyche from the regions which
Are Holy Land!

by Wendell Berry
 When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Silvia  Create an image from this poem
by William Shakespeare
 WHO is Silvia? What is she? 
 That all our swains commend her? 
Holy, fair, and wise is she; 
 The heaven such grace did lend her, 
That she might admired be. 

Is she kind as she is fair? 
 For beauty lives with kindness: 
Love doth to her eyes repair, 
 To help him of his blindness; 
And, being help'd, inhabits there. 

Then to Silvia let us sing, 
 That Silvia is excelling; 
She excels each mortal thing 
 Upon the dull earth dwelling: 
To her let us garlands bring.



by Emily Dickinson
 The earth has many keys,
Where melody is not
Is the unknown peninsula.
Beauty is nature's fact.

But witness for her land,
And witness for her sea,
The cricket is her utmost
Of elegy to me.

Alone  Create an image from this poem
by Walter de la Mare
 The abode of the nightingale is bare,
Flowered frost congeals in the gelid air,
The fox howls from his frozen lair:
Alas, my loved one is gone,
I am alone:
It is winter.

Once the pink cast a winy smell,
The wild bee hung in the hyacinth bell,
Light in effulgence of beauty fell:
I am alone:
It is winter.

My candle a silent fire doth shed,
Starry Orion hunts o'erhead;
Come moth, come shadow, the world is dead:
Alas, my loved one is gone,
I am alone;
It is winter.

by Dejan Stojanovic
There is a moonlight note
In the Moonlight Sonata; 
There is a thunder note
In an angry sky.

Sound unbound by nature
Becomes bounded by art.
There is no competition of sounds
Between a nightingale and a violin.

Nature rewards and punishes
By offering unpredictable ways; 
Art is apotheosis; 
Often, the complaint of beauty.

Nature is an outcry, 
Unpolished truth; 
The art—a euphemism— 
Tamed wilderness. 

by Walter de la Mare
 Nay, nay, sweet England, do not grieve! 
Not one of these poor men who died 
But did within his soul believe 
That death for thee was glorified. 

Ever they watched it hovering near 
That mystery 'yond thought to plumb, 
Perchance sometimes in loathèd fear 
They heard cold Danger whisper, Come! -- 

Heard and obeyed. O, if thou weep 
Such courage and honour, beauty, care, 
Be it for joy that those who sleep 
Only thy joy could share.

by Edward Estlin (E E) Cummings
O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting

fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked

thee
has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy

beauty .how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true

to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover

thou answerest

them only with

spring)

by Pablo Neruda
 O tower of light, sad beauty
that magnified necklaces and statues in the sea,
calcareous eye, insignia of the vast waters, cry
of the mourning petrel, tooth of the sea, wife
of the Oceanian wind, O separate rose
from the long stem of the trampled bush
that the depths, converted into archipelago,
O natural star, green diadem,
alone in your lonesome dynasty,
still unattainable, elusive, desolate
like one drop, like one grape, like the sea.

Please  Create an image from this poem
by Sappho
Come back to me Gongyla here tonight 
You my rose with your Lydian lyre.
There hovers forever around you delight:
A beauty desired. 

Even your garment plunders my eyes.
I am enchanted: I who once
Complained to the Cyprus-born goddess 
Whom I now beseech 

Never to let this lose me grace
But rather bring you back to me:
Amongst all mortal women the one
I most wish to see. 

--Translated by Paul Roche 

Halved  Create an image from this poem
by Spike Milligan
 The essence of true beauty
Lingers in all-encompassing rainbows
Of your joy and laughter

You hold my hand and smile
As we ensconce ourselves in our world of fire
Our love is all there is

I touch your face
Your gentleness astounds me
I'm held in the honour of your love

Then overnight, the wrold truns suor
61 mInnIts past the ELevenTHH HouRR
I'M A L 0 N E

Beauty  Create an image from this poem
by Charles Baudelaire
 I HAVE seen dawn and sunset on moors and windy hills 
Coming in solemn beauty like slow old tunes of Spain: 
I have seen the lady April bringing the daffodils, 
Bringing the springing grass and the soft warm April rain. 

