Famous Skeletal Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Letters To Friends

...ng best, the thirsty beasts

Of night quenched as the furnaces

Of Hunslet where Hudswell Clarke’s locos

Rust in their skeletal sheds, rails skewed

To graveyards platforms and now instead

Skyscrapers circle the city, cranes, aeroplanes,

Electric trains but even they cannot hinder

Branches bursting with semen

Seraphic cloud sanctuaries shunting

Us homeward to the beckoning moors.

II

Brenda Williams

Leeds voices soothe the turbulence

‘Ey’ ‘sithee’ and ‘love’, lasting...Read more of this...
by Tebb, Barry


Mirror

...lies 
in the morning
no cheating of age

an illusion of eye
smoothing skin over bone.

No portrait hidden away
becoming skeletal
and demanding release.

Another day to face,
my confessor, so laugh
at this charting of years....Read more of this...
by Green, Adrian

Seascape

...
in an ornamental spray of spray; 
this cartoon by Raphael for a tapestry for a Pope: 
it does look like heaven. 
But a skeletal lighthouse standing there 
in black and white clerical dress, 
who lives on his nerves, thinks he knows better. 
He thinks that hell rages below his iron feet, 
that that is why the shallow water is so warm, 
and he knows that heaven is not like this. 
Heaven is not like flying or swimming, 
but has something to do with blackness and a strong glare ...Read more of this...
by Bishop, Elizabeth

Senlin: His Futile Preoccupations

...mournful, a somnolent cry.

6

Death himself in the rain . . . death himself . . . 
Death in the savage sunlight . . . skeletal death . . . 
I hear the clack of his feet, 
Clearly on stones, softly in dust; 
He hurries among the trees 
Whirling the leaves, tossing he hands from waves. 
Listen! the immortal footsteps beat.

Death himself in the grass, death himself, 
Gyrating invisibly in the sun, 
Scatters the grass-blades, whips the wind, 
Tears at boughs with malignant lau...Read more of this...
by Aiken, Conrad

Snow and Ice

...
link fragile loves sunk deep in snows as footprints
the voice prints cold black gesticulations
bone bare voices
chewed skeletal choices
in fangs of piranha gales
spewing out slivers of raucous laughter
glinting bright as hard polished silver nails...Read more of this...
by Troupe, Quincy


The Bridge

...for not teaching 
him better. I am letting him wear my pith helmet for 
consolation. The bridge looks like one of those skeletal 
reconstructions of a huge dinosaur one sees in a museum. The 
ape is looking at the stump of his wrist and scolding me again. 
I offer him another banana and he gets very furious, as though 
I'd insulted him. Tomorrow we cross the bridge. I'll write to 
you from the other side if I can; if not, look for a sign . . ....Read more of this...
by Edson, Russell

To Be Blind

...ng,
Infringement,
 impingement,
Impact,
 contact
With surfaces of the sounds
Or surfaces without the sounds:
Diagrams,
 skeletal,
 strange?

Is it winds
 curling round invisible corners?
Polyphony of perfumes?
Antennae discovering an axis,
 erecting the architecture of a world?

Is it
 orchestration of the finger-tips,
 graph of a fugue:
Scaffold for colours:
 colour itself being god?...Read more of this...
by Tessimond, A S J

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