Famous Theft Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Theft poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous theft poems. These examples illustrate what a famous theft poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
W. E. B. Du Bois
Dark daughter of the lotus leaves that watch the Southern Sea!
Wan spirit of a prisoned soul a-panting to be free!
The muttered music of thy streams, the whisper of the deep,
Have kissed each other in God's name and kissed a world to sleep.
The will of the world is a whistling wind, sweeping a cloud-swept sky,
And not from the East and not...Read more of this...
by
Francesco Petrarch
CANZONE XX. Ben mi credea passar mio tempo omai. HE CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT SEEING HER, BUT WOULD NOT DIE THAT HE MAY STILL LOVE HER. As pass'd the years which I have left behind,To pass my future years I fondly thought,Amid old studies, with desires the same;But, from my lady since I...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
Consider
a girl who keeps slipping off,
arms limp as old carrots,
into the hypnotist's trance,
into a spirit world
speaking with the gift of tongues.
She is stuck in the time machine,
suddenly two years old sucking her thumb,
as inward as a snail,
learning to talk again.
She's on a voyage.
She is swimming further and further back,
up like a salmon,
struggling into her mother's pocketbook.
Little doll child,
come here...Read more of this...
by
William Cowper
Oh that those lips had language! Life has pass'd
With me but roughly since I heard thee last.
Those lips are thine--thy own sweet smiles I see,
The same that oft in childhood solaced me;
Voice only fails, else, how distinct they say,
"Grieve not, my child, chase all thy fears away!"
The meek intelligence of those dear eyes
(Blest be the art that can immortalize,
The...Read more of this...
by
Ben Jonson
Come, my Celia, let us prove
While we may, the sports of love;
Time will not be ours forever;
He at length our good will sever.
Spend not then his gifts in vain.
Suns that set may rise again;
But if once we lose this light,
'Tis with us perpetual night.
Why should we defer our joys?
Fame and rumor are but toys.
Cannot we delude the eyes
Of a...Read more of this...
by
Robinson Jeffers
Only stand high a long enough time your lightning
will come; that is what blunts the peaks of
redwoods;
But this old tower of life on the hilltop has taken
it more than twice a century, this knows in
every
Cell the salty and the burning taste, the shudder
and the voice.
The fire from heaven; it has
felt the earth's...Read more of this...
by
Francesco Petrarch
CANZONE XVIII. Qual più diversa e nova. HE COMPARES HIMSELF TO ALL THAT IS MOST STRANGE IN CREATION. Whate'er most wild and newWas ever found in any foreign land,If viewed and valued true,Most likens me 'neath Love's transforming hand.Whence the bright day breaks through,Alone and consortless, a bird there flies,Read more of this...
by
George Herbert
O Sacred Providence, who from end to end
Strongly and sweetly movest! shall I write,
And not of thee, through whom my fingers bend
To hold my quill? shall they not do thee right?
Of all the creatures both in sea and land
Onely to Man thou hast made known thy wayes,
And put the penne alone into his hand,
And made him Secretarie of...Read more of this...
by
D. H. Lawrence
God shook thy roundness in His finger's cup,
He sunk His hands in firmness down thy sides,
And drew the circle of His grasp, O Man,
Along thy limbs delighted, thine, His bride's.
And so thou wert God-shapen: His finger
Curved thy mouth for thee, and His strong shoulder
Planted thee upright: art not proud to see
In the curve of thine exquisite form the joy of...Read more of this...
by
Herman Melville
Children of my happier prime,
When One yet lived with me, and threw
Her rainbow over life and time,
Even Hope, my bride, and mother to you!
O, nurtured in sweet pastoral air,
And fed on flowers and light and dew
Of morning meadows -spare, ah, spare
Reproach; spare, and upbraid me not
That, yielding scarce to reckless mood,
But jealous of your future lot,
I sealed you in...Read more of this...
by
Amy Lowell
Cross-ribboned shoes; a muslin gown,
High-waisted, girdled with bright blue;
A straw poke bonnet which hid the frown
She pluckered her little brows into
As she picked her dainty passage through
The dusty street. "Ah, Mademoiselle,
A dirty pathway, we need rain,
My poor fruits suffer, and the shell
Of this nut's too big for its kernel, lain
Here in the sun it has shrunk again.
The baker down...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
1
EARTH, round, rolling, compact—suns, moons, animals—all these are words to be
said;
Watery, vegetable, sauroid advances—beings, premonitions, lispings of the future,
Behold! these are vast words to be said.
Were you thinking that those were the words—those upright lines? those curves,
angles,
dots?
