Famous Slender Poems by Famous Poets

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

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(From) The Nowhere Man

by Pritish Nandy
When you first came, quiet as the rain that never fell,
in the sunlight that never shone, I whispered words
I had never known and now shall never forget. These
words have grown into secret songs. We have known, and
loved, and shared what only lovers can share in lyric
guilt. There can be nothing simpler than this love of
ours, nothing truer when this darkness...Read more of this...

The Strange Music

by G K Chesterton
 Other loves may sink and settle, other loves may loose and slack, 
But I wander like a minstrel with a harp upon his back, 
Though the harp be on my bosom, though I finger and I fret, 
Still, my hope is all before me: for I cannot play it yet. 

In your strings is hid a music that no...Read more of this...

The General Public

by Stephen Vincent Benet
 "Ah, did you once see Shelley plain?" -- Browning. 
"Shelley? Oh, yes, I saw him often then," 
The old man said. A dry smile creased his face 
With many wrinkles. "That's a great poem, now! 
That one of Browning's! Shelley? Shelley plain? 
The time that I remember best is this -- 

A thin mire crept along the rutted ways,...Read more of this...

I Remember I Remember

by Thomas Hood
 I Remember, I Remember

I remember, I remember 
The house where I was born, 
The little window where the sun 
Came peeping in at morn; 
He never came a wink too soon 
Nor brought too long a day; 
But now, I often wish the night 
Had borne my breath away.

I remember, I remember 
The roses red and white, 
The violets...Read more of this...

Past and Present

by Thomas Hood
 I remember, I remember
The house where I was born,
The little window where the sun
Came peeping in at morn;
He never came a wink too soon
Nor bought too long a day;
But now, I often wish the night
Had borne my breath away.

I remember, I remember
The roses, red and white,
The violets, and the lily-cups--
Those flowers made of light!
The lilacs where the robin built,
And...Read more of this...

Hiawathas Childhood

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 Downward through the evening twilight, 
In the days that are forgotten, 
In the unremembered ages, 
From the full moon fell Nokomis, 
Fell the beautiful Nokomis, 
She a wife, but not a mother.
She was sporting with her women, 
Swinging in a swing of grape-vines, 
When her rival the rejected, 
Full of jealousy and hatred, 
Cut the leafy swing asunder, 
Cut...Read more of this...

Virgule

by Thomas Lux
 What I love about this little leaning mark
is how it divides
without divisiveness. The left
or bottom side prying that choice up or out,
the right or top side pressing down upon
its choice: either/or,
his/her. Sometimes called a slash (too harsh), a slant
(a little dizzy, but the Dickinson association
nice: "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant--"), solidus (sounding
too much like a Roman...Read more of this...

What slender youth (QUIS MULTA GRACILIS)

by Horace
     What slender youth, besprinkled with perfume,
         Courts you on roses in some grotto's shade?
       Fair Pyrrha, say, for whom
         Your yellow hair you braid,
     So trim, so simple! Ah!...Read more of this...

The Bombardment

by Amy Lowell
 Slowly, without force, the rain drops into the 
city. It stops a moment
on the carved head of Saint John, then slides on again, slipping 
and trickling
over his stone cloak. It splashes from the lead conduit 
of a gargoyle,
and falls from it in turmoil on the stones in the Cathedral square.
Where are the people, and why does the fretted steeple...Read more of this...

Musketaquid

by Ralph Waldo Emerson
 Because I was content with these poor fields,
Low open meads, slender and sluggish streams,
And found a home in haunts which others scorned,
The partial wood-gods overpaid my love,
And granted me the freedom of their state,
And in their secret senate have prevailed
With the dear dangerous lords that rule our life,
Made moon and planets parties to their bond,
And pitying through my solitary...Read more of this...

A Distance From The Sea

by Weldon Kees
 To Ernest Brace

"And when the seven thunders had uttered their voices, I was
about to write: and I heard a voice from heaven saying unto
me, Seal up those things which the seven thunders uttered, and
write them not." --REVELATIONS, x, 4.

That raft we rigged up, under the water,
Was just the item: when he walked,
With his robes blowing, dark against the sky,
It...Read more of this...

If only out of vanity

by Staceyann Chin
If only out of vanity
I have wondered what kind of woman I will be
when I am well past the summer of my raging youth
Will I still be raising revolutionary flags
and making impassioned speeches
that stir up anger in the hearts of pseudo-liberals
dressed in navy-blue conservative wear

In those years when I am grateful
I still have a good sturdy bladder
that does not leak...Read more of this...

Binsey Poplars

by Gerard Manley Hopkins
 felled 1879


 My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
 Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
 All felled, felled, are all felled;
 Of a fresh and following folded rank
 Not spared, not one
 That dandled a sandalled
 Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank. 
 O if we but knew what we do
...Read more of this...

