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Famous Stitched Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Sexton, Anne
...ody is in its bunker. The surgeon applies his gum.
Each body is fitted quickly into its ice-cream pack
and then stitched up again for the long voyage
back....Read more of this...



by Tebb, Barry
...me camouflage grey to

Council green with a traffic island in between

The lanes where lorries roar and silent anglers

Stitched along the shore shelter under the

Giant red, green and yellow umbrellas of Monet.



In the Aire’s clear waters salmon dart and

Giant trout are basking in the sun;

There is abundant clay for potters’ wheels

With haptic stone for sculptors’ hands

And the surrounding water is lapis lazuli and ochre.



The steps to the moorings have been ...Read more of this...

by Browning, Robert
...ay, and sport. 
Himself peeped late, eyed Prosper at his books 
Careless and lofty, lord now of the isle: 
Vexed, 'stitched a book of broad leaves, arrow-shaped, 
Wrote thereon, he knows what, prodigious words; 
Has peeled a wand and called it by a name; 
Weareth at whiles for an enchanter's robe 
The eyed skin of a supple oncelot; 
And hath an ounce sleeker than youngling mole, 
A four-legged serpent he makes cower and couch, 
Now snarl, now hold its breath and mind his...Read more of this...

by Roethke, Theodore
...Indelicate is he who loathes
The aspect of his fleshy clothes, --
The flying fabric stitched on bone,
The vesture of the skeleton,
The garment neither fur nor hair,
The cloak of evil and despair,
The veil long violated by
Caresses of the hand and eye.
Yet such is my unseemliness:
I hate my epidermal dress,
The savage blood's obscenity,
The rags of my anatomy,
And willingly would I dispense
With false accouterments of sense,
To sleep imm...Read more of this...

by Aiken, Conrad
...loud behind me, 
Sun went over the housetops and dusty trees; 
And there they were, glistening, brilliant, motionless, 
Stitched in a golden sky 
By yellow patient fingers long since turned to dust.

III

The first bell is silver, 
And breathing darkness I think only of the long scythe of time. 
The second bell is crimson, 
And I think of a holiday night, with rockets 
Furrowing the sky with red, and a soft shatter of stars. 
The third bell is saffron and slow, 
A...Read more of this...



by Jong, Erica
...You gave me the child
that seamed my belly
& stitched up my life.

You gave me: one book of love poems,
five years of peace
& two of pain.

You gave me darkness, light, laughter
& the certain knowledge
that we someday die.

You gave me seven years
during which the cells of my body
died & were reborn.

Now we have died
into the limbo of lost loves,
that wreckage of memories
tarnishing wi...Read more of this...

by Nemerov, Howard
...owned by a ****** now
Likelier'n not, with half its chromium teeth
Knocked down its throat and aerial ripped off,
Side stitched with like bullets where the stripping's gone
And rust like a fungus spreading on the fenders,

Well, what I mean, that fucking car still runs,
Even the moths in the upholstery are old
But it gets around, you see one on the street
Beat-up and proud, well, Jeezus what a country,
Where even the monuments keep on the move."...Read more of this...

by Seeger, Alan
...asant, Christ-like heads, 
and courtezans like powdered moths, 
And peddlers from Algiers, with cloths 
bright-hued and stitched with golden threads; 


And painters with big, serious eyes go rapt in dreams, fantastic shapes 
In corduroys and Spanish capes and locks uncut and flowing ties; 


And lovers wander two by two, oblivious among the press, 
And making one of them no less, all lovers shall be dear to you: 


All laughing lips you move among, all happy hearts that, kno...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Amy
...als, hung altar-cloths and chasubles, and copes, and stoles,
and coffin palls. All stiff with rich embroidery, and 
stitched with
so much artistry, they seemed like spun and woven gems, or flower-buds
new-opened on their stems.

Annette looked at the geraniums, very red against the blue sky.
"No matter how I try, I cannot find any thread 
of such a red.
My bleeding hearts drip stuff muddy in comparison. Heigh-ho! See 
my little
pecking dove? I'm in love wi...Read more of this...

by Boland, Eavan
...hought the distance smelled of rain and lightning.

These are wild roses, appliqued on silk by hand,
darkly picked, stitched boldly, quickly.
The rest is tortoiseshell and has the reticent clear patience 
 of its element. It is
a worn-out, underwater bullion and it keeps,
even now, an inference of its violation.
The lace is overcast as if the weather 
it opened for and offset had entered it.

