Get Your Premium Membership

Famous Twisted Poems by Famous Poets

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

See also:

by Burns, Robert
...ld glen;
When sweet, like honest Worth, she blusht,
 An’ steppèd ben.


Green, slender, leaf-clad holly-boughs
Were twisted, gracefu’, round her brows;
I took her for some Scottish Muse,
 By that same token;
And come to stop those reckless vows,
 Would soon been broken.


A “hair-brain’d, sentimental trace”
Was strongly markèd in her face;
A wildly-witty, rustic grace
 Shone full upon her;
Her eye, ev’n turn’d on empty space,
 Beam’d keen with honour.


Down flow’...Read more of this...



by Shakespeare, William
...and dear modesty,
Encamp'd in hearts, but fighting outwardly.

''And, lo, behold these talents of their hair,
With twisted metal amorously impleach'd,
I have received from many a several fair,
Their kind acceptance weepingly beseech'd,
With the annexions of fair gems enrich'd,
And deep-brain'd sonnets that did amplify
Each stone's dear nature, worth, and quality.

''The diamond,--why, 'twas beautiful and hard,
Whereto his invised properties did tend;
The deep-green e...Read more of this...

by Milton, John
...ng verse.


SONG.

 Sabrina fair,
 Listen where thou art sitting
 Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,
 In twisted braids of lilies knitting
 The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair;
 Listen for dear honour's sake,
 Goddess of the silver lake,
 Listen and save!

Listen, and appear to us,
In name of great Oceanus.
By the earth-shaking Neptune's mace,
And Tethys' grave majestic pace;
By hoary Nereus' wrinkled look,
And the Carpathian wizard's hook;
By scaly ...Read more of this...

by Wilcox, Ella Wheeler
...A scanty garment rudely made of sacks
Hangs from their loins; bright blankets drape their backs; 
About their necks are twisted tangled strings
Of gaudy beads, while tinkling wire and rings
Of yellow brass on wrists and fingers glow.
Thus, to assuage the anger of the foe 
The cunning Indians decked the captive pair
Who in one year have known a lifetime of despair.



XLVI.
But love can resurrect from sorrow's tomb
The vanished beauty and the faded bloom, 
As sunli...Read more of this...

by Hugo, Victor
...he knight, with arm held high. 
 But Eviradnus was of all aware, 
 And turned upon the murderous weapon there, 
 And twisted it away; then in a trice 
 His strong colossal hand grasped like a vice 
 The neck of Ladisläus, who the blade 
 Now dropped; over his eyes a misty shade 
 Showed that the royal dwarf was near to death. 
 
 "Traitor!" said Eviradnus in his wrath, 
 "I rather should have hewn your limbs away, 
 And left you crawling on your stumps, I say,— 
 ...Read more of this...



by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...ed fish; 
And in the space to left of her, and right, 
Were Arthur's wars in weird devices done, 
New things and old co-twisted, as if Time 
Were nothing, so inveterately, that men 
Were giddy gazing there; and over all 
High on the top were those three Queens, the friends 
Of Arthur, who should help him at his need. 

Then those with Gareth for so long a space 
Stared at the figures, that at last it seemed 
The dragon-boughts and elvish emblemings 
Began to move, seethe,...Read more of this...

by Ginsberg, Allen
...wall in reply and the last fur- 
 nished room emptied down to the last piece of 
 mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted 
 on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that 
 imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of 
 hallucination--
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and 
 now you're really in the total animal soup of 
 time--
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed 
 with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use 
 of the ellipse the cata...Read more of this...

by Kipling, Rudyard
...ph and Disaster 
And treat those two impostors just the same:. 
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken 
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, 
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, 
And stoop and build'em up with worn-out tools; 

If you can make one heap of all your winnings 
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, 
And lose, and start again at your beginnings, 
And never breathe a word about your loss: 
If you can force your hea...Read more of this...

by Bukowski, Charles
...ppiness,
let it enfold you

when i was a young man
I felt these things were
dumb,unsophisticated.
I had bad blood,a twisted
mind, a pecarious
upbringing.

I was hard as granite,I
leered at the 
sun.
I trusted no man and
especially no
woman.

I was living a hell in
small rooms, I broke
things, smashed things,
walked through glass,
cursed.
I challenged everything,
was continually being
evicted,jailed,in and
out of fights,in and aout
of my mind.
women wer...Read more of this...

by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...ath, and palsy, death-in-life,
And wretched age -- and worst disease of all,
These prodigies of myriad nakednesses,
And twisted shapes of lust, unspeakable,
Abominable, strangers at my hearth
Not welcome, harpies miring every dish,
The phantom husks of something foully done,
And fleeting thro' the boundless universe,
And blasting the long quiet of my breast
With animal heat and dire insanity?

