Famous Twenty Six Poems by Famous Poets

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

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To The Sound Of Violins

by Barry Tebb
 Give me life at its most garish

Friday night in the Square, pink sequins dazzle

And dance on clubbers bare to the midriff

Young men in crisp shirts and pressed pants

‘Dress code smart’ gyrate to ‘Sex Bomb, Sex Bomb’

And sing along its lyrics to the throng of which I’m one

My shorts, shoulder bag and white beard

Making me stand out in the teeming...Read more of this...

Lord Lundy

by Hilaire Belloc
 Who was too Freely Moved to Tears, and thereby ruined his Political Career 

Lord Lundy from his earliest years
Was far too freely moved to Tears.
For instance if his Mother said,
"Lundy! It's time to go to Bed!"
He bellowed like a Little Turk.
Or if his father Lord Dunquerque
Said "Hi!" in a Commanding Tone,
"Hi, Lundy! Leave the Cat alone!"
Lord Lundy, letting go...Read more of this...

Distressed Haiku

by Donald Hall
 In a week or ten days
the snow and ice
will melt from Cemetery Road.

I'm coming! Don't move!

Once again it is April.
Today is the day
we would have been married
twenty-six years.

I finished with April
halfway through March.

You think that their
dying is the worst
thing that could happen.

Then they stay dead.

Will Hall ever write
lines that do anything
but whine and complain?

In April the blue
mountain revises
from white...Read more of this...

For My Father, Karachi 1947

by Meena Alexander
Mid-May, centipedes looped over netting at the well's mouth.
Girls grew frisky in summer frocks, lilies spotted with blood.

You were bound to meteorology,
Science of fickle clouds, ferocious winds.

The day you turned twenty-six fighter planes cut a storm,
Fissured air baring the heart's intricate meshwork

Of want and need—
Springs of cirrus out of which sap and shoot you raised me.

Crossing Chand Bibi Road,
Named after...Read more of this...

The Strange Love Song of T. S. Eliot

by Dejan Stojanovic
At twenty-six, I was inexperienced; 
Still, I knew much about love 
In the waste land, reasoning, 
It's not important when you start 
Practicing, rather when you start searching; 
And I committed myself to finding 
It before others even knew it existed, 'breeding 

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing' 
My thoughts, my longings, my love 
For something that didn't need...Read more of this...

A Song of Brave Men

by Henry Lawson
 Man, is the Sea your master? Sea, and is man your slave? – 
This is the song of brave men who never know they are brave: 
Ceaselessly watching to save you, stranger from foreign lands, 
Soundly asleep in your state room, full sail for the Goodwin Sands! 
Life is a dream, they tell us, but life seems very real,...Read more of this...

Scars on Paper

by Marilyn Hacker
 An unwrapped icon, too potent to touch,
she freed my breasts from the camp Empire dress.
Now one of them's the shadow of a breast
with a lost object's half-life, with as much
life as an anecdotal photograph:
me, Kim and Iva, all stripped to the waist,
hiking near Russian River on June first
'79: Iva's five-and-a-half.
While she was almost twenty, wearing black
T-shirts in D.C., where...Read more of this...

The Famous Tay Whale

by William Topaz McGonagall
 'TWAS in the month of December, and in the year l883,
That a monster whale came to Dundee,
Resolved for a few days to sport and play,
And devour the small fishes in the silvery Tay. 

So the monster whale did sport and play
Among the innocent little fishes in the beautiful Tay,
Until he was seen by some men one day,
And they resolved...Read more of this...

Arrival At Santos

by Elizabeth Bishop
 Here is a coast; here is a harbor; 
here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery: 
impractically shaped and--who knows?--self-pitying mountains, 
sad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery,

with a little church on top of one. And warehouses,
some of them painted a feeble pink, or blue, 
and some tall, uncertain palms. Oh, tourist,
is this how this country is...Read more of this...

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