The past is an empty cafe terrace.
An airless dusk before th...Read more of this...

by Taylor, Marilyn L
...munications Office 



On both sides of the screaming highway, the world
is made of emerald silk—sumptuous bolts of it,
stitched by threads of water into cushions
that shimmer and float on the Mekong's munificent glut. 

In between them plods the ancient buffalo—dark blue
in the steamy distance, and legless
where the surface of the ditch dissects
the body from its waterlogged supports below

or it might be a woman, up to her thighs
in the lukewarm ooze, bending at the wai...Read more of this...

by Edgar, Marriott
...ife strapped a mascot around him, 
The tears to his eyes gently stole;
'Twere some guiness corks she had collected 
And stitched to an old camisole.

He entered the water at daybreak, 
A man with a camera stood near,
He said "Hurry up and get in, lad, 
You're spoiling my view of the pier."

At last he were in, he were swimming 
With a beautiful overarm stroke,
When the men on the tug saw with horror
That the rope he were tied to had broke.

Then down came a fog, t...Read more of this...

by Plath, Sylvia
...w them, whether you said
Words to rid me of those three ladies
Nodding by night around my bed,
Mouthless, eyeless, with stitched bald head.

In the hurricane, when father's twelve
Study windows bellied in
Like bubbles about to break, you fed
My brother and me cookies and Ovaltine
And helped the two of us to choir:
'Thor is angry; boom boom boom!
Thor is angry: we don't care!'
But those ladies broke the panes.

When on tiptoe the schoolgirls danced,
Blinking flashlight...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...h pen,
We slaved and sang above the city.
And as across my streams of ink
I watched her from a poet's distance,
She stitched and sang . . . I scarcely think
She was aware of my existence.

And then one day she sang no more.
That put me out, there's no denying.
I looked -- she labored as before,
But, bless me! she was crying, crying.
Her poor canary chirped in vain;
Her pink geranium drooped in sorrow;
"Of course," said I, "she'll sing again.Read more of this...

by Walcott, Derek
...of generals, poets, and cripples 
who danced without moving over their graves 
with each revolution; her Caesarean was stitched 
by the teeth of machine guns,and every sunset 
she carried the Caribbean's elliptical basin 
as she had once carried the penitential napkins 
to be the footbath of dictators, Trujillo, Machado, 
and those whose faces had yellowed like posters 
on municipal walls. Now she stroked his hair 
until it turned white, but she would not understand 
tha...Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...eon
that had gone into seclusion.
I turned it over and the palm was old,
its lines traced like fine needlepoint
and stitched up into fingers.
It was fat and soft and blind in places.
Nothing but vulnerable.

And all this is metaphor.
An ordinary hand -- just lonely
for something to touch
that touches back.
The dog won't do it.
Her tail wags in the swamp for a frog.
I'm no better than a case of dog food.
She owns her own hunger.
My siste...Read more of this...

by Plath, Sylvia
...t quiet,
Quiet, like the little emptinesses I carry.

I have had my chances. I have tried and tried.
I have stitched life into me like a rare organ,
And walked carefully, precariously, like something rare.
I have tried not to think too hard. I have tried to be natural.
I have tried to be blind in love, like other women,
Blind in my bed, with my dear blind sweet one,
Not looking, through the thick dark, for the face of another.

I did not look. ...Read more of this...

by Tebb, Barry
...ted, against all advice

But mine. I remember feebly holding the mask in place

As the Indian woman doctor brutally stitched you without an anaesthetic

And the silence like no other when even the midwives

Had left: the child slept and we crept round his make-shift cradle.



At Brudenell Road again it was night in the cold house

With bare walls and plug-in fires: Bob, the real father

Paced the front, deep in symphonic thought:

Isaiah slept: I waited and watched -...Read more of this...

by Dickinson, Emily
...pronounced --
And you were frozen led
From Dungeon's luxury of Doubt
To Gibbets, and the Dead --

And when the Film had stitched your eyes
A Creature gasped "Reprieve"!
Which Anguish was the utterest -- then --
To perish, or to live?...Read more of this...

by Plath, Sylvia
...How this tart fable instructs
And mocks! Here's the parody of that moral mousetrap
Set in the proverbs stitched on samplers
Approving chased girls who get them to a tree
And put on bark's nun-black

Habit which deflects
All amorous arrows. For to sheathe the virgin shape
In a scabbard of wood baffles pursuers,
Whether goat-thighed or god-haloed. Ever since that first Daphne
Switched her incomparable back

For a bay-tree hide, respect's
Twined to her h...Read more of this...

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