"How should the mind, except it loved them, clasp
These idols to herself? or do the...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...se is duly in order, everything is in its place,
What has arrived is in its place, and what waits is in its place; 
The twisted skull waits, the watery or rotten blood waits, 
The child of the glutton or venerealee waits long, and the child of the drunkard waits
 long,
 and the
 drunkard himself waits long, 
The sleepers that lived and died wait—the far advanced are to go on in their turns,
 and
 the far
 behind are to come on in their turns, 
The diverse shall be no less div...Read more of this...

by Angelou, Maya
...You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

Did you want to se...Read more of this...

by Chesterton, G K
...wings,
Where the forgotten seraph kings
Still plot how God shall die.

"The wise men know all evil things
Under the twisted trees,
Where the perverse in pleasure pine
And men are weary of green wine
And sick of crimson seas.

"But you and all the kind of Christ
Are ignorant and brave,
And you have wars you hardly win
And souls you hardly save.

"I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises hi...Read more of this...

by Byron, George (Lord)
...naries. 

(12) "Delis," bravoes who form the forlorn-hope of the cavalry, and always begin the action. 

(13) A twisted fold of felt is used for scimitar practice by the Turks, and few but Mussulman arms can cut through it at a single stroke: sometimes a tough turban is used for the same purpose. The jerreed is a game of blunt javelins, animated and graceful. 

(14) "Ollahs," Alla il Allah, the "Leilles," as the Spanish poets call them; the sound is Ollah; a c...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...the plethoric Jones;
Peered at him for a little while, held out a bill: "NOW, will you sell?"
Brown scanned it with his twisted smile: "A thousand dollars! you go to hell!"

Brown enrolled in the homeless host, sleeping anywhere, anywhen;
Suffered, strove, became a ghost, slave of the lamp for other men;
For What's-his-name and So-and-so in the abyss his soul he stripped,
Yet in his want, his worst of woe, held he fast to the manuscript.
Then one day as he chewed his pen,...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Amy
...is an undependable thing.
Ding! Ding!
Vienna is scattered all over the Place du Carrousel
In glittering, bent, and twisted letters.
Your betters have clattered over Vienna before,
Officer of his Imperial Majesty our Father-in-Law!
Tink! Tink!
A workman's chisel can strew you to the winds,
Munich.
Do they think
To pleasure Paris, used to the fall of cities,
By giving her a fall of letters!
It is a month too late.
One month, and our lily-white Bourbon king
Has ...Read more of this...

by Blake, William
...we here remain behold thy lot which will soon appear when the
darkness passes away
So I remaind with him sitting in the twisted [PL 18] root of
an oak. he was suspended in a fungus which hung with the head
downward into the deep:
By degrees we beheld the infinite Abyss, fiery as the smoke 
of a burning city; beneath us at an immense distance was the sun,
black but shining[;] round it were fiery tracks on which revolv'd
vast spiders, crawling after their prey; which flew o...Read more of this...

by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...r> One reared a font of stone 
And drew, from butts of water on the slope, 
The fountain of the moment, playing, now 
A twisted snake, and now a rain of pearls, 
Or steep-up spout whereon the gilded ball 
Danced like a wisp: and somewhat lower down 
A man with knobs and wires and vials fired 
A cannon: Echo answered in her sleep 
From hollow fields: and here were telescopes 
For azure views; and there a group of girls 
In circle waited, whom the electric shock 
Dislinked with...Read more of this...

by Khayyam, Omar
...e
Life's leaden Metal into Gold transmute. 

XLVI.
Why, be this Juice the growth of God, who dare
Blaspheme the twisted tendril as Snare?
A Blessing, we should use it, should we not?
And if a Curse -- why, then, Who set it there? 

XLVII.
But leave the Wise to wrangle, and with me
The Quarrel of the Universe let be:
And, in some corner of the Hubbub couch'd,
Make Game of that which makes as much of Thee. 

XLVIII.
For in and out, above, about, below,
'Tis ...Read more of this...

by Miller, Alice Duer
...s, friendly, frightening,
Shine from our gateposts every Hallow-e'en; 
I saw the oak tree, shattered once by lightning,
Twisted, stripped clean.

I saw the Dioscuri— two black kittens,
Stalking relentlessly an empty spool;
I saw a little girl in scarlet mittens
Trudging through snow to school. 

XXVII 
John read the letter with his lovely smile. 
'Your father has a vigorous English style, 
And what he says is true, upon my word; 
But what's this war of which I nev...Read more of this...

Dont forget to view our wonderful member Twisted poems.


Book: Shattered Sighs