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Famous Shriveled Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Amichai, Yehuda
...uddled, doesn't learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures 
and its pains.

He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there's time for everything....Read more of this...



by Wylie, Elinor
...ss feet? 
Piled in his barrow, tawnier than wheat, 
Lie heaps of smouldering daisies, sombre-eyed, 
Their copper petals shriveled up with pride, 
Hot with a superfluity of heat, 
Like a great brazier borne along the street 
By captive leopards, black and burning pied.

Are there no water-lilies, smooth as cream, 
With long stems dripping crystal? Are there none 
Like those white lilies, luminous and cool, 
Plucked from some hemlock-darkened northern stream 
By fair-haired...Read more of this...

by Sandburg, Carl
...A MAN saw the whole world as a grinning skull and
cross-bones. The rose flesh of life shriveled from all
faces. Nothing counts. Everything is a fake. Dust to
dust and ashes to ashes and then an old darkness and a
useless silence. So he saw it all. Then he went to a
Mischa Elman concert. Two hours waves of sound beat
on his eardrums. Music washed something or other
inside him. Music broke down and rebuilt someth...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Amy
...reoled and apart.
Enslaved and encircled, I bore it,
Proud token of my gift to you.
The petals waned paler, and shriveled,
And dropped; and the thorns started through.
Bitter thorns to proclaim me your lover,
A diadem woven with rue....Read more of this...

by Hikmet, Nazim
...at the art
in this latest work of LI-LI-FU."

Screaming at the tip of his voice,
the Chinese magician
 LI.
His shriveled yellow spider of a hand
tossed long thin knives into the air:
one
 one more
 one
 one more
 five
 one more.
Tracing lightning-like circles in the air,
his knives flew up in a steady stream.
Gioconda looked,
 she kept looking,
 she'd still be looking
but, like a large-colored Chinese lantern,
 the crowd swayed and became confused:
"Stand bac...Read more of this...



by Nye, Naomi Shihab
...of blue flowers
on an orange cloth. I follow her.
She is making a soup from what she had left
in the bowl, the shriveled garlic and bent bean.
She is leaving nothing out....Read more of this...

by Chin, Staceyann
...I was then
and paint for her pictures
of the young me more beautiful than I ever was
if only to make her forget the shriveled paper skin
the stained but even dental plates
and the faint smell of urine that tends to linger
in places built especially for revolutionaries
whose causes have been won
or forgotten

Will I still be lesbian then
or will the church or family finally convince me
to marry some man with a smaller dick
than the one my woman uses to afford me
...Read more of this...

by Masters, Edgar Lee
...Not, where the stairway turns in the dark,
A hooded figure, shriveled under a flowing cloak!
Not yellow eyes in the room at night,
Staring out from a surface of cobweb gray!
And not the flap of a condor wing,
When the roar of life in your ears begins
As a sound heard never before!
But on a sunny afternoon,
By a country road,
Where purple rag-weeds bloom along a straggling fence,
And the field is gleaned, and the air ...Read more of this...

by Roethke, Theodore
...ver
Sustenance seemed sensible
At the time: she'd lived
So long on gin, bobbie pins, half-smoked cigars, dead beer,
Her shriveled petals falling
On the faded carpet, the stale
Steak grease stuck to her fuzzy leaves.
(Dried-out, she creaked like a tulip.)
The things she endured!--
The dumb dames shrieking half the night
Or the two of us, alone, both seedy,
Me breathing booze at her,
She leaning out of her pot toward the window.

Near the end, she seemed almost to h...Read more of this...

by Walcott, Derek
...g with dusk, 
the scorched pastures of the old benign Custos; blew 
far the decent servants and the lifelong cook, 
and shriveled to a shard that ancient pastoral 
of dusk in a gilt-edged frame now catching the evening sun 
in Jamaica, making both epochs one. 

He looked out from the Great House windows on 
clouds that still held the fragrance of fire, 
he saw the Botanical Gardens officially drown 
in a formal dusk, where governors had strolled 
and black gardeners had s...Read more of this...

by Parker, Dorothy
...e,
Too often seen the end of endless pain
To swear that peace no more shall cool my brow.
I know, I know- again the shriveled bough
Will burgeon sweetly in the gentle rain,
And these hard lands be quivering with grain-
I tell you only: it is Winter now.

What if I know, before the Summer goes
Where dwelt this bitter frenzy shall be rest?
What is it now, that June shall surely bring
New promise, with the swallow and the rose?
My heart is water, that I first must breast...Read more of this...

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Book: Reflection on the Important Things