Famous Spanned Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Love Song

by Elinor Wylie
 How can I keep my soul in me, so that
it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise
it high enough, past you, to other things?
I would like to shelter it, among remote
lost objects, in some dark and silent place
that doesn't resonate when your depths resound.
Yet everything that touches us, me and you,
takes us together like a violin's bow,
which draws...Read more of this...

My Typewriter

by Robert William Service
 I used to think a pot of ink
Held magic in its fluid,
And I would ply a pen when I
Was hoary a a Druid;
But as I scratch my silver thatch
My battered old Corona
Calls out to me as plaintively
As dying Desdemona.

"For old time's sake give me a break:
To you I've been as loyal
As ever could an Underwood,
Or Remington or Royal.
The globe...Read more of this...

The Ballad Of Gum-Boot Ben

by Robert William Service
 He was an old prospector with a vision bleared and dim.
 He asked me for a grubstake, and the same I gave to him.
 He hinted of a hidden trove, and when I made so bold
 To question his veracity, this is the tale he told.

"I do not seek the copper streak, nor yet the yellow dust;
I am not...Read more of this...

Mortua Est

by Mihai Eminescu
Two candles, tall sentry, beside an earth mound, 
A dream with wings broken that trail to the ground,  
Loud flung from the belfry calamitous chime... 
'Tis thus that you passed o'er the bound'ries of time. 

Gone by are the hours when the heavens entire 
Flowed rivers of milk and grew flowers of fire, 
When the thunderous clouds were but...Read more of this...

A Coloured Print by Shokei

by Amy Lowell
 It winds along the face of a cliff
This path which I long to explore,
And over it dashes a waterfall,
And the air is full of the roar
And the thunderous voice of waters which sweep
In a silver torrent over some steep.
It clears the path with a mighty bound
And tumbles below and away,
And the trees and the bushes which grow in the...Read more of this...

The Plainsmen

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...

Chunagon Yakamochi

by Ogura Hyakunin Isshu
If the "Magpie Bridge"--
Bridge by flight of magpies spanned,--
White with frost I see:--
With a deep-laid frost made white:--
Late, I know, has grown the night....Read more of this...

Reverence

by Robert William Service
 I saw the Greatest Man on Earth,
Aye, saw him with my proper eyes.
A loin-cloth spanned his proper girth,
But he was naked otherwise,
Excepting for his grey sombrero;
And when his domelike head he bared,
With reverence I stared and stared,
As mummified as any Pharaoh.

He leaned upon a little cane,
A big cigar was in his mouth;
Through spectacles of yellow stain
He gazed and gazed...Read more of this...

Poem On His Birthday

by Dylan Thomas
 In the mustardseed sun,
By full tilt river and switchback sea
 Where the cormorants scud,
In his house on stilts high among beaks
 And palavers of birds
This sandgrain day in the bent bay's grave
 He celebrates and spurns
His driftwood thirty-fifth wind turned age;
 Herons spire and spear.

 Under and round him go
Flounders, gulls, on their cold, dying trails,
 Doing what they...Read more of this...

The All Right Un

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 He came from "further out", 
That land of fear and drought 
And dust and gravel. 
He got a touch of sun, 
And rested at the run 
Until his cure was done, 
And he could travel. 
When spring had decked the plain, 
He flitted off again 
As flit the swallows. 
And from that western land, 
When many months were spanned,...Read more of this...

The Ballad Of Hank The Finn

by Robert William Service
 Now Fireman Flynn met Hank the Finn where lights of Lust-land glow;
"Let's leave," says he, "the lousy sea, and give the land a show.
I'm fed up to the molar mark with wallopin' the brine;
I feel the bloody barnacles a-carkin' on me spine.
Let's hit the hard-boiled North a crack, where creeks are paved with gold."
"You count me in," says Hank...Read more of this...

Reveille

by A E Housman
 Wake: the silver dusk returning
Up the beach of darkness brims,
And the ship of sunrise burning
Strands upon the eastern rims.

Wake: the vaulted shadow shatters,
Trampled to the floor it spanned,
And the tent of night in tatters
Straws the sky-pavilioned land.

Up, lad, up, 'tis late for lying:
Hear the drums of morning play;
Hark, the empty highways crying
"Who'll beyond the hills away?"

Towns and countries woo...Read more of this...

Love And Death

by Sara Teasdale
 Shall we, too, rise forgetful from our sleep,
And shall my soul that lies within your hand
Remember nothing, as the blowing sand
Forgets the palm where long blue shadows creep
When winds along the darkened desert sweep?

Or would it still remember, tho' it spanned
A thousand heavens, while the planets fanned
The vacant ether with their voices deep?
Soul of my soul, no word shall...Read more of this...

Sonnet On An Alpine Night

by Dorothy Parker
 My hand, a little raised, might press a star-
Where I may look, the frosted peaks are spun,
So shaped before Olympus was begun,
Spanned each to each, now, by a silver bar.
Thus to face Beauty have I traveled far,
But now, as if around my heart were run
Hard, lacing fingers, so I stand undone.
Of all my tears, the bitterest these are.

Who humbly...Read more of this...

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