Famous Torso Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Torso poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous torso poems. These examples illustrate what a famous torso poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Sandburg, Carl
...when they are dying so many grand deaths in France.
A voice, a shape, gone.
A baby bundle from Warsaw … legs, torso, head … on a hotel bed at The Savoy.
The white chiselings of flesh that flung themselves in somersaults, straddles, for packed houses:
A memory, a stage and footlights out, an electric sign on Broadway dark.
She belonged to somebody, nobody.
No one man owned her, no ten nor a thousand.
She belonged to many thousand men, lovers of the w...Read more of this...
by
Schwartz, Delmore
...(After Rilke)
We cannot know the indescribable face
Where the eyes like apples ripened. Even so,
His torso has a candelabra's glow,
His gaze, contained as in a mirror's grace,
Shines within it. Otherwise his breast
Would not be dazzling. Nor would you recognize
The smile that moves along his curving thighs,
There where love's strength is caught within its nest.
This stone would not be broken, but intact
Beneath the shoulders' flowing cataract...Read more of this...
by
Rilke, Rainer Maria
...We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent c...Read more of this...
by
Taylor, Marilyn L
...
would have throbbed their dull tattoo
into the shadows writhing
behind the fire’s eye
while a likeness
of her narrow torso, carved
and studded with obsidian
might have been passed from hand
to hand and rubbed against the bellies
of women with child
and a twist of her gray hair
been dipped in oil
and set alight, releasing the essence
of her life’s elixir, pricking
the nostrils of her children
and her children’s children
whose amber faces nod and shine
like a ring of lan...Read more of this...
by
Lima, Rossy Evelin
...I am a beautiful broken woman,
my arms separated in three levels.
Thunderous is my independent torso,
my torso of perfect size,
my torso a treasure box, an unrestricted treasure box
in which I keep the thirst that I resist.
My legs, also cut in three,
are the trinity of my dismembered temple,
transformed pieces made
unstoppable,
they are the flow of the sea
and they sai...Read more of this...
by
Plath, Sylvia
...her waiting on me, and she adored it.
In the morning she woke me early, reflecting the sun
From her amazingly white torso, and I couldn't help but notice
Her tidiness and her calmness and her patience:
She humored my weakness like the best of nurses,
Holding my bones in place so they would mend properly.
In time our relationship grew more intense.
She stopped fitting me so closely and seemed offish.
I felt her criticizing me in spite of herself,
As if my habi...Read more of this...
by
Schwartz, Delmore
...arilyn Monroe.
She has a noble attitude marked by pride and candor
She takes a noble pride in the female nature and torso
She articualtes her pride with directness and exuberance
She is honest in her delight in womanhood and manhood.
She is not a great lady, she is more than a lady,
She continues the tradition of Dolly Madison and Clara
Bow
When she says, "any woman who claims she does not like
to be grabbed is a liar!"
Whether true or false, this colossal remark
st...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...r me,
Within a flimsy bathrobe curled
Upon a mattress by the sea:
He reached to pat a tou-tou's nose,
And scratched his torso now and then,
And scribbled with a fountain pen
What I assumed was jewelled prose.
And then methought he looked at me,
And hailed me with a gesture grand;
His fingers made the letter "V,"
So I, too, went to raise my hand; -
When nigh to me the barman glided
With liquid gold, and then I knew
He merely called for cock-tails two,
And so abjectly I su...Read more of this...
by
Sandburg, Carl
...LEGS hold a torso away from the earth.
And a regular high poem of legs is here.
Powers of bone and cord raise a belly and lungs
Out of ooze and over the loam where eyes look and ears hear
And arms have a chance to hammer and shoot and run motors.
You make us
Proud of our legs, old man.
And you left off the head here,
The skull found always crumbling nei...Read more of this...
by
Hall, Donald
...lower back, and Katie bled,
Only a little, doing what we could do
When Katie tucked her feet behind her head.
Her torso was a C-cup'd figurehead,
Wearing below its navel a tattoo
That writhed in suppleness upon the bed.
As love led on to love, love's goddess said,
"No lovers ever fucked as fucked these two!
Katie could put her feet behind her head!"
When Katie came she never stopped. Instead,
She came, cried "God!," and came, this dancer who
Brought ballerina ...Read more of this...
by
Nash, Ogden
...Now when I have a cold
I am careful with my cold,
I consult a physician
And I do as I am told.
I muffle up my torso
In woolly woolly garb,
And I quaff great flagons
Of sodium bicarb.
I munch on aspirin,
I lunch on water,
And I wouldn’t dream of osculating
Anybody’s daughter,
And to anybody’s son
I wouldn’t say howdy,
For I am a sufferer
Magna cum laude.
I don’t like germs,
But I’ll keep the germs I’ve got.
Will I take a chance of spreading t...Read more of this...
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