Famous Untouched Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Week Later

...warily,
untamed, a greater sense of the sweetness
and plenty of his ongoing life,
unknown to me, unseen by me,
unheard, untouched-but known, seen,
heard, touched. And it came to me,
for moments at a time, moment after moment,
to be glad for him that he is with the one
he feels was meant for him. And I thought of my
mother, minutes from her death, eighty-five
years from her birth, the almost warbler
bones of her shoulder under my hand, the
eggshell skull, as she lay in some pe...Read more of this...
by Olds, Sharon


A Years Carols

...say
Is even a flower of flowering May.

JUNE
Strong June, superb, serene, elate
With conscience of thy sovereign state
Untouched of thunder, though the storm
Scathe here and there thy shuddering skies
And bid its lightning cross thine eyes
With fire, thy golden hours inform
Earth and the souls of men with life
That brings forth peace from shining strife.

JULY
Hail, proud July, whose fervent mouth
Bids even be morn and north be south
By grace and gospel of thy word,
Whence a...Read more of this...
by Swinburne, Algernon Charles

At Bessemer

...wet, and there beside me was 
the small white proof that someone 
rolled and smoked and left me there 
unharmed, truly untouched. 
A hundred yards off I could hear 
cars on the highway. A life 
was calling to be lived, but how 
and why I had still to learn....Read more of this...
by Levine, Philip

Blue

...Of darkness where she sleeps on her perfect bed. 

And I know the host, the minute sparkling of darkness
Which vibrates untouched and virile through the grandeur of night,
But which, when dawn crows challenge, assaulting the vivid motes
Of living darkness, bursts fretfully, and is bright: 

Runs like a fretted arc-lamp into light, 
Stirred by conflict to shining, which else
Were dark and whole with the night. 

Runs to a fret of speed like a racing wheel, 
Which else were asl...Read more of this...
by Lawrence, D. H.

Bridge Over The Aire Book 1

...stone flowers fading.



The Scala, too, is gone

Even the street

Where it stood,

Only the river

And the canal

Are untouched

In their flow.



By the Office Lock

I go at dawn, ‘Total Anarchy’

Is moored by ‘Milly Molly Mandy’

In perfect rhythm

A man cycles on the towpath

His dog on a lead

Running beside,

They do not notice me

Or falter in their stride.





6



At dawn in Leeds

I was lost

Once I had left

The lock

Car park, office block,

Grand hotel looming
...Read more of this...
by Tebb, Barry


Bridge Over The Aire Book 2

...pack horse roads

Cut and stacked have waited two

Hundred years for the horse sledge

To drag them over Todmorden top

Untouched by hoof or foot they are

Shaped and polished by the rain

And wind.



They are the North

And cannot be altered

The surfaces of change

Transient, the gloss

Cannot last, the wind

Says no.





8



Item: one photograph

Of South Accom

Taken by the City

Engineers, relating to

A cycling accident,

June 3rd. 1905





9



The grate that trapp...Read more of this...
by Tebb, Barry

De Erotio Puella

...yster. She, the flower of girls,
Outshone the light of Erythraean pearls;
The teeth of India that with polish glow,
The untouched lilies or the morning snow.
Her tresses did gold-dust outshine
And fair hair of women of the Rhine.
Compared to her the peacock seemed not fair,
The squirrel lively, or the phoenix rare;
Her on whose pyre the smoke still hovering waits;
Her whom the greedy and unequal fates
On the sixth dawning of her natal day,
My child-love and my playmate - snat...Read more of this...
by Stevenson, Robert Louis

Dead Mans Dump

...rning bee
Drained the wild honey of their youth.

What of us, who flung on the shrieking pyre,
Walk, our usual thoughts untouched,
Our lucky limbs as on ichor fed,
Immortal seeming ever?
Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us,
A fear may choke in our veins
And the startled blood may stop.

The air is loud with death,
The dark air spurts with fire,
The explosions ceaseless are.
Timelessly now, some minutes past,
These dead strode time with vigorous life,
Till the shrapnel cal...Read more of this...
by Rosenberg, Isaac

Improvisations: Light And Snow

...sky a long cloud, 
A smouldering wave of smoky crimson, 
Breaks in the freezing wind: and above it, unabashed, 
Remote, untouched, fierly palpitant, 
Sings the first star....Read more of this...
by Aiken, Conrad

Inferno (English)

...itten words I read, 
 That in brief speech is wisdom." 

 Here a voice 
 Behind me, "Tuscan, who canst walk at choice 
 Untouched amidst the torments, wilt thou stay? 
 For surely native of the noble land 
 Where once I held my too-audacious way, 
 Discreet of speech, thou comest." 
 The
 sudden cry 
 So close behind me from the chests that came, 
 First drove me closer to my guide, but he, - 
 "What dost thou? Turn thee!" - and a kindly hand 
 Impelled me, fearful, where the...Read more of this...
by Alighieri, Dante

My Mothers Body

...ion 
and the winter solstice 

when tops turn like little planets. 
Shall you have all or nothing 
take half or pass by untouched? 
Nothing you got, Nun said the dreydl
as the room stopped spinning. 

