Famous Syllables Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Syllables poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous syllables poems. These examples illustrate what a famous syllables poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
John Ashbery
Orpheus liked the glad personal quality
Of the things beneath the sky. Of course, Eurydice was a part
Of this. Then one day, everything changed. He rends
Rocks into fissures with lament. Gullies, hummocks
Can't withstand it. The sky shudders from one horizon
To the other, almost ready to give up wholeness.
Then Apollo quietly told him: "Leave it all on earth.
Your lute, what point?...Read more of this...
by
Pablo Neruda
From bristly foliage
you fell
complete, polished wood, gleaming mahogany,
as perfect
as a violin newly
born of the treetops,
that falling
offers its sealed-in gifts,
the hidden sweetness
that grew in secret
amid birds and leaves,
a model of form,
kin to wood and flour,
an oval instrument
that holds within it
intact delight, an edible rose.
In the heights you abandoned
the sea-urchin burr
that parted its spines
in the light of the chestnut tree;
through that...Read more of this...
by
Jorge Luis Borges
Oh days devoted to the useless burden
of putting out of mind the biography
of a minor poet of the Southem Hemisphere,
to whom the fates or perhaps the stars have given
a body which will leave behind no child,
and blindness, which is semi-darkness and jail,
and old age, which is the dawn of death,
and fame, which absolutely nobody deserves,
and the practice of weaving...Read more of this...
by
Emile Verhaeren
Young and kindly spring who clothes our garden with beauty makes lucid our voices and words, and steeps them in his limpidity.
The breeze and the lips of the leaves babble, and slowly shed in us the syllables of their brightness.
But the best in us turns away and flees material words; a mute and mild and simple rapture, better than all...Read more of this...
by
Allen Ginsberg
Tail turned to red sunset on a juniper crown a lone magpie cawks.
Mad at Oryoki in the shrine-room -- Thistles blossomed late afternoon.
Put on my shirt and took it off in the sun walking the path to lunch.
A dandelion seed floats above the marsh grass with the mosquitos.
At 4 A.M. the two middleaged men sleeping together holding hands.
In the...Read more of this...
by
Edna St. Vincent Millay
The room is full of you!—As I came in
And closed the door behind me, all at once
A something in the air, intangible,
Yet stiff with meaning, struck my senses sick!—
Sharp, unfamiliar odors have destroyed
Each other room's dear personality.
The heavy scent of damp, funereal flowers,—
The very essence, hush-distilled, of Death—
Has strangled that habitual breath of home
Whose expiration leaves all houses dead;
And...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Allan Poe
For her this rhyme is penned, whose luminous eyes,
Brightly expressive as the twins of Leda,
Shall find her own sweet name, that nestling lies
Upon the page, enwrapped from every reader.
Search narrowly the lines!- they hold a treasure
Divine- a talisman- an amulet
That must be worn at heart. Search well the measure-
The words- the syllables! Do not forget
The trivialest point, or you...Read more of this...
by
Adrienne Rich
1.
A conversation begins
with a lie. and each
speaker of the so-called common language feels
the ice-floe split, the drift apart
as if powerless, as if up against
a force of nature
A poem can being
with a lie. And be torn up.
A conversation has other laws
recharges itself with its own
false energy, Cannot be torn
up. Infiltrates our blood. Repeats itself.
Inscribes...Read more of this...
by
Sylvia Plath
The horizons ring me like faggots,
Tilted and disparate, and always unstable.
Touched by a match, they might warm me,
And their fine lines singe
The air to orange
Before the distances they pin evaporate,
Weighting the pale sky with a soldier color.
But they only dissolve and dissolve
Like a series of promises, as I step forward.
There is no life higher than the grasstops
Or the hearts...Read more of this...
by
Sylvia Plath
I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off....Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
I WAS a boy when I heard three red words
a thousand Frenchmen died in the streets
for: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—I asked
why men die for words.
I was older; men with mustaches, sideburns,
lilacs, told me the high golden words are:
Mother, Home, and Heaven—other older men with
face decorations said: God, Duty, Immortality
—they sang these threes slow from deep lungs.
Years ticked off their say-so...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
The Hills in Purple syllables
The Day's Adventures tell
To little Groups of Continents
Just going Home from School....Read more of this...
by
Allen Ginsberg
To Struga Festival Golden Wreath Laureates
& International Bards 1986
Stand up against governments, against God.
Stay irresponsible.
Say only what we know & imagine.
Absolutes are coercion.
