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Famous Wright Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Wright, James
...Just off the Highway to Rochester, Minnesota
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can h...Read more of this...



by Wright, James
...The night's drifts
Pile up below me and behind my back,
Slide down the hill, rise again, and build
Eerie little dunes on the roof of the house.
In the valley below me,
Miles between me and the town of St.-Jeannet,
The road lamps glow.
They are so cold, they might as well be dark.
Trucks and cars
Cough and drone down there between the golden...Read more of this...

by Wright, James
...And how can I, born in evil days
And fresh from failure, ask a kindness of Fate?

 -- Written A.D. 819


Po Chu-i, balding old politician,
What's the use?
I think of you,
Uneasily entering the gorges of the Yang-Tze,
When you were being towed up the rapids
Toward some political job or other
In the city of Chungshou.
You made it, I guess,
By dar...Read more of this...

by Wright, James
...In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of ******* in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their son...Read more of this...

by Wright, James
...I was only a young man
In those days. On that evening
The cold was so God damned
Bitter there was nothing.
Nothing. I was in trouble
With a woman, and there was nothing
There but me and dead snow.

I stood on the street corner
In Minneapolis, lashed
This way and that.
Wind rose from some pit,
Hunting me.
Another bus to Saint Paul
Wo...Read more of this...



by Wright, James
...Deep into spring, winter is hanging on. Bitter and skillful in his
hopelessness, he stays alive in every shady place, starving along the
Mediterranean: angry to see the glittering sea-pale boulder alive
with lizards green as Judas leaves. Winter is hanging on. He still
believes. He tries to catch a lizard by the shoulder. One olive tree...Read more of this...

by Nash, Ogden
...as ignoring the law of gravity.
Therefore nobody could possibly indict me for perjury
When I swear that I wish the Wright brothers had gone in for silver
fox farming or tree surgery....Read more of this...

by Tebb, Barry
...e the staccato of a bren, yet loaded

With a lifetime’s hard-won ken of poetry’s obscurest corners.

I salute David Wright, that ‘difficult deaf son’

Of the sixties, acknowledged my own youthful spasm of enthusiasm

But Simon you must share the honour with Jimmy Keery,

Of whom I will admit I’m somewhat leery,

His critical acuity so absolute and steely.



I ask you all to stay with me

Through time into infinity

Not even death can undo

The love I have for you.Read more of this...

by Wright, Judith
...If the year is meditating a suitable gift, 
I should like it to be the attitude 
of my great- great- grandmother, 
legendary devotee of the arts, 

who having eight children 
and little opportunity for painting pictures, 
sat one day on a high rock 
beside a river in Switzerland 

and from a difficult distance viewed 
her second son, balanced on a small ic...Read more of this...

by Wright, James
...Still,
I would leap too
Into the light,
If I had the chance.
It is everything, the wet green stalk of the field
On the other side of the road.
They crouch there, too, faltering in terror
And take strange wing. Many
Of the dead never moved, but many
Of the dead are alive forever in the split second
Auto headlights more sudden
Than their drivers ...Read more of this...

by Wright, Judith
...South of my days' circle, part of my blood's country, 
rises that tableland, high delicate outline 
of bony slopes wincing under the winter, 
low trees, blue-leaved and olive, outcropping granite- 
clean, lean, hungry country. The creek's leaf-silenced, 
willow choked, the slope a tangle of medlar and crabapple 
branching over and under, blotched with ...Read more of this...

by Chaucer, Geoffrey
...hent.* *seize


Notes to the Friar's Tale


1. Small tithers: people who did not pay their full tithes. Mr
Wright remarks that "the sermons of the friars in the fourteenth
century were most frequently designed to impress the ahsolute
duty of paying full tithes and offerings".

2. There might astert them no pecunial pain: they got off with
no mere pecuniary punishment. (Transcriber's note: "Astert"
means "escape". An alternative reading of this lin...Read more of this...

by Chaucer, Geoffrey
...And have a thank, and yet* a coat and hood. *also
In youth he learned had a good mistere* *trade
He was a well good wright, a carpentere
This Reeve sate upon a right good stot*, *steed
That was all pomely* gray, and highte** Scot. *dappled **called
A long surcoat of perse* upon he had, *sky-blue
And by his side he bare a rusty blade.
Of Norfolk was this Reeve, of which I tell,
Beside a town men clepen* Baldeswell, *call
Tucked he was, as is a friar, about,
And eve...Read more of this...

by Wright, James
...There is this cave
In the air behind my body
That nobodyt is going to touch:
A cloister, a silence
Closing around a blossom of fire.
When I stand upright in the wind,
My bones turn to dark emeralds....Read more of this...

by Wright, Judith
...The rows of cells are unroofed, 
a flute for the wind's mouth, 
who comes with a breath of ice 
from the blue caves of the south. 

O dark and fierce day: 
the wind like an angry bee 
hunts for the black honey 
in the pits of the hollow sea. 

Waves of shadow wash 
the empty shell bone-bare, 
and like a bone it sings 
a bitter song of air. 

Wh...Read more of this...

by Chaucer, Geoffrey
...r> Testif: headstrong, wild-brained; French, "entete."

7. Strother: Tyrwhitt points to Anstruther, in Fife: Mr Wright
to the Vale of Langstroth, in the West Riding of Yorkshire.
Chaucer has given the scholars a dialect that may have belonged
to either district, although it more immediately suggests the
more northern of the two.
(Transcribers note: later commentators have identified it with a
now vanished village near Kirknewton in Northumberland.
There wa...Read more of this...

by Chaucer, Geoffrey
...en. ii, 13).

22. Him that harrowed Hell: Christ. See note 14 to the Reeve's
Tale.

23. Mr. Wright says that "it was a common practice to grant
under the conventual seal to benefactors and others a brotherly
participation in the spiritual good works of the convent, and in
their expected reward after death."

24. The friar had received a master's degree.

25. The regular number of monks or friars in a convent was
fixed at twelve, wit...Read more of this...

by Chaucer, Geoffrey
...rgin's name.

20. St. Joce: or Judocus, a saint of Ponthieu, in France.

21. "An allusion," says Mr Wright, "to the story of the Roman
sage who, when blamed for divorcing his wife, said that a shoe
might appear outwardly to fit well, but no one but the wearer
knew where it pinched."

22. Vigilies: festival-eves; see note 33 to the Prologue to the
Tales.

23. Bobance: boasting; Ben Jonson's braggart, in "Every Man in
his Humour," is named Bo...Read more of this...

by Wright, James
...Beautiful natural blossoms,
Pure delicate body,
You stand without trembling.
Little mist of fallen starlight,
Perfect, beyond my reach,
How I envy you.
For if you could only listen,
I would tell you something,
Something human.

An old man
Appeared to me once
In the unendurable snow.
He had a singe of white
Beard on his face.
He paused o...Read more of this...

by Wright, James
...This time, I have left my body behind me, crying
In its dark thorns.
Still,
There are good things in this world.
It is dusk.
It is the good darkness
Of women's hands that touch loaves.
The spirit of a tree begins to move.
I touch leaves.
I close my eyes and think of water....Read more of this...

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