Famous Thrown Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Light Woman

by Robert Browning
 I.

So far as our story approaches the end,
 Which do you pity the most of us three?—
My friend, or the mistress of my friend
 With her wanton eyes, or me?

 II.

My friend was already too good to lose,
 And seemed in the way of improvement yet,
When she crossed his path with her hunting-noose
 And over him drew her net.

...Read more of this...

March

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 THE snow-flakes fall in showers,

The time is absent still,
When all Spring's beauteous flowers,
When all Spring's beauteous flowers

Our hearts with joy shall fill.

With lustre false and fleeting

The sun's bright rays are thrown;
The swallow's self is cheating:
The swallow's self is cheating,

And why? He comes alone!

Can I e'er feel delighted

Alone, though Spring is near?
Yet when we are united,
Yet when we are united,

The...Read more of this...

The Ghost

by Charles Baudelaire
 Down the street as I was drifting with the city's human tide, 
Came a ghost, and for a moment walked in silence by my side -- 
Now my heart was hard and bitter, and a bitter spirit he, 
So I felt no great aversion to his ghostly company. 
Said the Shade: `At finer feelings let your lip in scorn...Read more of this...

Although we saw this bright garden

by Emile Verhaeren
Although we saw this bright garden, wherein we pass silently, flower before our eyes, it is rather in us that grows the pleasantest and fairest garden in the world.
For we live all the flowers, all the plants and all the grasses in our laughter and our tears of pure and calm happiness.
For we live all the transparencies of the blue...Read more of this...

A Star in a Stoneboat

by Robert Frost
 For Lincoln MacVeagh

Never tell me that not one star of all
That slip from heaven at night and softly fall
Has been picked up with stones to build a wall.

Some laborer found one faded and stone-cold,
And saving that its weight suggested gold
And tugged it from his first too certain hold,

He noticed nothing in it to remark.
He was not used to handling...Read more of this...

The Road

by Siegfried Sassoon
 The road is thronged with women; soldiers pass 
And halt, but never see them; yet they’re here— 
A patient crowd along the sodden grass, 
Silent, worn out with waiting, sick with fear. 
The road goes crawling up a long hillside,
All ruts and stones and sludge, and the emptied dregs 
Of battle thrown in heaps. Here where they died 
Are...Read more of this...

The Difference

by Lucy Maud Montgomery
 When we were together, heart of my heart, on that unforgotten quest,
With your tender arm about me thrown and your head upon my breast,
There came a grief that was bitter and deep and straitly dwell with me,
And I shunned it not, so sweet it was to suffer and be with thee. 

And now when no more against mine own...Read more of this...

Love And Madness

by Thomas Campbell
 Hark ! from the battlements of yonder tower
The solemn bell has tolled the midnight hour !
Roused from drear visions of distempered sleep,
Poor Broderick wakes—in solitude to weep !

"Cease, Memory; cease (the friendless mourner cried)
To probe the bosom too severely tried !
Oh ! ever cease, my pensive thoughts, to stray
Through tie bright fields of Fortune's better day,
When youthful Hope, the...Read more of this...

The Gyres

by William Butler Yeats
 The gyres! the gyres! Old Rocky Face, look forth;
Things thought too long can be no longer thought,
For beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth,
And ancient lineaments are blotted out.
Irrational streams of blood are staining earth;
Empedocles has thrown all things about;
Hector is dead and there's a light in Troy;
We that look on but laugh in tragic joy.

What matter though numb...Read more of this...

If from the commencement Thou hadst wished to make

by Omar Khayyam
If from the commencement Thou hadst wished to make
me known to myself, why later, hast Thou separated me
from this myself? If from the first day Thy intention
was to abandon me, why hast Thou thrown me, all
amazed, into the midst of the world?...Read more of this...

The Legend of Mirth

by Rudyard Kipling
 The Four Archangels, so the legends tell,
Raphael, Gabriel, Michael, Azrael,
Being first of those to whom the Power was shown
Stood first of all the Host before The Throne,
And, when the Charges were allotted, burst
Tumultuous-winged from out the assembly first.
Zeal was their spur that bade them strictly heed
Their own high judgment on their lightest deed.
Zeal was their spur that, when relief...Read more of this...

Some Advice To Those Who Will Serve Time In Prison

by Nazim Hikmet
 If instead of being hanged by the neck
 you're thrown inside
 for not giving up hope
in the world, your country, your people,
 if you do ten or fifteen years
 apart from the time you have left,
you won't say,
 "Better I had swung from the end of a rope
 like a flag" --
You'll put your foot down and live.
It may...Read more of this...

The Statues

by William Butler Yeats
 Pythagoras planned it. Why did the people stare?
His numbers, though they moved or seemed to move
In marble or in bronze, lacked character.
But boys and girls, pale from the imagined love
Of solitary beds, knew what they were,
That passion could bring character enough,
And pressed at midnight in some public place
Live lips upon a plummet-measured face.

No! Greater than Pythagoras, for the men
That...Read more of this...