Change is absolute.
Ordinary mind includes eternal perceptions.
Observe what's vivid.
Notice what you notice.
Catch yourself thinking.
Vividness is self-selecting.
If we don't show anyone, we're free to write anything.
Remember the future.
Advise only yourself.
Don't drink yourself to death.
Two molecules clanking against...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
In Ebon Box, when years have flown
To reverently peer,
Wiping away the velvet dust
Summers have sprinkled there!
To hold a letter to the light --
Grown Tawny now, with time --
To con the faded syllables
That quickened us like Wine!
Perhaps a Flower's shrivelled check
Among its stores to find --
Plucked far away, some morning --
By gallant -- mouldering hand!
A curl, perhaps, from foreheads
Our Constancy...Read more of this...
by
Sidney Lanier
A Story of Christmas Eve.
Strange that the termagant winds should scold
The Christmas Eve so bitterly!
But Wife, and Harry the four-year-old,
Big Charley, Nimblewits, and I,
Blithe as the wind was bitter, drew
More frontward of the mighty fire,
Where wise Newfoundland Fan foreknew
The heaven that Christian dogs desire --
Stretched o'er the rug, serene and grave,
Huge nose on heavy paws reclined,
With never a drowning...Read more of this...
by
Heather McHugh
The literate are ill-prepared for this
snap in the line of life:
the day turns a trick
of twisted tongues and is
untiable, the month by no mere root
moon-ridden, and the yearly eloquences yielding more
than summer's part of speech times four. We better learn
the buried meaning in the grave: here
all we see of its alphabet is tracks
of predators, all we know of...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
ON Forty First Street
near Eighth Avenue
a frame house wobbles.
If houses went on crutches
this house would be
one of the cripples.
A sign on the house:
Church of the Living God
And Rescue Home for Orphan Children.
From a Greek coffee house
Across the street
A cabalistic jargon
Jabbers back.
And men at tables
Spill Peloponnesian syllables
And speak of shovels for street work.
And the new embankments...Read more of this...
by
Laure-Anne Bosselaar
I love to lick English the way I licked the hard
round licorice sticks the Belgian nuns gave me for six
good conduct points on Sundays after mass.
Love it when ‘plethora’, ‘indolence’, ‘damask’,
or my new word: ‘lasciviousness,’ stain my tongue,
thicken my saliva, sweet as those sticks — black
and slick with every lick it took...Read more of this...
by
Meena Alexander
In a crumpled shirt (so casual for a god)
Bow tucked loosely under an arm still jittery from battle
He balanced himself on a flat boat painted black.
Each wave as I kneel closer a migrant flag
A tongue with syllables no script can catch.
The many births you have passed through, try to remember them as I do mine
Memory is all you have.
Still, how...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
There is a word
Which bears a sword
Can pierce an armed man --
It hurls its barbed syllables
And is mute again --
But where it fell
The saved will tell
On patriotic day,
Some epauletted Brother
Gave his breath away.
Wherever runs the breathless sun --
Wherever roams the day --
There is its noiseless onset --
There is its victory!
Behold the keenest marksman!
The most accomplished shot!
Time's sublimest target
Is a...Read more of this...
by
Salvatore Quasimodo
Tindari, I know you
mild between broad hills, overhanging the waters
of the god’s sweet islands.
Today, you confront me
and break into my heart.
I climb airy peaks, precipices,
following the wind in the pines,
and the crowd of them, lightly accompanying me,
fly off into the air,
wave of love and sound,
and you take me to you,
you from whom I wrongly drew
evil, and fear of silence,...Read more of this...
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...
by
Sylvia Plath
I ordered this, clean wood box
Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift.
I would say it was the coffin of a midget
Or a square baby
Were there not such a din in it.
The box is locked, it is dangerous.
I have to live with it overnight
And I can't keep away from it.
There...Read more of this...
by
Raymond Carver
it gets run over by a van.
you find it at the side of the road
and bury it.
you feel bad about it.
you feel bad personally,
but you feel bad for your daughter
because it was her pet,
and she loved it so.
she used to croon to it
and let it sleep in her bed.
you...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
1
IN cabin’d ships, at sea,
The boundless blue on every side expanding,
With whistling winds and music of the waves—the large imperious waves—In
such,
Or some lone bark, buoy’d on the dense marine,
Where, joyous, full of faith, spreading white sails,
She cleaves the ether, mid the sparkle and the foam of day, or under many a star
at night,...Read more of this...
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