Famous Sensual Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Sensual poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous sensual poems. These examples illustrate what a famous sensual poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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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...
by
William Butler Yeats
I
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
II
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon...Read more of this...
by
Constantine P Cavafy
The years of my youth, my sensual life --
how clearly I see their meaning now.
What needless repentances, how futile....
But I did not understand the meaning then.
In the dissolute life of my youth
the desires of my poetry were being formed,
the scope of my art was being plotted.
This is why my repentances were never stable.
And my resolutions to control myself, to...Read more of this...
by
Robert Lowell
1
Only today and just for this minute,
when the sunslant finds its true angle,
you can see yellow and pinkish leaves spangle
our gentle, fluffy tree—
suddenly the green summer is momentary...
Autumn is my favorite season—
why does it change clothes and withdraw?
This week the house went on the market—
suddenly I woke up among strangers;
when I go into a room, it moves
with embarrassment, and...Read more of this...
by
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Contemplate all this work of Time,
The giant labouring in his youth;
Nor dream of human love and truth,
As dying Nature's earth and lime;
But trust that those we call the dead
Are breathers of an ampler day
For ever nobler ends. They say,
The solid earth whereon we tread
In tracts of fluent heat began,
And grew to seeming-random forms,
The seeming prey of cyclic storms,
Till at...Read more of this...
by
Constantine P Cavafy
He's an old man. Used up and bent,
crippled by time and indulgence,
he slowly walks along the narrow street.
But when he goes inside his house to hide
the shambles of his old age, his mind turns
to the share in youth that still belongs to him.
His verse is now recited by young men.
His visions come before their lively eyes.
Their healthy sensual minds,
their...Read more of this...
by
Dylan Thomas
The bows glided down, and the coast
Blackened with birds took a last look
At his thrashing hair and whale-blue eye;
The trodden town rang its cobbles for luck.
Then good-bye to the fishermanned
Boat with its anchor free and fast
As a bird hooking over the sea,
High and dry by the top of the mast,
Whispered the affectionate sand
And the bulwarks of the dazzled quay.
For...Read more of this...
by
Constantine P Cavafy
Half past twelve. Time has gone by quickly
since nine o'clock when I lit the lamp
and sat down here. I've been sitting without reading,
without speaking. Completely alone in the house,
whom could I talk to?
Since nine o'clock when I lit the lamp
the shade of my young body
has come to haunt me, to remind me
of shut scented rooms,
of past sensual pleasure -...Read more of this...
by
Anais Nin
"Am I, at bottom, that fervent little Spanish Catholic child who chastised herself for loving toys, who forbade herself the enjoyment of sweet foods, who practiced silence, who humiliated her pride, who adored symbols, statues, burning candles, incense, the caress of nuns, organ music, for whom Communion was a great event? I was so exalted by the idea of...Read more of this...
by
Larry Levis
--The Carpathian Frontier, October, 1968
--for my brother
Once, in a foreign country, I was suddenly ill.
I was driving south toward a large city famous
For so little it had a replica, in concrete,
In two-thirds scale, of the Arc de Triomphe stuck
In the midst of traffic, & obstructing it.
But the city was hours away, beyond the hills
Shaped like the bodies of...Read more of this...
by
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
With stammering lips and insufficient sound
I strive and struggle to deliver right
That music of my nature, day and night
With dream and thought and feeling interwound
And inly answering all the senses round
With octaves of a mystic depth and height
Which step out grandly to the infinite
From the dark edges of the sensual ground.
This song of soul I struggle to outbear
Through portals...Read more of this...
by
Robert Hayden
(And I, I am no longer of that world)
Naked, he lies in the blinded room
chainsmoking, cradled by drugs, by jazz
as never by any lover's cradling flesh.
Miles Davis coolly blows for him:
O pena negra, sensual Flamenco blues;
the red clay foxfire voice of Lady Day
(lady of the pure black magnolias)
sobsings her sorrow and loss and fare you well,
dryweeps the pain his...Read more of this...
