Famous Thick Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The Beacon In The Storm

by Victor Hugo
 ("Quels sont ces bruits sourds?") 
 
 {XXIV., July 17, 1836.} 


 Hark to that solemn sound! 
 It steals towards the strand.— 
 Whose is that voice profound 
 Which mourns the swallowed land, 
 With moans, 
 Or groans, 
 New threats of ruin close at hand? 
 It is Triton—the storm to scorn 
 Who doth...Read more of this...

Greenlands Icy Mountains

by William Topaz McGonagall
 Greenland's icy mountains are fascinating and grand,
And wondrously created by the Almighty's command;
And the works of the Almighty there's few can understand:
Who knows but it might be a part of Fairyland? 

Because there are churches of ice, and houses glittering like glass,
And for scenic grandeur there's nothing can it surpass,
Besides there's monuments and spires, also ruins,
Which serve for a...Read more of this...

The Loss of Love

by Countee Cullen
 All through an empty place I go,
And find her not in any room;
The candles and the lamps I light
Go down before a wind of gloom. 
Thick-spraddled lies the dust about,
A fit, sad place to write her name
Or draw her face the way she looked
That legendary night she came.

The old house crumbles bit by bit;
Each day I hear the ominous...Read more of this...

Dream Song 3: A Stimulant for an Old Beast

by John Berryman
 Acacia, burnt myrrh, velvet, pricky stings.
-”I'm not so young but not so very old,
said screwed-up lovely 23.
A final sense of being right out in the cold,
unkissed.
(-”My psychiatrist can lick your psychiatrist.) Women get under 
 things.

All these old criminals sooner or later
have had it. I've been reading old journals.
Gottwald & Co., out of business now.
Thick chests quit. Double agent,...Read more of this...

An Aquarium

by Amy Lowell
 Streaks of green and yellow iridescence,
Silver shiftings,
Rings veering out of rings,
Silver -- gold --
Grey-green opaqueness sliding down,
With sharp white bubbles
Shooting and dancing,
Flinging quickly outward.
Nosing the bubbles,
Swallowing them,
Fish.
Blue shadows against silver-saffron water,
The light rippling over them
In steel-bright tremors.
Outspread translucent fins
Flute, fold, and relapse;
The threaded light prints through them on the pebbles
In scarcely tarnished twinklings.
Curving of spotted spines,
Slow up-shifts,
Lazy convolutions:
Then a...Read more of this...

A Pastiche For Eve

by Weldon Kees
 Unmanageable as history: these
Followers of Tammuz to the land
That offered no return, where dust
Grew thick on every bolt and door. And so the world
Chilled, and the women wept, tore at their hair.
Yet, in the skies, a goddess governed Sirius, the Dog,
Who shines alike on mothers, lesbians, and whores.

What are we governed by? Dido and Carrie
Chapman Catt arrange themselves as...Read more of this...

302. Elegy on Willie Nicol's Mare

by Robert Burns
 PEG NICHOLSON was a good bay mare,
 As ever trod on airn;
But now she’s floating down the Nith,
 And past the mouth o’ Cairn.


Peg Nicholson was a good bay mare,
 An’ rode thro’ thick and thin;
But now she’s floating down the Nith,
 And wanting even the skin.


Peg Nicholson was a good bay mare,
 And ance she bore a priest;
But...Read more of this...

Brother and Sister

by D. H. Lawrence
 The shorn moon trembling indistinct on her path,
Frail as a scar upon the pale blue sky, 
Draws towards the downward slope: some sorrow hath
Worn her down to the quick, so she faintly fares 
Along her foot-searched way without knowing why
She creeps persistent down the sky’s long stairs. 

Some day they see, though I have never seen, 
The dead moon...Read more of this...

The Further Bank

by Rabindranath Tagore
 I long to go over there to the further bank of the river.
Where those boats are tied to the bamboo poles in a line;
Where men cross over in their boats in the morning with
ploughs on their shoulders to till their far-away fields;
Where the cowherds make their lowing cattle swim across to the
riverside pasture;
Whence they all come back home in...Read more of this...

Mannahatta

by Walt Whitman
 I WAS asking for something specific and perfect for my city, 
Whereupon, lo! upsprang the aboriginal name! 

Now I see what there is in a name, a word, liquid, sane, unruly, musical, self-sufficient;

I see that the word of my city is that word up there, 
Because I see that word nested in nests of water-bays, superb, with tall and...Read more of this...

Barbie Doll

by Marge Piercy
 This girlchild was born as usual
and presented dolls that did pee-pee
and miniature GE stoves and irons
and wee lipsticks the color of cherry candy.
Then in the magic of puberty, a classmate said:
You have a great big nose and fat legs. 

She was healthy, tested intelligent,
possessed strong arms and back,
abundant sexual drive and manual dexterity.
She went to and fro apologizing.
Everyone saw...Read more of this...

Now in thick clouds Thy face Thou dost immerse,

by Omar Khayyam
Now in thick clouds Thy face Thou dost immerse,
And now display it in this universe;
Thou the spectator, Thou the spectacle,
Sole to Thyself Thy glories dost rehearse....Read more of this...