Crater Face

by Denise Duhamel
 is what we called her. The story was
that her father had thrown Drano at her
which was probably true, given the way she slouched
through fifth grade, afraid of the world, recess
especially. She had acne scars
before she had acne—poxs and dips
and bright red patches.
 I don't remember
any report in the papers. I don't remember
my father telling me her father had gone...Read more of this...

Lilys Menagerie

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 [Goethe describes this much-admired Poem, which 
he wrote in honour of his love Lily, as being "designed to change 
his surrender of her into despair, by drolly-fretful images."]

THERE'S no menagerie, I vow,

Excels my Lily's at this minute;

She keeps the strangest creatures in it,
And catches them, she knows not how.

Oh, how they hop, and run, and rave,
And their clipp'd pinions...Read more of this...

The Testimony Of Light

by Carolyn Forche
 Our life is a fire dampened, or a fire shut up in stone.
 --Jacob Boehme, De Incarnatione Verbi

Outside everything visible and invisible a blazing maple.
Daybreak: a seam at the curve of the world. The trousered legs of the women
 shimmered.
They held their arms in front of them like ghosts.

The coal bones of the house clinked in a kimono of...Read more of this...

Sonnet CCXXI

by Francesco Petrarch
SONNET CCXXI. Cercato ho sempre solitaria vita. THINKING ALWAYS OF LAURA, IT PAINS HIM TO REMEMBER WHERE SHE IS LEFT.  Still have I sought a life of solitude;The streams, the fields, the forests know my mind;That I might 'scape the sordid and the blind,Who paths forsake trod by the wise and good:Read more of this...

Not Heaving from My Ribb-™d Breast Only

by Walt Whitman
 NOT heaving from my ribb’d breast only; 
Not in sighs at night, in rage, dissatisfied with myself; 
Not in those long-drawn, ill-supprest sighs; 
Not in many an oath and promise broken; 
Not in my wilful and savage soul’s volition;
Not in the subtle nourishment of the air; 
Not in this beating and pounding at my temples and wrists; 
Not in...Read more of this...

The Twelve Dancing Princesses

by Anne Sexton
 If you danced from midnight
to six A.M. who would understand?

The runaway boy
who chucks it all
to live on the Boston Common
on speed and saltines,
pissing in the duck pond,
rapping with the street priest,
trading talk like blows,
another missing person,
would understand.

The paralytic's wife
who takes her love to town,
sitting on the bar stool,
downing stingers and peanuts,
singing "That ole Ace down in the hole,"
would understand.

The...Read more of this...

Barb-Wire Bill

by Robert William Service
 At dawn of day the white land lay all gruesome-like and grim,
When Bill Mc'Gee he says to me: "We've got to do it, Jim.
We've got to make Fort Liard quick. I know the river's bad,
But, oh! the little woman's sick . . . why! don't you savvy, lad?"
And me! Well, yes, I must confess it wasn't hard to see
Their...Read more of this...

Ballad Of The Banished And Returning Count

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 [Goethe began to write an opera called Lowenstuhl, 
founded upon the old tradition which forms the subject of this Ballad, 
but he never carried out his design.]

OH, enter old minstrel, thou time-honour'd one!
We children are here in the hall all alone,

The portals we straightway will bar.
Our mother is praying, our father is gone

To the forest, on wolves to make...Read more of this...

Ode to Himself upon the Censure of his New Inn

by Ben Jonson
 Come, leave the loathed stage,
And the more loathsome age;
Where pride and impudence, in faction knit,
Usurp the chair of wit!
Indicting and arraigning every day
Something they call a play.
Let their fastidious, vain
Commission of the brain
Run on and rage, sweat, censure, and condemn;
They were not made for thee, less thou for them.

Say that thou pour'st them wheat,
And they will acorns eat;
'Twere simple...Read more of this...

Pierced with a vain hope, I have thrown to the wind

by Omar Khayyam
Pierced with a vain hope, I have thrown to the wind
a part of my existence, and that without having known
here below a day of happiness. That which I fear now
is that time will prevent me from seizing the opportunity
to make amends for the past....Read more of this...

To The Pious Memory Of The Accomplished Young Lady Mrs. Anne Killigrew

by John Dryden
 Thou youngest virgin-daughter of the skies,
 Made in the last promotion of the Blest;
Whose palms, new pluck'd from Paradise,
In spreading branches more sublimely rise,
Rich with immortal green above the rest:
Whether, adopted to some neighbouring star,
Thou roll'st above us, in thy wand'ring race,
 Or, in procession fix'd and regular,
 Mov'd with the Heavens' majestic pace:
 Or, call'd to more superior...Read more of this...

La Nue

by Alan Seeger
 Oft when sweet music undulated round, 
Like the full moon out of a perfumed sea 
Thine image from the waves of blissful sound 
Rose and thy sudden light illumined me. 


And in the country, leaf and flower and air 
Would alter and the eternal shape emerge; 
Because they spoke of thee the fields seemed fair, 
And Joy to wait...Read more of this...

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