Famous Voluptuous Poems by Famous Poets

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

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My Mothers Body

by Marge Piercy
 1. 

The dark socket of the year 
the pit, the cave where the sun lies down 
and threatens never to rise, 
when despair descends softly as the snow 
covering all paths and choking roads: 

then hawkfaced pain seized you 
threw you so you fell with a sharp 
cry, a knife tearing a bolt of silk. 
My father heard the...Read more of this...

Sonnet VII

by Francesco Petrarch
SONNET VII. La gola e 'l sonno e l' oziose piume. TO A FRIEND, ENCOURAGING HIM TO PURSUE POETRY.  Torn is each virtue from its earthly throneBy sloth, intemperance, and voluptuous ease;E'en nature deviates from her wonted ways,Too much the slave of vicious custom grown.Far hence is every light celestial gone,Read more of this...

To Ye Kings

by Victor Hugo
 When the Christians were doomed to the lions of old 
 By the priest and the praetor, combined to uphold 
 An idolatrous cause, 
 Forth they came while the vast Colosseum throughout 
 Gathered thousands looked on, and they fell 'mid the shout 
 Of "the People's" applause. 
 
 On the eve of that day of their...Read more of this...

The Youth By The Brook

by Friedrich von Schiller
 Beside the brook the boy reclined
And wove his flowery wreath,
And to the waves the wreath consigned--
The waves that danced beneath.
"So fleet mine hours," he sighed, "away
Like waves that restless flow:
And so my flowers of youth decay
Like those that float below."

"Ask not why I, alone on earth,
Am sad in life's young time;
To all the rest are hope and mirth
When spring...Read more of this...

Caroline Branson

by Edgar Lee Masters
 With our hearts like drifting suns, had we but walked,
As often before, the April fields till star-light
Silkened over with viewless gauze the darkness
Under the cliff, our trysting place in the wood,
Where the brook turns! Had we but passed from wooing
Like notes of music that run together, into winning,
In the inspired improvisation of love!
But to put back of us as...Read more of this...

To Laura (Mystery Of Reminiscence)

by Friedrich von Schiller
 Who and what gave to me the wish to woo thee--
Still, lip to lip, to cling for aye unto thee?
Who made thy glances to my soul the link--
Who bade me burn thy very breath to drink--
My life in thine to sink?
As from the conqueror's unresisted glaive,
Flies, without strife subdued, the ready slave--
So, when to life's unguarded fort, I see
Thy...Read more of this...

On Sir Voluptuous Beast

by Ben Jonson
XXV. ? ON SIR VOLUPTUOUS BEAST.     While BEAST instructs his fair and innocent wife,  In the past pleasures of his sensual life, Telling the motions of each petticoat,  And how his Ganymede mov'd, and how his goat, And now her hourly her own cucquean makes,  In varied shapes, which for his lust she takes : What doth...Read more of this...

Pompeii And Herculaneum

by Friedrich von Schiller
 What wonder this?--we ask the lympid well,
O earth! of thee--and from thy solemn womb
What yieldest thou?--is there life in the abyss--
Doth a new race beneath the lava dwell?
Returns the past, awakening from the tomb?
Rome--Greece!--Oh, come!--Behold--behold! for this!
Our living world--the old Pompeii sees;
And built anew the town of Dorian Hercules!
House upon house--its silent halls once more
Opes the broad portico!--Oh, haste...Read more of this...

If You Only Knew

by Robert Desnos
 Far from me and like the stars, the sea and all the trappings of poetic myth,
Far from me but here all the same without your knowing,
Far from me and even more silent because I imagine you endlessly.
Far from me, my lovely mirage and eternal dream, you cannot know.
If you only knew.
Far from me and even farther yet from being...Read more of this...

The Assignation

by Friedrich von Schiller
 Hear I the creaking gate unclose?
The gleaming latch uplifted?
No--'twas the wind that, whirring, rose,
Amidst the poplars drifted!
Adorn thyself, thou green leaf-bowering roof,
Destined the bright one's presence to receive,
For her, a shadowy palace-hall aloof
With holy night, thy boughs familiar weave.
And ye sweet flatteries of the delicate air,
Awake and sport her rosy cheek around,
When their light weight the tender feet shall...Read more of this...

Indian Dancers

by Sarojini Naidu
 EYES ravished with rapture, celestially panting, what passionate bosoms aflaming with fire 
Drink deep of the hush of the hyacinth heavens that glimmer around them in fountains of light; 
O wild and entrancing the strain of keen music that cleaveth the stars like a wail of desire, 
And beautiful dancers with houri-like faces bewitch the voluptuous watches of night....Read more of this...

A Former Life

by Charles Baudelaire
 LONG since, I lived beneath vast porticoes, 
By many ocean-sunsets tinged and fired, 
Where mighty pillars, in majestic rows, 
Seemed like basaltic caves when day expired. 

The rolling surge that mirrored all the skies 
Mingled its music, turbulent and rich, 
Solemn and mystic, with the colours which 
The setting sun reflected in my eyes. 

And there I lived amid...Read more of this...

