Famous Veined Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Thompsons Lunch Room -- Grand Central Station

by Amy Lowell
 Study in Whites

Wax-white --
Floor, ceiling, walls.
Ivory shadows
Over the pavement
Polished to cream surfaces
By constant sweeping.
The big room is coloured like the petals
Of a great magnolia,
And has a patina
Of flower bloom
Which makes it shine dimly
Under the electric lamps.
Chairs are ranged in rows
Like sepia seeds
Waiting fulfilment.
The chalk-white spot of a cook's cap
Moves unglossily against the vaguely bright wall --
Dull chalk-white striking the...Read more of this...

A Celebration

by William Carlos (WCW) Williams
 A middle-northern March, now as always— 
gusts from the South broken against cold winds— 
but from under, as if a slow hand lifted a tide, 
it moves—not into April—into a second March, 

the old skin of wind-clear scales dropping 
upon the mold: this is the shadow projects the tree 
upward causing the sun to shine in his sphere. 

So...Read more of this...

Butterfly

by D. H. Lawrence
 Butterfly, the wind blows sea-ward, 
 strong beyond the garden-wall!
Butterfly, why do you settle on my
 shoe, and sip the dirt on my shoe, 
Lifting your veined wings, lifting them?
 big white butterfly!

Already it is October, and the wind
 blows strong to the sea
from the hills where snow must have 
 fallen, the wind is polished with 
 snow.
Here...Read more of this...

The Squaw Man

by Robert William Service
 The cow-moose comes to water, and the beaver's overbold,
The net is in the eddy of the stream;
The teepee stars the vivid sward with russet, red and gold,
And in the velvet gloom the fire's a-gleam.
The night is ripe with quiet, rich with incense of the pine;
From sanctuary lake I hear the loon;
The peaks are bright against the blue, and drenched...Read more of this...

O Breath

by Elizabeth Bishop
 Beneath that loved and celebrated breast,
silent, bored really blindly veined,
grieves, maybe lives and lets
live, passes bets,
something moving but invisibly,
and with what clamor why restrained
I cannot fathom even a ripple.
(See the thin flying of nine black hairs
four around one five the other nipple,
flying almost intolerably on your own breath.)
Equivocal, but what we have in common's bound to be there,
whatever we...Read more of this...

Cleopatra

by Algernon Charles Swinburne
 HER mouth is fragrant as a vine,
A vine with birds in all its boughs;
Serpent and scarab for a sign
Between the beauty of her brows
And the amorous deep lids divine.

Her great curled hair makes luminous
Her cheeks, her lifted throat and chin.
Shall she not have the hearts of us
To shatter, and the loves therein
To shred between her fingers thus?

Small ruined broken...Read more of this...

Baby Charley

by Sidney Lanier
 He's fast asleep. See how, O Wife,
Night's finger on the lip of life
Bids whist the tongue, so prattle-rife,
Of busy Baby Charley.

One arm stretched backward round his head,
Five little toes from out the bed
Just showing, like five rosebuds red,
-- So slumbers Baby Charley.

Heaven-lights, I know, are beaming through
Those lucent eyelids, veined with blue,
That shut away from mortal view
Large eyes of...Read more of this...

The Beauty of Death XIV

by Kahlil Gibran
 Part One - The Calling


Let me sleep, for my soul is intoxicated with love and 
Let me rest, for my spirit has had its bounty of days and nights; 
Light the candles and burn the incense around my bed, and 
Scatter leaves of jasmine and roses over my body; 
Embalm my hair with frankincense and sprinkle my feet with...Read more of this...

Flee On Your Donkey

by Anne Sexton
 Because there was no other place
to flee to,
I came back to the scene of the disordered senses,
came back last night at midnight,
arriving in the thick June night
without luggage or defenses,
giving up my car keys and my cash,
keeping only a pack of Salem cigarettes
the way a child holds on to a toy.
I signed myself in where a stranger
puts the inked-in...Read more of this...

In the garden of our love

by Emile Verhaeren
In the garden of our love, summer still goes on: yonder, a golden peacock crosses an avenue; petals—pearls, emeralds, turquoises —deck the uniform slumber of the green swards.
Our blue ponds shimmer, covered with the white kiss of the snowy water-lilies; in the quincunxes, our currant bushes follow one another in procession; an iridescent insect teases the heart of a flower;...Read more of this...

Rapids at Night

by Duncan Campbell Scott
 Here at the roots of the mountains,
Between the sombre legions of cedars and tamaracks,
The rapids charge the ravine:
A little light, cast by foam under starlight,
Wavers about the shimmering stems of the birches:
Here rise up the clangorous sounds of battle,
Immense and mournful.
Far above curves the great dome of darkness
Drawn with the limitless lines of the stars and the planets.
Deep at...Read more of this...

Belated Bard

by Robert William Service
 The songs I made from joy of earth
 In wanton wandering,
Are rapturous with Maytime mirth
 And ectasy of Spring.
But all the songs I sing today
 Take tediously the ear:
Novemberishly dark are they
 With mortuary fear.

