Famous Shy Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Shy poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous shy poems. These examples illustrate what a famous shy poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Robert Lowell
Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother's bed;
the rising sun in war paint dyes us red;
in broad daylight her gilded bed-posts shine,
abandoned, almost Dionysian.
At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street,
blossoms on our magnolia ignite
the morning with their murderous five days' white.
All night I've held your hand,
as if you had
a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad--
its hackneyed...Read more of this...
by
Lewis Carroll
The Landing
"Just the place for a Snark!" the Bellman cried,
As he landed his crew with care;
Supporting each man on the top of the tide
By a finger entwined in his hair.
"Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell...Read more of this...
by
Maria Mazziotti Gillan
Panic in your face, you write questions
to ask him. When he arrives,
you are serene, your fear
unbetrayed. How unlike me you are.
After the dance,
I see your happiness; he holds
your hand. Though you barely speak,
your body pulses messages I can read
all too well. He kisses you goodnight,
his body moving toward yours, and yours
responding. I am frightened, guard my
tongue for fear my...Read more of this...
by
Francis Thompson
I fear to love thee, Sweet, because
Love's the ambassador of loss;
White flake of childhood, clinging so
To my soiled raiment, thy shy snow
At tenderest touch will shrink and go.
Love me not, delightful child.
My heart, by many snares beguiled,
Has grown timorous and wild.
It would fear thee not at all,
Wert thou not so...Read more of this...
by
Henry Lawson
A day of seeming innocence,
A glorious sun and sky,
And, just above my picket fence,
Black Bonnet passing by.
In knitted gloves and quaint old dress,
Without a spot or smirch,
Her worn face lit with peacefulness,
Old Granny goes to church.
Her hair is richly white, like milk,
That long ago was fair --
And glossy still...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
Ah! What avails the classic bent
And what the cultured word,
Against the undoctored incident
That actually occurred?
And what is Art whereto we press
Through paint and prose and rhyme--
When Nature in her nakedness
Defeats us every time?
It is not learning, grace nor gear,
Nor easy meat and drink,
But bitter pinch of pain and fear
That makes creation think.
When in...Read more of this...
by
Delmore Schwartz
Caesar, the amplifier voice, announces
Crime and reparation. In the barber shop
Recumbent men attend, while absently
The barber doffs the naked face with cream.
Caesar proposes, Caesar promises
Pride, justice, and the sun
Brilliant and strong on everyone,
Speeding one hundred miles an hour across the land:
Caesar declares the will. The barber firmly
Planes the stubble with a steady hand,
While all in barber chairs reclining,
In wet...Read more of this...
by
Amy Lowell
How still it is! Sunshine itself here
falls
In quiet shafts of light through the high trees
Which, arching, make a roof above the walls
Changing from sun to shadow as each breeze
Lingers a moment, charmed by the strange sight
Of an Italian theatre, storied, seer
Of vague romance, and time's long history;
Where tiers of grass-grown seats sprinkled with white,
Sweet-scented clover, form a broken...Read more of this...
by
C S Lewis
Against too many writers of science fiction
Why did you lure us on like this,
Light-year on light-year, through the abyss,
Building (as though we cared for size!)
Empires that cover galaxies
If at the journey's end we find
The same old stuff we left behind,
Well-worn Tellurian stories of
Crooks, spies, conspirators, or love,
Whose setting might as...Read more of this...
by
D. H. Lawrence
The elephant, the huge old beast,
is slow to mate;
he finds a female, they show no haste
they wait
for the sympathy in their vast shy hearts
slowly, slowly to rouse
as they loiter along the river-beds
and drink and browse
and dash in panic through the brake
of forest with the herd,
and sleep in massive silence, and wake
together, without a...Read more of this...
by
Seamus Heaney
Her scarf a la Bardot,
In suede flats for the walk,
She came with me one evening
For air and friendly talk.
We crossed the quiet river,
Took the embankment walk.
Traffic holding its breath,
Sky a tense diaphragm:
Dusk hung like a backcloth
That shook where a swan swam,
Tremulous as a hawk
Hanging deadly, calm.
A vacuum of need
Collapsed each hunting heart
But tremulously...Read more of this...
by
Jorie Graham
In the fairy tale the sky
makes of itself a coat
because it needs you
to put it
on. How can it do this?