My Earlier Life

by Charles Baudelaire
 I've been home a long time among the vast porticos,
Which the mariner sun has tinged with a million fires,
Whose grandest pillars, upright, majestic and cold
Render them the same, this evening, as caves with basalt spires.

The swells' overwhelming accords of rich music,
Heaving images of heaven to the skies,
Mingle in a way solemn and mystic
With the colors of the horizon reflected...Read more of this...

Picture Of A 23-Year-Old Youth Painted By His Friend Of The Same Age An Amature

by Constantine P Cavafy
 He finished the painting yesterday noon. Now
he studies it in detail. He has painted him in a
gray unbuttoned coat, a deep gray; without
any vest or any tie. With a rose-colored shirt;
open at the collar, so something might be seen
also of the beauty of his chest, of his neck.
The right temple is almost entirely
covered by his hair, his beautiful hair
(parted...Read more of this...

So Much I Gazed

by Constantine P Cavafy
 So much I gazed on beauty,
that my vision is replete with it.

Contours of the body. Red lips. Voluptuous limbs.
Hair as if taken from greek statues;
always beautiful, even when uncombed,
and it falls, slightly, over white foreheads.
Faces of love, as my poetry
wanted them.... in the nights of my youth,
in my nights, secretly, met.......Read more of this...

Indian Dancer

by Sarojini Naidu
 EYES ravished with rapture, celestially panting, what passionate bosoms aflaming with fire 
Drink deep of the hush of the hyacinth heavens that glimmer around them in fountains of light; 
O wild and entrancing the strain of keen music that cleaveth the stars like a wail of desire, 
And beautiful dancers with houri-like faces bewitch the voluptuous watches of night.


The...Read more of this...

To Elsie

by William Carlos (WCW) Williams
 The pure products of America
go crazy—
mountain folk from Kentucky

or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and

valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between

devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure—

and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday

to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no

peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt

sheer rags-succumbing...Read more of this...

Ode to Fanny

by John Keats
 Physician Nature! Let my spirit blood! 
O ease my heart of verse and let me rest; 
Throw me upon thy Tripod, till the flood 
Of stifling numbers ebbs from my full breast. 
A theme! a theme! great nature! give a theme; 
Let me begin my dream. 
I come -- I see thee, as thou standest there, 
Beckon me not...Read more of this...

Symphonic Studies (After Schumann)

by Emma Lazarus
 Prelude 

Blue storm-clouds in hot heavens of mid-July 
Hung heavy, brooding over land and sea: 
Our hearts, a-tremble, throbbed in harmony 
With the wild, restless tone of air and sky. 
Shall we not call im Prospero who held 
In his enchanted hands the fateful key 
Of that tempestuous hour's mystery, 
And with controlling wand our spirits spelled, 
With him...Read more of this...

The Infanticide

by Friedrich von Schiller
 Hark where the bells toll, chiming, dull and steady,
The clock's slow hand hath reached the appointed time.
Well, be it so--prepare, my soul is ready,
Companions of the grave--the rest for crime!
Now take, O world! my last farewell--receiving
My parting kisses--in these tears they dwell!
Sweet are thy poisons while we taste believing,
Now we are quits--heart-poisoner, fare-thee-well!

Farewell, ye suns that once to joy...Read more of this...

La Nue

by Alan Seeger
 Oft when sweet music undulated round, 
Like the full moon out of a perfumed sea 
Thine image from the waves of blissful sound 
Rose and thy sudden light illumined me. 


And in the country, leaf and flower and air 
Would alter and the eternal shape emerge; 
Because they spoke of thee the fields seemed fair, 
And Joy to wait...Read more of this...

The Triumph Of Love

by Friedrich von Schiller
 By love are blest the gods on high,
Frail man becomes a deity
When love to him is given;
'Tis love that makes the heavens shine
With hues more radiant, more divine,
And turns dull earth to heaven!

In Pyrrha's rear (so poets sang
In ages past and gone),
The world from rocky fragments sprang--
Mankind from lifeless stone.

Their soul was but a thing of night,
Like stone and...Read more of this...

The Four Ages Of The World

by Friedrich von Schiller
 The goblet is sparkling with purpled-tinged wine,
Bright glistens the eye of each guest,
When into the hall comes the Minstrel divine,
To the good he now brings what is best;
For when from Elysium is absent the lyre,
No joy can the banquet of nectar inspire.

He is blessed by the gods, with an intellect clear,
That mirrors the world as it glides;
He has seen...Read more of this...

Paris

by Alan Seeger
 First, London, for its myriads; for its height, 
Manhattan heaped in towering stalagmite; 
But Paris for the smoothness of the paths 
That lead the heart unto the heart's delight. . . . 


Fair loiterer on the threshold of those days 
When there's no lovelier prize the world displays 
Than, having beauty and your twenty years, 
You have the means...Read more of this...

The Sultans Palace

by Alan Seeger
 My spirit only lived to look on Beauty's face,
As only when they clasp the arms seem served aright;
As in their flesh inheres the impulse to embrace,
To gaze on Loveliness was my soul's appetite.

I have roamed far in search; white road and plunging bow
Were keys in the blue doors where my desire was set;
Obedient to their lure, my lips and...Read more of this...

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