For half a century has gone
 Since first I rang a rhyme;
And that is long to linger on
 The tolerance of Time.
This blue-veined hand with...Read more of this...

Please Master

by Allen Ginsberg
 Please master can I touch your cheeck
please master can I kneel at your feet
please master can I loosen your blue pants
please master can I gaze at your golden haired belly
please master can I have your thighs bare to my eyes
please master can I take off my clothes below your chair
please master can I can I kiss your ankles and...Read more of this...

Night

by Sidney Lanier
 HEART-HIDDEN from the outer things I rose;
The spirit woke anew in nightly birth
Unto the vastness where forever glows
 The star-soul of the earth.


There all alone in primal ecstasy,
Within her depths where revels never tire,
The olden Beauty shines: each thought of me
 Is veined through with its fire.


And all my thoughts are throngs of living souls;
They breathe in me, heart...Read more of this...

Le Panneau

by Oscar Wilde
 Under the rose-tree's dancing shade
There stands a little ivory girl,
Pulling the leaves of pink and pearl
With pale green nails of polished jade.

The red leaves fall upon the mould,
The white leaves flutter, one by one,
Down to a blue bowl where the sun,
Like a great dragon, writhes in gold.

The white leaves float upon the air,
The red leaves flutter idly down,
Some fall...Read more of this...

The Paris Commune

by Barry Tebb
 From the French of Andr? Fr?naud



France was born there and it is from there she sings

Of Joan of Ark and Varlin both.

We must dig deep, o motherland,

Beneath those heavy cobbles.

Country of the Commune, so dear to me,

My very own which make my blood burn

And that same blood will one day flow again

Between those very stones.

It is there when I...Read more of this...

A Creature Catechism

by Bliss Carman
 I
Soul, what art thou in the tribes of the sea?


LORD, said a flying fish, 
Below the foundations of storm 
We feel the primal wish 
Of the earth take form. 

Through the dim green water-fire 
We see the red sun loom, 
And the quake of a new desire 
Takes hold on us down in the gloom. 

No more can the...Read more of this...

The House Of Clouds

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
 I would build a cloudy House
For my thoughts to live in;
When for earth too fancy-loose
And too low for Heaven!
Hush! I talk my dream aloud---
I build it bright to see,---
I build it on the moonlit cloud,
To which I looked with thee.

Cloud-walls of the morning's grey,
Faced with amber column,---
Crowned with crimson cupola
From a sunset solemn!
May mists, for the casements, fetch,
Pale and...Read more of this...

The Going

by Thomas Hardy
 Why did you give no hint that night
That quickly after the morrow's dawn,
And calmly, as if indifferent quite,
You would close your term here, up and be gone
 Where I could not follow
 With wing of swallow
To gain one glimpse of you ever anon!

 Never to bid good-bye
 Or lip me the softest call,
Or utter a wish for a word,...Read more of this...

Memory

by Adela Florence Cory Nicolson
   How I loved you in your sleep,
   With the starlight on your hair!

   The touch of your lips was sweet,
     Aziza whom I adore,
   I lay at your slender feet,
     And against their soft palms pressed,
   I fitted my face to...Read more of this...

Corn

by Sidney Lanier
 To-day the woods are trembling through and through
With shimmering forms, that flash before my view,
Then melt in green as dawn-stars melt in blue.
The leaves that wave against my cheek caress
Like women's hands; the embracing boughs express
A subtlety of mighty tenderness;
The copse-depths into little noises start,
That sound anon like beatings of a heart,
Anon like talk 'twixt lips not far apart.
The...Read more of this...

Cornish Cliffs

by John Betjeman
 Those moments, tasted once and never done,
Of long surf breaking in the mid-day sun.
A far-off blow-hole booming like a gun-

The seagulls plane and circle out of sight
Below this thirsty, thrift-encrusted height,
The veined sea-campion buds burst into white

And gorse turns tawny orange, seen beside
Pale drifts of primroses cascading wide
To where the slate falls sheer into the tide.

More than in gardened...Read more of this...

Craving for Spring

by D. H. Lawrence
 I wish it were spring in the world.

Let it be spring!
Come, bubbling, surging tide of sap!
Come, rush of creation!
Come, life! surge through this mass of mortification!
Come, sweep away these exquisite, ghastly first-flowers,
which are rather last-flowers!
Come, thaw down their cool portentousness, dissolve them:
snowdrops, straight, death-veined exhalations of white and purple crocuses,
flowers of the penumbra, issue of corruption, nourished in mortification,
jets...Read more of this...

The Yukon

by Joaquin Miller
 THE moon resumed all heaven now, 
She shepherded the stars below 
Along her wide, white steeps of snow, 
Nor stooped nor rested, where or how. 

She bared her full white breast, she dared 
The sun e'er show his face again. 
She seemed to know no change, she kept 
Carousal constantly, nor slept, 
Nor turned aside a breath, nor spared...Read more of this...

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