Song by Gulbaz

by Adela Florence Cory Nicolson
   Love, let me thank you for this!
     Now we have drifted apart,
   Wandered away from the sea,—
     For the fresh touch of your kiss,
   For the young warmth of your heart,
     For your youth given to me.

   Thanks: for...Read more of this...

The Garden by the Bridge

by Adela Florence Cory Nicolson
   The Desert sands are heated, parched and dreary,
     The tigers rend alive their quivering prey
   In the near Jungle; here the kites rise, weary,
     Too gorged with living food to fly away.

   All night the hungry jackals howl together
     Over the...Read more of this...

Late Afternoon: The Onslaught Of Love

by Anthony Hecht
 For William and Emily Maxwell

At this time of day
One could hear the caulking irons sound
Against the hulls in the dockyard.
Tar smoke rose between trees
And large oily patches floated on the water,
Undulating unevenly
In the purple sunlight
Like the surfaces of Florentine bronze.

At this time of day
Sounds carried clearly
Through hot silences of fading daylight.
The weedy fields lay drowned
In odors of creosote and...Read more of this...

Beginning

by James Wright
 The moon drops one or two feathers into the fiels.
The dark wheat listens.
Be still.
Now.
There they are, the moon's young, trying
Their wings.
Between trees, a slender woman lifts up the lovely shadow
Of her face, and now she steps into the air, now she is gone
Wholly, into the air.
I stand alone by an elder tree, I do not dare breathe
Or move.
I listen.
The...Read more of this...

The Haunted House

by Thomas Hood
 Oh, very gloomy is the house of woe,
Where tears are falling while the bell is knelling,
With all the dark solemnities that show
That Death is in the dwelling!

Oh, very, very dreary is the room
Where Love, domestic Love, no longer nestles,
But smitten by the common stroke of doom,
The corpse lies on the trestles!

But house of woe, and hearse, and sable pall,
The...Read more of this...

Child of the Romans

by Carl Sandburg
 THE dago shovelman sits by the railroad track
Eating a noon meal of bread and bologna.
A train whirls by, and men and women at tables
Alive with red roses and yellow jonquils,
Eat steaks running with brown gravy,
Strawberries and cream, eclaires and coffee.
The dago shovelman finishes the dry bread and bologna,
Washes it down with a dipper from the water-boy,
And goes back to...Read more of this...

On Westwell Downes

by William Strode
 When Westwell Downes I gan to tread,
Where cleanely wynds the greene did sweepe,
Methought a landskipp there was spread,
Here a bush and there a sheepe:
The pleated wrinkles of the face
Of wave-swolne earth did lend such grace,
As shadowings in Imag'ry
Which both deceive and please the eye.


The sheepe sometymes did tread the maze
By often wynding in and in,
And sometymes round about they...Read more of this...

Wine should be drunk in the company of slender creatures

by Omar Khayyam
Wine should be drunk in the company of slender creatures
who ravish the heart with the color of their cheeks.
Art thou bitten by the serpent of grief, friend—drink, then,
of this antidote. I myself drink of it and plume myself
on the strength of it; would that it might be propitious!
If you drink it not, why not be willing that I should?
Go, eat...Read more of this...

Girlhood

by Fannie Isabelle Sherrick
Girlhood, the dearest time of joy and love,
The sunny spring of gladness and of peace,
The time that joins its links with heaven above,
And all that's pure below; a running ease
Of careless thought beguiles the murmuring stream
Of girlish life, and as some sweet, vague dream,
The fleeting days go by; fair womanhood
Comes oft to lure the girlish feet away,
But by the brooklet...Read more of this...

0 Remain Dear One..

by Mihai Eminescu
"O remain, dear one, I love you, 
Stay with me in my fair land, 
For your dreamings and longings 
Only I can understand. 

You, who like a prince reclining 
O'er the pool with heaven starred; 
You who gaze up from the water 
With such earnest deep regard. 

Stay, for where the lapping wavelets 
Shake the tall and tasseled grass, 
I...Read more of this...

Greater Love

by Wilfred Owen
 Red lips are not so red
 As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.
Kindness of wooed and wooer
Seems shame to their love pure.
O Love, your eyes lose lure
 When I behold eyes blinded in my stead!

Your slender attitude
 Trembles not exquisite like limbs knife-skewed,
Rolling and rolling there
Where God seems not to care;
Till the fierce Love they bear
 Cramps...Read more of this...

For M.W

by Jean Toomer
 There is no transcience of twilight in
 The beauty of your soft dusk-dimpled face,
 No flicker of a slender flame in space,
In crucibles, fragility crystalline.
There is no fragrance of the jessamine
 About you, no pathos of some old place
 At dusk, that crumbles like moth-eaten lace
Beneath the touch. Nor has there ever been.

Your love is like the folk-song's flaming...Read more of this...

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