Famous Surface(A) Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Surface(A) poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous surface(a) poems. These examples illustrate what a famous surface(a) poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Percy Bysshe Shelley
O WILD West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being¡ª
Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes!¡ªO thou 5
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The wing¨¨d seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave,...Read more of this...
by
Billy Collins
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the...Read more of this...
by
Robert Browning
Vanity, saith the preacher, vanity!
Draw round my bed: is Anselm keeping back?
Nephews -- sons mine -- ah God, I know not! Well --
She, men would have to be your mother once,
Old Gandolf envied me, so fair she was!
What's done is done, and she is dead beside,
Dead long ago, and I am Bishop since,
And as she died so must we...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
Like Oedipus I am losing my sight.
LIke Judas I have done my wrong.
Their punishment is over;
the shame and disgrace of it
are all used up.
But as for me,
look into my face
and you will know that crimes dropped upon me
as from a high building
and although I cannot speak of them
or explain the degrading details
I have remembered much
about Judas -
about Judas, the...Read more of this...
by
John Ashbery
Far from the Rappahannock, the silent
Danube moves along toward the sea.
The brown and green Nile rolls slowly
Like the Niagara's welling descent.
Tractors stood on the green banks of the Loire
Near where it joined the Cher.
The St. Lawrence prods among black stones
And mud. But the Arno is all stones.
Wind ruffles the Hudson's
Surface. The Irawaddy is overflowing.
But the yellowish, gray Tiber
Is contained...Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
How many people that I see upon the surface of the
earth are plunged in sleep [superstition]! How many I
perceive that are already buried in its depths! When I
throw my eyes over this desert of Not-being, how many
people I see who have not yet come—how many who
have already departed!...Read more of this...
by
Larry Levis
--The Carpathian Frontier, October, 1968
--for my brother
Once, in a foreign country, I was suddenly ill.
I was driving south toward a large city famous
For so little it had a replica, in concrete,
In two-thirds scale, of the Arc de Triomphe stuck
In the midst of traffic, & obstructing it.
But the city was hours away, beyond the hills
Shaped like the bodies of...Read more of this...
by
Elizabeth Bishop
This is not my home. How did I get so far from water? It must
be over that way somewhere.
I am the color of wine, of tinta. The inside of my powerful
right claw is saffron-yellow. See, I see it now; I wave it like a
flag. I am dapper and elegant; I move with great precision,...Read more of this...
by
Delmore Schwartz
(After Valery)
This hushed surface where the doves parade
Amid the pines vibrates, amid the graves;
Here the noon's justice unites all fires when
The sea aspires forever to begin again and again.
O what a gratification comes after long meditation
O satisfaction, after long meditation or ratiocination
Upon the calm of the gods
Upon the divine serenity, in luxurious contemplation!
What pure toil of perfect lightning enwombs,...Read more of this...
by
Billy Collins
Today I pass the time reading
a favorite haiku,
saying the few words over and over.
It feels like eating
the same small, perfect grape
again and again.
I walk through the house reciting it
and leave its letters falling
through the air of every room.
I stand by the big silence of the piano and say it.
I say it in front of a painting of the sea.
I...Read more of this...
by
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millenial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumber'd and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for...Read more of this...
by
D. H. Lawrence
My world is a painted fresco, where coloured shapes
Of old, ineffectual lives linger blurred and warm;
An endless tapestry the past has women drapes
The halls of my life, compelling my soul to conform.
The surface of dreams is broken,
The picture of the past is shaken and scattered.
Fluent, active figures of men pass along the railway, and...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
AFTER the Sea-Ship—after the whistling winds;
After the white-gray sails, taut to their spars and ropes,
Below, a myriad, myriad waves, hastening, lifting up their necks,
Tending in ceaseless flow toward the track of the ship:
Waves of the ocean, bubbling and gurgling, blithely prying,
Waves, undulating waves—liquid, uneven, emulous waves,
Toward that whirling current, laughing and buoyant, with curves,...Read more of this...
by
Louise Gluck
In the early evening, a now, as man is bending
over his writing table.
Slowly he lifts his head; a woman
appears, carrying roses.
Her face floats to the surface of the mirror,
marked with the green spokes of rose stems.