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...
by
Anonymous
Wild and fearful in his cavern
Hid the naked troglodyte,
And the homeless nomad wandered
Laying waste the fertile plain.
Menacing with spear and arrow
In the woods the hunter strayed ...
Woe to all poor wreteches stranded
On those cruel and hostile shores!
From the peak of high Olympus
Came the mother Ceres down,
Seeeking in those savage regions
Her lost daughter Prosperine.
But the Goddess found no refuge,
Found no kindly...Read more of this...
by
Henry David Thoreau
Whate'er we leave to God, God does,
And blesses us;
The work we choose should be our own,
God leaves alone.
If with light head erect I sing,
Though all the Muses lend their force,
From my poor love of anything,
The verse is weak and shallow as its source.
But if with bended neck I grope
Listening behind...Read more of this...
by
William Shakespeare
No more be grieved at that which thou hast done:
Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud;
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.
All men make faults, and even I in this,
Authorizing thy trespass with compare,
Myself corrupting, salving thy amiss,
Excusing thy sins more than thy sins are;
For to thy sensual fault I bring in...Read more of this...
by
William Shakespeare
In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes,
For they in thee a thousand errors note;
But 'tis my heart that loves what they despise,
Who in despite of view is pleased to dote.
Nor are mine cars with thy tongue's tune delighted,
Nor tender feeling to base touches prone,
Nor taste, nor smell, desire to be invited
To any sensual feast with thee...Read more of this...
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...
by
Adrienne Rich
A life hauls itself uphill
through hoar-mist steaming
the sun's tongue licking
leaf upon leaf into stricken liquid
When? When? cry the soothseekers
but time is a bloodshot eye
seeing its last of beauty its own
foreclosure
a bloodshot mind
finding itself unspeakable
What is the last thought?
Now I will let you know?
or, Now I know?
(porridge of skull-splinters, brain tissue
mouth and throat membrane, cranial fluid)
Shattered head on the...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
I never did fit in – at six or sixty one –
I stand out in a crowd, too young or old
And gather pity like a shroud. "Is that real silk?"
A teenager inquired. "As real as Oxfam ever is
For one pound fifty." The vast ballroom was growing misty
And blurred with alcohol I’ve never had the taste for.
"**** off" a forty-plus...Read more of this...
by
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
WITH stammering lips and insufficient sound
I strive and struggle to deliver right
That music of my nature, day and night
With dream and thought and feeling interwound
And inly answering all the senses round
With octaves of a mystic depth and height
Which step out grandly to the infinite
From the dark edges of the sensual ground.
This song of soul I struggle to outbear
Through portals...Read more of this...
by
John Keats
THOU still unravish'd bride of quietness
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time
Sylvan historian who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape 5
Of deities or mortals or of both
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens...Read more of this...
by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
in the wares before you spread,
Types of all things may be read.
'NEATH the shadow
Of these bushes,
On the meadow
Where the cooling water gushes.
Phoebus gave me, when a boy,
All life's fullness to enjoy.
So, in silence, as the God
Bade them with his sov'reign nod,
Sacred Muses train'd my days
To his praise.--
With the bright and silv'ry flood
Of Parnassus stirr'd my blood,
And the seal so...Read more of this...
by
Henry Lawson
It was somewhere in September, and the sun was going down,
When I came, in search of `copy', to a Darling-River town;
`Come-and-have-a-drink' we'll call it -- 'tis a fitting name, I think --
And 'twas raining, for a wonder, up at Come-and-have-a-drink.
'Neath the public-house verandah I was resting on a bunk
When a stranger rose before me,...Read more of this...
by
William Henry Davies
when the body of a woman dissolves
within are the three feared faces
the man who dares to trace them comes
to grief - but nothing personal is meant
waves and particles transvest - vulva
breast and womb are sexless doors
beyond whose suck a sensual light
swings life round its little finger...Read more of this...
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