Song For The Rainy Season

by Elizabeth Bishop
 Hidden, oh hidden 
in the high fog 
the house we live in, 
beneath the magnetic rock, 
rain-, rainbow-ridden, 
where blood-black 
bromelias, lichens, 
owls, and the lint 
of the waterfalls cling, 
familiar, unbidden. 

In a dim age 
of water 
the brook sings loud 
from a rib cage 
of giant fern; vapor 
climbs up the thick growth 
effortlessly, turns back, 
holding...Read more of this...

Human Life's Mystery

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
 We sow the glebe, we reap the corn, 
We build the house where we may rest, 
And then, at moments, suddenly, 
We look up to the great wide sky, 
Inquiring wherefore we were born… 
For earnest or for jest? 

The senses folding thick and dark 
About the stifled soul within, 
We guess diviner things beyond, 
And yearn to them...Read more of this...

A Prodigal

by Elizabeth Bishop
 The brown enormous odor he lived by
was too close, with its breathing and thick hair,
for him to judge. The floor was rotten; the sty
was plastered halfway up with glass-smooth dung.
Light-lashed, self-righteous, above moving snouts,
the pigs' eyes followed him, a cheerful stare--
even to the sow that always ate her young--
till, sickening, he leaned to scratch her head.
But sometimes mornings after...Read more of this...

Hughley Steeple

by A E Housman
 LXI

The vane on Hughley steeple
 Veers bright, a far-known sign,
And there lie Hughley people,
 And there lie friends of mine.
Tall in their midst the tower
 Divides the shade and sun,
And the clock strikes the hour
 And tells the time to none.

To south the headstones cluster,
 The sunny mounds lie thick;
The dead are more in muster
 At Hughley than the...Read more of this...

Spring in Town

by William Cullen Bryant
 The country ever has a lagging Spring,
Waiting for May to call its violets forth,
And June its roses--showers and sunshine bring,
Slowly, the deepening verdure o'er the earth;
To put their foliage out, the woods are slack,
And one by one the singing-birds come back.

Within the city's bounds the time of flowers
Comes earlier. Let a mild and sunny day,
Such as full often, for...Read more of this...

Marys Song

by Sylvia Plath
 The Sunday lamb cracks in its fat.
The fat
Sacrifices its opacity. . . .

A window, holy gold.
The fire makes it precious,
The same fire

Melting the tallow heretics,
Ousting the Jews.
Their thick palls float

Over the cicatrix of Poland, burnt-out
Germany.
They do not die.

Grey birds obsess my heart,
Mouth-ash, ash of eye.
They settle. On the high

Precipice
That emptied one man into space
The ovens glowed like heavens, incandescent.

It...Read more of this...

Trebetherick

by John Betjeman
 We used to picnic where the thrift
Grew deep and tufted to the edge;
We saw the yellow foam flakes drift
In trembling sponges on the ledge
Below us, till the wind would lift
Them up the cliff and o’er the hedge.
Sand in the sandwiches, wasps in the tea,
Sun on our bathing dresses heavy with the wet,
Squelch of the bladder-wrack waiting for the sea,
Fleas...Read more of this...

Thick-Sprinkled Bunting

by Walt Whitman
 THICK-SPRINKLED bunting! Flag of stars! 
Long yet your road, fateful flag!—long yet your road, and lined with bloody death! 
For the prize I see at issue, at last is the world! 
All its ships and shores I see, interwoven with your threads, greedy banner! 
—Dream’d again the flags of kings, highest born, to flaunt unrival’d?
O hasten, flag of man!...Read more of this...

Nadowessian Death-Lament

by Friedrich von Schiller
 See, he sitteth on his mat
Sitteth there upright,
With the grace with which he sat
While he saw the light.

Where is now the sturdy gripe,--
Where the breath sedate,
That so lately whiffed the pipe
Toward the Spirit great?

Where the bright and falcon eye,
That the reindeer's tread
On the waving grass could spy,
Thick with dewdrops spread?

Where the limbs that used to dart
Swifter through the snow
Than...Read more of this...

Sunflower Sutra

by Allen Ginsberg
I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look for the sunset over the box house hills and cry.

Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by...Read more of this...

Ii

by Victor Hugo
 But he saw nothing; space was black—no sound. 
 "Forward," said Canute, raising his proud head. 
 There fell a second stain beside the first, 
 Then it grew larger, and the Cimbrian chief 
 Stared at the thick vague darkness, and saw naught. 
 Still as a bloodhound follows on his track, 
 Sad he went on. 'There...Read more of this...

Oh see how thick the goldcup flowers

by A E Housman
 Oh, see how thick the goldcup flowers 
Are lying in field and lane, 
With dandelions to tell the hours 
That never are told again. 
Oh may I squire you round the meads 
And pick you posies gay? 
--'Twill do no harm to take my arm. 
'You may, young man, you may.' 

Ah, spring was sent for lass and lad,...Read more of this...

The Little Match Girl

by William Topaz McGonagall
 It was biting cold, and the falling snow,
Which filled a poor little match girl's heart with woe,
Who was bareheaded and barefooted, as she went along the street,
Crying, "Who'll buy my matches? for I want pennies to buy some meat!" 

When she left home she had slippers on;
But, alas! poor child, now they were gone.
For she lost both of them...Read more of this...

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