No, those are not the words—the substantial words are in the ground and sea,
They are in...Read more of this...
by
Ben Jonson
V. — SONG. — TO CELIA. He at length our good will sever. Spend not then his gifts in vain. 5 Suns that set, may rise again: But if once we lose this light, 'Tis with us perpetual night. Why should we defer our joys ? Fame and rumor are but toys. 10 Cannot we delude the eyes Of a few...Read more of this...
by
Isaac Watts
v.1,5,8,16,21,22
C. M.
The judgment of hypocrites.
When Christ to judgment shall descend,
And saints surround their Lord,
He calls the nations to attend,
And hear his awful word.
"Not for the want of bullocks slain
Will I the world reprove;
Altars, and rites, and forms are vain,
Without the fire of love.
"And what have hypocrites to do
To bring their sacrifice?
They call my statutes just and true,
But deal...Read more of this...
by
Philip Larkin
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped in the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft.
And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Carew
'Tis true, dear Ben, thy just chastising hand
Hath fix'd upon the sotted age a brand
To their swoll'n pride and empty scribbling due;
It can nor judge, nor write, and yet 'tis true
Thy comic muse, from the exalted line
Touch'd by thy Alchemist, doth since decline
From that her zenith, and foretells a red
And blushing evening,...Read more of this...
by
Jonathan Swift
To the Priest, on Observing how most Men mistake their own Talents
When beasts could speak (the learned say,
They still can do so ev'ry day),
It seems, they had religion then,
As much as now we find in men.
It happen'd, when a plague broke out
(Which therefore made them more devout),
The king of brutes (to make it plain,
Of quadrupeds I only mean)
By...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
Now Tomlinson gave up the ghost in his house in Berkeley Square,
And a Spirit came to his bedside and gripped him by the hair --
A Spirit gripped him by the hair and carried him far away,
Till he heard as the roar of a rain-fed ford the roar of the Milky Way:
Till he heard the roar of the Milky Way...Read more of this...
by
Philip Larkin
Morning, a glass door, flashes
Gold names off the new city,
Whose white shelves and domes travel
The slow sky all day.
I land to stay here;
And the windows flock open
And the curtains fly out like doves
And a past dries in a wind.
Now let me lie down, under
A wide-branched indifference,
Shovel-faces like pennies
Down the back of the mind,
Find voices coined to
An argot of motor-horns,
And...Read more of this...
by
Philip Larkin
At last you yielded up the album, which
Once open, sent me distracted. All your ages
Matt and glossy on the thick black pages!
Too much confectionery, too rich:
I choke on such nutritious images.
My swivel eye hungers from pose to pose --
In pigtails, clutching a reluctant cat;
Or furred yourself, a sweet girl-graduate;
Or lifting a heavy-headed rose
Beneath a trellis, or in a trilby-hat
(Faintly...Read more of this...
by
Francesco Petrarch
SONNET CLXVI. O bella man, che mi distringi 'l core. THE STOLEN GLOVE. O beauteous hand! that dost my heart subdue,And in a little space my life confine;Hand where their skill and utmost efforts joinNature and Heaven, their plastic powers to show!Sweet fingers, seeming pearls of orient hue,To my wounds...Read more of this...
by
Francesco Petrarch
[Pg 76] CANZONE X. Poichè per mio destino. IN PRAISE OF LAURA'S EYES: IN THEM HE FINDS EVERY GOOD, AND HE CAN NEVER CEASE TO PRAISE THEM. Since then by destinyI am compell'd to sing the strong desire,Which here condemns me ceaselessly to sigh,May Love, whose quenchless fireExcites...Read more of this...
by
A E Housman
"Here the hangman stops his cart:
Now the best of friends must part.
Fare you well, for ill fare I:
Live, lads, and I will die.
"Oh, at home had I but stayed
'Prenticed to my father's trade,
Had I stuck to plane and adze,
I had not been lost, my lads.
"Then I might have built perhaps
Gallows-trees...Read more of this...
by
Amy Levy
He comes; I hear him up the street--
Bird of ill omen, flapping wide
The pinion of a printed sheet,
His hoarse note scares the eventide.
Of slaughter, theft, and suicide
He is the herald and the friend;
Now he vociferates with pride--
A double murder in Mile End!
A hanging to his soul is sweet;
His gloating fancy's fain to bide
Where human-freighted vessels meet,
And misdirected trains collide.
With...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Lee Masters
Over and over they used to ask me,
While buying the wine or the beer,
In Peoria first, and later in Chicago,
Denver, Frisco, New York, wherever I lived,
How I happened to lead the life,
And what was the start of it.
Well, I told them a silk dress,
And a promise of marriage from a rich man --
(It was Lucius Atherton).
But that was not...Read more of this...
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