Famous Threads Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Going Back to School

by Stephen Vincent Benet
 The boat ploughed on. Now Alcatraz was past 
And all the grey waves flamed to red again 
At the dead sun's last glimmer. Far and vast 
The Sausalito lights burned suddenly 
In little dots and clumps, as if a pen 
Had scrawled vague lines of gold across the hills; 
The sky was like a cup some rare wine fills,...Read more of this...

She Of The Garden

by Emile Verhaeren
In such a spot, with radiant flowers for halo,
I saw the Guardian Angel sit her down;
Vine-branches fashioned a green shrine above her
And sun-flowers rose behind her like a crown.


Her fingers, their white slenderness encircled
With humble, fragile rings of coral round.
Held, ranged in couples, sprays of faithful roses.
Sealed with a clasp, with threads of woollen bound.


A shimmering air the golden calm...Read more of this...

Where?

by Helen Hunt Jackson
 My snowy eupatorium has dropped 
Its silver threads of petals in the night; 
No signal told its blossoming had stopped; 
Its seed-films flutter silent, ghostly white: 
No answer stirs the shining air, 
As I ask, "Where?" 

Beneath the glossy leaves of winter-green 
Dead lilly-bells lie low, and in their place 
A rounded disk of pearly pink is seen, 
Which...Read more of this...

Dance Figure

by Ezra Pound
 For the Marriage in Cana of Galilee

Dark-eyed, 
O woman of my dreams, 
Ivory sandalled, 
There is none like thee among the dancers, 
None with swift feet.
I have not found thee in the tents, 
In the broken darkness.
I have not found thee at the well-head
Among the women with pitchers.
Thine arms are as a young sapling under the bark; 
Thy face...Read more of this...

High Noon

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
 Time’s finger on the dial of my life
Points to high noon! And yet the half-spent day
Leaves less than half remaining, for the dark, 
Bleak shadows of the grave engulf the end.

To those who burn the candle to the stick, 
The sputtering socket yields but little light.
Long life is sadder than early death.
We cannot count on raveled threads of age
Whereof...Read more of this...

Crossed Threads

by Helen Hunt Jackson
 The silken threads by viewless spinners spun, 
Which float so idly on the summer air, 
And help to make each summer morning fair, 
Shining like silver in the summer sun, 
Are caught by wayward breezes, one by one, 
Are blown to east and west and fastened there, 
Weaving on all the roads their sudden snare. 
No sign which road...Read more of this...

Black On Black

by A S J Tessimond
 Serrations of chimneys
Stone-black perforate
Velvet-black dark.
A tree coils in core of darkness.
My swinging
Hands
Incise the night.
A man slips into a doorway,
Black hole in blackness, and drowns there.
A second man passing traces
The diagram of his steps
On invisible pavement. Rain
Draws black parallel threads
Through the hollow of air....Read more of this...

To Think of Time

by Walt Whitman
 1
TO think of time—of all that retrospection! 
To think of to-day, and the ages continued henceforward! 

Have you guess’d you yourself would not continue? 
Have you dreaded these earth-beetles? 
Have you fear’d the future would be nothing to you?

Is to-day nothing? Is the beginningless past nothing? 
If the future is nothing, they are just as surely nothing. 

To think...Read more of this...

She is Overheard Singing

by Edna St. Vincent Millay
 OH, Prue she has a patient man,
And Joan a gentle lover,
And Agatha's Arth' is a hug-the-hearth,­
But my true love's a rover! 

Mig, her man's as good as cheese
And honest as a briar,
Sue tells her love what he's thinking of,­
But my dear lad's a liar! 

Oh, Sue and Prue and Agatha
Are thick with Mig and Joan!
They bite their threads and...Read more of this...

Magdalen Walks

by Oscar Wilde
 The little white clouds are racing over the sky,
And the fields are strewn with the gold of the flower of March,
The daffodil breaks under foot, and the tasselled larch
Sways and swings as the thrush goes hurrying by.

A delicate odour is borne on the wings of the morning 
breeze,
The odour of deep wet grass, and of brown new-furrowed earth,
The birds...Read more of this...

Summer

by John Clare
 Come we to the summer, to the summer we will come,
For the woods are full of bluebells and the hedges full of bloom,
And the crow is on the oak a-building of her nest,
And love is burning diamonds in my true lover's breast;
She sits beneath the whitethorn a-plaiting of her hair,
And I will to my true lover with a fond...Read more of this...

Sunshine through a Cobwebbed Window

by Amy Lowell
 What charm is yours, you faded old-world tapestries,
Of outworn, childish mysteries,
Vague pageants woven on a web of dream!
And we, pushing and fighting in the turbid stream
Of modern life, find solace in your tarnished broideries.
Old lichened halls, sun-shaded by huge cedar-trees,
The layered branches horizontal stretched, like Japanese
Dark-banded prints. Carven cathedrals, on a sky
Of faintest colour, where the gothic spires fly
And...Read more of this...