The angel folded you up like laundry 
your body thin as an empty dress. 
Your clothes were curtains 
hanging on the window of what had 
been your flesh and now was glass. 

Outside in Florida shopping plazas 
loudspeakers blared Christmas carols 
and palm trees were decked with ...Read more of this...
by Piercy, Marge

Our Mother Pocahontas

...er skin was rosy copper-red.
And high she held her beauteous head.
Her step was like a rustling leaf:
Her heart a nest, untouched of grief.
She dreamed of sons like Powhatan,
And through her blood the lightning ran.
Love-cries with the birds she sung,
Birdlike
In the grape-vine swung.
The Forest, arching low and wide
Gloried in its Indian bride.
Rolfe, that dim adventurer
Had not come a courtier.
John Rolfe is not our ancestor.
We rise from out the soul of her
Held in native ...Read more of this...
by Lindsay, Vachel

Paradise Lost: Book 09

...w 
In Paradise, and various, yet unknown 
To us; in such abundance lies our choice, 
As leaves a greater store of fruit untouched, 
Still hanging incorruptible, till men 
Grow up to their provision, and more hands 
Help to disburden Nature of her birth. 
To whom the wily Adder, blithe and glad. 
Empress, the way is ready, and not long; 
Beyond a row of myrtles, on a flat, 
Fast by a fountain, one small thicket past 
Of blowing myrrh and balm: if thou accept 
My conduct, I can...Read more of this...
by Milton, John

Shattered Head

...sporic changes
hair long blown into far follicles
blasted into a chosen place 

Revenge on the head (genitals, breast, untouched)
revenge on the mouth
packed with its inarticulate confessions
revenge on the eyes
green-gray and restless
revenge on the big and searching lips
the tender tongue
revenge on the sensual, on the nose the
carrier of history
revenge on the life devoured
in another incineration

You can walk by such a place, the earth is 
made of them
where the stretch...Read more of this...
by Rich, Adrienne

The Bee Meeting

..., the outriders, on their hysterical elastics.
If I stand very still, they will think I am cow-parsley,
A gullible head untouched by their animosity,

Not even nodding, a personage in a hedgerow.
The villagers open the chambers, they are hunting the queen.
Is she hiding, is she eating honey? She is very clever.
She is old, old, old, she must live another year, and she knows it.
While in their fingerjoint cells the new virgins

Dream of a duel they will win inevitably,
A curta...Read more of this...
by Plath, Sylvia

The Wanderer

...
Tense, like a supple athlete with lean hips, 
Swiftness at pause, the Wanderer come again-- 

Come as of old a queen, untouched by Time, 
Resting the beauty that no seas could tire, 
Sparkling, as though the midnight's rain were rime, 
Like a man's thought transfigured into fire, 

And as I looked, one of her men began 
To sing some simple tune of Christmas day; 
Among her crew the song spread, man to man, 
Until the singing rang across the bay; 

And soon in other anchored...Read more of this...
by Masefield, John

The Wild Honey-Suckle

...Fair flower, that dost so comely grow,
Hid in this silent, dull retreat,
Untouched thy honied blossoms blow,
Unseen thy little branches greet;
...No roving foot shall crush thee here,
...No busy hand provoke a tear.

By Nature's self in white arrayed,
She bade thee shun the vulgar eye,
And planted here the gaurdian shade,
And sent soft waters murmuring by;
...Thus quietly thy summer goes,
...Thy days declinging to repose.

Smit w...Read more of this...
by Freneau, Philip

The Winter Scene

...gh the dusk,
Great Sirius rises in his flashing blue.
Lord of the winter night, august and pure,
Returning year on year untouched by time,
To hearten faith with thine unfaltering fire,
There are no hurts that beauty cannot ease,
No ills that love cannot at last repair,
In the victorious progress of the soul.
III

Russet and white and gray is the oak wood
In the great snow. Still from the North it comes,
Whispering, settling, sifting through the trees,
O'erloading branch and t...Read more of this...
by Carman, Bliss

Thoreaus Flute

...bluebird chants a requiem; 
The willow-blossom waits for him; 
The Genius of the wood is lost." 

Then from the flute, untouched by hands, 
There came a low, harmonious breath: 
"For such as he there is no death; 
His life the eternal life commands; 
Above man's aims his nature rose. 
The wisdom of a just content 
Made one small spot a continent 
And turned to poetry life's prose. 

"Haunting the hills, the stream, the wild, 
Swallow and aster, lake and pine, 
To him grew hu...Read more of this...
by Alcott, Louisa May

Three Women

...d--
On India, Africa, America, these miraculous ones,
These pure, small images. They smell of milk.
Their footsoles are untouched. They are walkers of air.

Can nothingness be so prodigal?
Here is my son.
His wide eye is that general, flat blue.
He is turning to me like a little, blind, bright plant.
One cry. It is the hook I hang on.
And I am a river of milk.
I am a warm hill.

SECOND VOICE:
I am not ugly. I am even beautiful.
The mirror gives back a woman without deformity....Read more of this...
by Plath, Sylvia

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