Famous Wallace Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The Idea of Order at Key West

by Wallace Stevens
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if...Read more of this...

Disillusionment of Ten o Clock

by Wallace Stevens
The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather....Read more of this...

Sunday Morning

by Wallace Stevens
1
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide...Read more of this...

Tattoo

by Wallace Stevens
 The light is like a spider.
It crawls over the water.
It crawls over the edges of the snow.
It crawls under your eyelids
And spreads its webs there--
Its two webs.

The webs of your eyes
Are fastened
To the flesh and bones of you
As to rafters or grass.

There are filaments of your eyes
On the surface of the water
And in the edges of the snow....Read more of this...

The High-Toned Old Christian Woman

by Wallace Stevens
Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at...Read more of this...

Negation

by Wallace Stevens
Hi! The creator too is blind,
Struggling toward his harmonious whole,
Rejecting intermediate parts,
Horrors and falsities and wrongs;
Incapable master of all force,
Too vague idealist, overwhelmed
By an afflatus that persists.
For this, then, we endure brief lives,
The evanescent symmetries
From that meticulous potter's thumb....Read more of this...

To The One Of Fictive Music

by Wallace Stevens
 Sister and mother and diviner love,
And of the sisterhood of the living dead
Most near, most clear, and of the clearest bloom,
And of the fragrant mothers the most dear
And queen, and of diviner love the day
And flame and summer and sweet fire, no thread
Of cloudy silver sprinkles in your gown
Its venom of renown, and on your head
No crown is simpler...Read more of this...

The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man

by Wallace Stevens
One's grand flights, one's Sunday baths,
One's tootings at the weddings of the soul
Occur as they occur. So bluish clouds
Occurred above the empty house and the leaves
Of the rhododendrons rattled their gold,
As if someone lived there. Such floods of white
Came bursting from the clouds. So the wind
Threw its contorted strength around the sky.

Could you have said the bluejay suddenly
Would swoop to...Read more of this...

Valley Candle

by Wallace Stevens
 My candle burned alone in an immense valley.
Beams of the huge night converged upon it,
Until the wind blew.
The beams of the huge night
Converged upon its image,
Until the wind blew....Read more of this...

Anecdote of the Jar

by Wallace Stevens
I placed a jar in Tennessee, 
And round it was, upon a hill. 
It made the slovenly wilderness 
Surround that hill. 

The wilderness rose up to it, 
And sprawled around, no longer wild. 
The jar was round upon the ground 
And tall and of a port in air. 

It took dominion every where. 
The jar was gray and bare. 
It...Read more of this...

The Well Dressed Man With A Beard

by Wallace Stevens
 After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.
If the rejected things, the things denied,
Slid over the western cataract, yet one,
One only, one thing that was firm, even
No greater than a cricket's horn, no more
Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech
Of the...Read more of this...

Scots Wha Hae Wi Wallace Bled

by Robert Burns
 Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled,
Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,
Welcome to your gory bed,
Or to victory!

Now's the day, and now's the hour;
See the front o' battle lour,
See approach proud Edward's power— 
Chains and slavery!

Wha will be a traitor-knave?
Wha can fill a coward's grave?
Wha sae base as be a slave?
Let him turn and flee!

Wha for Scotland's king and law
Freedom's...Read more of this...

Continual Conversation With A Silent Man

by Wallace Stevens
 The old brown hen and the old blue sky,
Between the two we live and die--
The broken cartwheel on the hill.

As if, in the presence of the sea,
We dried our nets and mended sail
And talked of never-ending things,

Of the never-ending storm of will,
One will and many wills, and the wind,
Of many meanings in the leaves,

Brought down to one below the...Read more of this...

The River of Rivers in Connecticut

by Wallace Stevens
There is a great river this side of Stygia
Before one comes to the first black cataracts
And trees that lack the intelligence of trees.

In that river, far this side of Stygia,
The mere flowing of the water is a gayety,
Flashing and flashing in the sun. On its banks,

No shadow walks. The river is fateful,
Like the last one. But there is no ferryman.
He...Read more of this...

The Planet On The Table

by Wallace Stevens
 Ariel was glad he had written his poems.
They were of a remembered time
Or of something seen that he liked.

Other makings of the sun
Were waste and welter
And the ripe shrub writhed.

His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of his self,
Were no less makings of the sun.

It was not important that they survive.
What mattered was that they...Read more of this...

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

by Wallace Stevens
I 
Among twenty snowy mountains, 
The only moving thing 
Was the eye of the blackbird. 

II 
I was of three minds, 
Like a tree 
In which there are three blackbirds. 

III 
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds. 
It was a small part of the pantomime. 

IV 
A man and a woman 
Are one. 
A man and a woman and...Read more of this...

Wallace Ferguson

by Edgar Lee Masters
 There at Geneva where Mt. Blanc floated above
The wine-hued lake like a cloud, when a breeze was blown
Out of an empty sky of blue, and the roaring Rhone
Hurried under the bridge through chasms of rock;
And the music along the cafés was part of the splendor
Of dancing water under a torrent of light;
And the purer part of the genius of...Read more of this...

Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly

by Wallace Stevens
Among the more irritating minor ideas 
Of Mr. Homburg during his visits home 
To Concord, at the edge of things, was this: 
To think away the grass, the trees, the clouds, 
Not to transform them into other things, 
Is only what the sun does every day, 

Until we say to ourselves that there may be 
A pensive nature, a mechanical...Read more of this...

Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour

by Wallace Stevens
 Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A...Read more of this...

Bantams in Pine-Woods

by Wallace Stevens
Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan
Of tan with henna hackles, halt!

Damned universal cock, as if the sun
Was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail.

Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal.
Your world is you. I am my world.

You ten-foot poet among inchlings. Fat!
Begone! An inchling bristles in these pines,

Bristles, and points their Appalachian tangs,
And fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos....Read more of this...

Nomad Exquisite

by Wallace Stevens
As the immense dew of Florida
Brings forth
The big-finned palm
And green vine angering for life,

As the immense dew of Florida
Brings forth hymn and hymn
From the beholder,
Beholding all these green sides
And gold sides of green sides,

And blessed mornings,
Meet for the eye of the young alligator,
And lightning colors
So, in me, comes flinging
Forms, flames, and the flakes of flames....Read more of this...

Six Significant Landscapes

by Wallace Stevens
I
An old man sits
In the shadow of a pine tree
In China.
He sees larkspur,
Blue and white,
At the edge of the shadow,
Move in the wind.
His beard moves in the wind.
The pine tree moves in the wind.
Thus water flows
Over weeds.

II
The night is of the colour
Of a woman's arm:
Night, the female,
Obscure,
Fragrant and supple,
Conceals herself.
A pool shines,
Like a bracelet
Shaken in a dance.

III
I measure myself
Against a...Read more of this...

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

by Wallace Stevens
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal.
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which...Read more of this...

Gray Room (1917)

by Wallace Stevens
Although you sit in a room that is gray, 
Except for the silver 
Of the straw-paper, 
And pick 
At your pale white gown; 
Or lift one of the green beads 
Of your necklace, 
To let it fall; 
Or gaze at your green fan 
Printed with the red branches of a red willow; 
Or, with one finger, 
Move the leaf in...Read more of this...

The Dirge of Wallace

by Thomas Campbell
 When Scotland's great Regent, our warrior most dear, 
The debt of his nature did pay, 
T' was Edward, the cruel, had reason to fear, 
And cause to be struck with dismay. 

At the window of Edward the raven did croak, 
Though Scotland a widow became; 
Each tie of true honor to Wallace he broke- 
The raven croaked "Sorrow and...Read more of this...

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