It collects its motes. It condenses its sound-
track, all the pyrric escapes, the pilgrimages
still unconsummated,
the turreted thoughts of sky it slightly liquefies
and droops, the hum of the yellowest day alive,
office-holders in their books,...Read more of this...
by
Mark Doty
The intact facade's now almost black
in the rain; all day they've torn at the back
of the building, "the oldest concrete structure
in New England," the newspaper said. By afternoon,
when the backhoe claw appears above
three stories of columns and cornices,
the crowd beneath their massed umbrellas cheer.
Suddenly the stairs seem to climb down themselves,
atomized...Read more of this...
by
Andrew Barton Paterson
Here in my mountain home,
On rugged hills and steep,
I sit and watch you come,
O Riverinia Sheep!
You come from the fertile plains
Where saltbush (sometimes) grows,
And flats that (when it rains)
Will blossom like the rose.
But when the summer sun
Gleams down like burnished brass,
You have to leave your run
And hustle off...Read more of this...
by
Ogden Nash
Master I may be,
But not of my fate.
Now come the kisses, too many too late.
Tell me, O Parcae,
For fain would I know,
Where were these kisses three decades ago?
Girls there were plenty,
Mint julep girls, beer girls,
Gay younger married and headstrong career girls,
The girls of my friends
And the wives of my friends,
Some smugly settled and some at loose ends,
Sad girls, serene...Read more of this...
by
Rg Gregory
(roundel: variation of the rondeau
consisting of three stanzas of three
lines each, linked together with but
two rhymes and a refrain at the end
of the first and third group)
1.
the blind rose
today's fullness is tomorrow's gone
(the next day after no one knows)
last year's dream now feeds upon
what blindly grows
imagine if you like a rose
on which no likely sun has shone
a darkness...Read more of this...
by
Sir Walter Scott
Ah! County Guy, the hour is nigh,
The sun has left the lea,
The orange flower perfumes the bower,
The breeze is on the sea.
The lark his lay who thrill'd all day
Sits hush'd his partner nigh:
Breeze, bird, and flower confess the hour,
But where is County Guy?
The village maid steals through the shade,
Her shepherd's suit to hear;
To beauty shy, by lattice high,
Sings high-born...Read more of this...
by
Randall Jarrell
Her imaginary playmate was a grown-up
In sea-coal satin. The flame-blue glances,
The wings gauzy as the membrane that the ashes
Draw over an old ember --as the mother
In a jug of cider-- were a comfort to her.
They sat by the fire and told each other stories.
"What men want..." said the godmother softly--
How she went...Read more of this...
by
James Joyce
When the shy star goes forth in heaven
All maidenly, disconsolate,
Hear you amid the drowsy even
One who is singing by your gate.
His song is softer than the dew
And he is come to visit you.
O bend no more in revery
When he at eventide is calling.
Nor muse: Who may this singer be
Whose song...Read more of this...
by
Badger Clark
Men of the older, gentler soil,
Loving the things that their fathers wrought--
Worn old fields of their fathers' toil,
Scarred old hills where their fathers fought--
Loving their land for each ancient trace,
Like a mother dear for her wrinkled face,
Such as they never...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
As Summer into Autumn slips
And yet we sooner say
"The Summer" than "the Autumn," lest
We turn the sun away,
And almost count it an Affront
The presence to concede
Of one however lovely, not
The one that we have loved --
So we evade the charge of Years
On one attempting shy
The Circumvention of the Shaft
Of Life's Declivity....Read more of this...
by
John Berryman
Seedy Henry rose up shy in de world
& shaved & swung his barbells, duded Henry up
and p.a.'d poor thousands of persons on topics of grand
moment to Henry, ah to those less & none.
Wif a book of his in either hand
he is stript down to move on.
-”Come away, Mr. Bones.
-”Henry is tired of the winter,
& haircuts, & a squeamish comfy...Read more of this...
by
Edwin Muir
Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a...Read more of this...
by
Emma Lazarus
Last night I slept, and when I woke her kiss
Still floated on my lips. For we had strayed
Together in my dream, through some dim glade,
Where the shy moonbeams scarce dared light our bliss.
The air was dank with dew, between the trees,
The hidden glow-worms kindled and were spent.
Cheek pressed to cheek, the cool, the...Read more of this...
by
Delmore Schwartz
What is to be given,
Is spirit, yet animal,
Colored, like heaven,
Blue, yellow, beautiful.
The blood is checkered by
So many stains and wishes,
Between it and the sky
You could not choose, for riches.
Yet let me now be careful
Not to give too much
To one so shy and fearful
For like a gun is touch....Read more of this...
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