It is a form
of suffering: then always the transparent page
raised to the window until its veins emerge
as words finally filled with ink.
And I am...Read more of this...
by
Philip Levine
after Juan Ramon
A child wakens in a cold apartment.
The windows are frosted. Outside he hears
words rising from the streets, words he cannot
understand, and then the semis gear down
for the traffic light on Houston. He sleeps
again and dreams of another city
on a high hill above a wide river
bathed in sunlight, and the...Read more of this...
by
James Whitcomb Riley
Oh luxury! Beyond the heat
And dust of town, with dangling feet
Astride the rock below the dam,
In the cool shadows where the calm
Rests on the stream again, and all
Is silent save the waterfall,--
I bait my hook and cast my line,
And feel the best of life is mine.
No high ambition can I claim --...Read more of this...
by
Robinson Jeffers
The old woman sits on a bench before the door and quarrels
With her meagre pale demoralized daughter.
Once when I passed I found her alone, laughing in the sun
And saying that when she was first married
She lived in the old farmhouse up Garapatas Canyon.
(It is empty now, the roof has fallen
But the log walls hang on the stone foundation; the...Read more of this...
by
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Oh, you who read some song that I have sung –
What know you of the soul from whence it sprung?
Dost dream the poet ever speaks aloud
His secret thought unto the listening crowd?
Go take the murmuring sea-shell from the shore-
You have its shape, its colour – and no more.
It tells not one of those vast mysteries
That lie beneath...Read more of this...
by
Philip Freneau
Nil mortalibus ardui est
Caelum ipsum petimus stultitia
Horace
FROM Persian looms the silk he wove
No Weaver meant should trail above
The surface of the earth we tread,
To deck the matron or the maid.
But you ambitious, have design'd
With silk to soar above mankind:--
On silk you hang your splendid car
And mount towards the morning star.
How can you be so...Read more of this...
by
Wallace Stevens
The light is like a spider.
It crawls over the water.
It crawls over the edges of the snow.
It crawls under your eyelids
And spreads its webs there--
Its two webs.
The webs of your eyes
Are fastened
To the flesh and bones of you
As to rafters or grass.
There are filaments of your eyes
On the surface of the water
And in the edges of the snow....Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
Empty chocolate boxes, a pillowcase with an orange at the bottom,
Nuts and tinsel with its idiosyncratic rustle and brilliant sheen
And the reflection in it of paper-chains hand-made and stuck with
Flour-paste stretching from the light-bowl to every corner of the room.
Father Christmas himself was plastic and his vast stomach painted red
With a bulging sack behind his back and he was...Read more of this...
by
Jorie Graham
It has a hole in it. Not only where I
concentrate.
The river still ribboning, twisting up,
into its re-
arrangements, chill enlightenments, tight-knotted
quickenings
and loosenings--whispered messages dissolving
the messengers--
the river still glinting-up into its handfuls, heapings.
glassy
forgettings under the river of
my attention--
and the river of my attention laying itself down--
bending,
reassembling--over the quick leaving-offs and windy
obstacles--
and the surface...Read more of this...
by
Victor Hugo
("Jeune fille, l'amour c'est un miroir.")
{XXVI., February, 1835.}
Young maiden, true love is a pool all mirroring clear,
Where coquettish girls come to linger in long delight,
For it banishes afar from the face all the clouds that besmear
The soul truly bright;
But tempts you to ruffle its surface; drawing...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Lux
They are, the surfaces, gorgeous: a master
pastry chef at work here, the dips and whorls,
the wrist-twist
squeezes of cream from the tube
to the tart, sweet bleak sugarwork, needlework
toward the perfect lace doily
where sit the bone-china teacups, a little maze
of meaning maybe in their arrangement
sneaky obliques, shadow
allusives all piling
atop one another. Textures succulent but famished,
banal, bereft. These surfaces,
these flickering patinas,
through which,
if...Read more of this...
by
Dejan Stojanovic
When you hear the idea
Lying between the sounds, between the letters,
You find the meaning
Of a sound silently flowing
In the universe, waiting
To be discovered in the obvious
Universe smiling
Or you find an omen
In a hostile land of the unknown.
Dig deeper and harder,
Grow in the opposite direction
To see what is beneath
That...Read more of this...
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