My first well Day -- since many ill --

by Emily Dickinson
 My first well Day -- since many ill --
I asked to go abroad,
And take the Sunshine in my hands,
And see the things in Pod --

A 'blossom just when I went in
To take my Chance with pain --
Uncertain if myself, or He,
Should prove the strongest One.

The Summer deepened, while we strove --
She put some flowers away --
And Redder cheeked Ones...Read more of this...

On The Death Of Sir Tho: Peltham

by William Strode
 Meerly for man's death to mourne
Were to repine that man was borne.
When weake old age doth fall asleepe
Twere foule ingratitude to weepe:
Those threads alone should pull out tears
Whose sodayne cracke breaks off some years.
Heere tis not so: full distance heere
Sunders the cradle from the beere.
A fellow-traveller he hath beene
So long with Time: so worne to skinne,
That were hee not...Read more of this...

I In My Intricate Image

by Dylan Thomas
 I

I, in my intricate image, stride on two levels,
Forged in man's minerals, the brassy orator
Laying my ghost in metal,
The scales of this twin world tread on the double,
My half ghost in armour hold hard in death's corridor,
To my man-iron sidle.

Beginning with doom in the bulb, the spring unravels,
Bright as her spinning-wheels, the colic season
Worked on a world of petals;
She...Read more of this...

To Mary

by William Cowper
 The twentieth year is well nigh past
Since first our sky was overcast;— 
Ah would that this might be the last!
My Mary!

Thy spirits have a fainter flow,
I see thee daily weaker grow;— 
'Twas my distress that brought thee low,
My Mary!

Thy needles, once a shining store,
For my sake restless heretofore,
Now rust disused, and shine no more,
My Mary!

For though thou gladly wouldst...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...

I See The Boys Of Summer

by Dylan Thomas
 I

I see the boys of summer in their ruin
Lay the gold tithings barren,
Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils;
There in their heat the winter floods
Of frozen loves they fetch their girls,
And drown the cargoed apples in their tides.

These boys of light are curdlers in their folly,
Sour the boiling honey;
The jacks of frost they finger in the hives;
There in...Read more of this...

The Plot Against The Giant

by Wallace Stevens
 First Girl
When this yokel comes maundering,
Whetting his hacker,
I shall run before him,
Diffusing the civilest odors
Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.
It will check him.

Second Girl
I shall run before him,
Arching cloths besprinkled with colors
As small as fish-eggs.
The threads
Will abash him.

Third Girl
Oh, la...le pauvre!
I shall run before him,
With a curious puffing.
He will bend his ear then.
I shall whisper
Heavenly labials in a world...Read more of this...

I Do Not Love Thee For That Fair

by Thomas Carew
 I do not love thee for that fair
Rich fan of thy most curious hair;
Though the wires thereof be drawn
Finer than threads of lawn,
And are softer than the leaves
On which the subtle spider weaves.

I do not love thee for those flowers
Growing on thy cheeks, love's bowers;
Though such cunning them hath spread,
None can paint them white and red:
Love's golden arrows thence...Read more of this...

God-Forgotten

by Thomas Hardy
 I towered far, and lo! I stood within 
 The presence of the Lord Most High, 
Sent thither by the sons of earth, to win 
 Some answer to their cry. 

 --"The Earth, say'st thou? The Human race? 
 By Me created? Sad its lot? 
Nay: I have no remembrance of such place: 
 Such world I fashioned...Read more of this...

Stone Shadows

by David St John
 For an entire year she dressed in all the shades
Of ash — the gray of old paper; the deeper,
Almost auburn ash of pencil boxes; the dark, nearly

Black marl of oak beds pulled from burning houses.
That year, even her hair itself was woven
With an ashen white, just single threads here & there.

Yet the effect at last was of a woman
Constructed...Read more of this...

The Chorus of Old Men in Aegus

by Edwin Arlington Robinson
 Ye gods that have a home beyond the world, 
Ye that have eyes for all man’s agony, 
Ye that have seen this woe that we have seen,— 
Look with a just regard, 
And with an even grace,
Here on the shattered corpse of a shattered king, 
Here on a suffering world where men grow old 
And wander like sad shadows...Read more of this...

Work chapter VII

by Kahlil Gibran
 Then a ploughman said, "Speak to us of Work." 

And he answered, saying: 

You work that you may keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth. 

For to be idle is to become a stranger unto the seasons, and to step out of life's procession, that marches in majesty and proud submission towards the infinite. 

When...Read more of this...

Ode to Eloquence

by Mary Darby Robinson
 HAIL! GODDESS of persuasive art! 
The magic of whose tuneful tongue 
Lulls to soft harmony the wand'ring heart 
With fascinating song; 
O, let me hear thy heav'n-taught strain, 
As thro' my quiv'ring pulses steal 
The mingling throbs of joy and pain, 
Which only sensate minds can feel; 
Ah ! let me taste the bliss supreme, 
Which thy warm touch...Read more of this...

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