I have heard the song of the blossoms and the old chant of the sea, 
And seen strange lands from under the arched white sails of ships; 
But the loveliest thing of beauty God ever has shown to me, 
Are her voice, and her hair, and eyes, and the dear red curve of her lips.

by Spike Milligan
 Pass by citizen
don't look left or right
Keep those drip dry eyes straight ahead
A tree? Chop it down- it's a danger
to lightning!
Pansies calling for water,
Let 'em die- ***** bastards-
Seek comfort in the scarlet, labour
saving plastic rose
Fresh with the frangrance of Daz!
Sunday! Pray citizen;
Pray no rain will fall
On your newly polished
Four wheeled
God

Envoi

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder
Get it out with Optrex

by Christina Rossetti
 Oh why is heaven built so far,
 Oh why is earth set so remote?
I cannot reach the nearest star
 That hangs afloat.

I would not care to reach the moon,
 One round monotonous of change;
Yet even she repeats her tune
 Beyond my range.

I never watch the scatter'd fire
 Of stars, or sun's far-trailing train,
But all my heart is one desire,
 And all in vain:

For I am bound with fleshly bands,
 Joy, beauty, lie beyond my scope;
I strain my heart, I stretch my hands,
 And catch at hope.

by Sara Teasdale
 I thought of you and how you love this beauty,
And walking up the long beach all alone 
I heard the waves breaking in measured thunder
As you and I once heard their monotone.

Around me were the echoing dunes, beyond me
The cold and sparkling silver of the sea --
We two will pass through death and ages lengthen
Before you hear that sound again with me.

by Anna Akhmatova
An as it's going often at love's breaking,
The ghost of first days came again to us,
The silver willow through window then stretched in,
The silver beauty of her gentle branches.
The bird began to sing the song of light and pleasure
To us, who fears to lift looks from the earth,
Who are so lofty, bitter and intense,
About days when we were saved together. 

Beauty  Create an image from this poem
by Charles Baudelaire
 Say not of beauty she is good, 
Or aught but beautiful, 
Or sleek to doves' wings of the wood 
Her wild wings of a gull.

Call her not wicked; that word's touch 
Consumes her like a curse; 
But love her not too much, too much, 
For that is even worse.

O, she is neither good nor bad, 
But innocent and wild! 
Enshrine her and she dies, who had 
The hard heart of a child.

by John Clare
 When once the sun sinks in the west,
And dewdrops pearl the evening's breast;
Almost as pale as moonbeams are,
Or its companionable star,
The evening primrose opes anew
Its delicate blossoms to the dew;
And, hermit-like, shunning the light,
Wastes its fair bloom upon the night,
Who, blindfold to its fond caresses,
Knows not the beauty it possesses;
Thus it blooms on while night is by;
When day looks out with open eye,
Bashed at the gaze it cannot shun,
It faints and withers and is gone.

by Hilaire Belloc
 Of three in One and One in three 
My narrow mind would doubting be 
Till Beauty, Grace and Kindness met 
And all at once were Juliet.

by Walter de la Mare
 When the rose is faded, 
Memory may still dwell on 
Her beauty shadowed, 
And the sweet smell gone. 

That vanishing loveliness, 
That burdening breath, 
No bond of life hath then, 
Nor grief of death. 

'Tis the immortal thought 
Whose passion still 
Makes the changing 
The unchangeable. 

Oh, thus thy beauty, 
Loveliest on earth to me, 
Dark with no sorrow, shines 
And burns, with thee.

by Edna St. Vincent Millay
 I

I had forgotten how the frogs must sound
After a year of silence, else I think
I should not so have ventured forth alone
At dusk upon this unfrequented road.

II

I am waylaid by Beauty. Who will walk
Between me and the crying of the frogs?
Oh, savage Beauty, suffer me to pass,
That am a timid woman, on her way
From one house to another!

by Jack Gilbert
 Poetry is a kind of lying,
necessarily. To profit the poet
or beauty. But also in
that truth may be told only so.

Those who, admirably, refuse
to falsify (as those who will not
risk pretensions) are excluded
from saying even so much.

Degas said he didn't paint
what he saw, but what
would enable them to see
the thing he had.

by Wang Wei
 My heart in middle age found the Way. 
And I came to dwell at the foot of this mountain. 
When the spirit moves, I wander alone 
Amid beauty that is all for me.... 
I will walk till the water checks my path, 
Then sit and watch the rising clouds -- 
And some day meet an old wood-cutter 
And talk and laugh and never return.


Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry