Famous Egg Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Egg poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous egg poems. These examples illustrate what a famous egg poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...Touch it: it won't shrink like an eyeball,
This egg-shaped bailiwick, clear as a tear.
Here's yesterday, last year ---
Palm-spear and lily distinct as flora in the vast
Windless threadwork of a tapestry.
Flick the glass with your fingernail:
It will ping like a Chinese chime in the slightest air stir
Though nobody in there looks up or bothers to answer.
The inhabitants are light as cork,
Every one of the...Read more of this...
by
Plath, Sylvia
...Life is real, life is earnest,
And the shell is not its pen –
“Egg thou art, and egg remainest”
Was not spoken of the hen.
Art is long and Time is fleeting,
Be our bills then sharpened well,
And not like muffled drums be beating
On the inside of the shell.
In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the great barnyard of life,
Be not like those lazy cattle!
Be a rooster in the strife!
Lives of roosters all remind ...Read more of this...
by
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
...om Denmark
who captures the oldest son's heart.
from diapers to Dior.
That story.
Or a milkman who serves the wealthy,
eggs, cream, butter, yogurt, milk,
the white truck like an ambulance
who goes into real estate
and makes a pile.
From homogenized to martinis at lunch.
Or the charwoman
who is on the bus when it cracks up
and collects enough from the insurance.
From mops to Bonwit Teller.
That story.
Once
the wife of a rich man was on her deathbed
and she said to her daugh...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...oose and rather tame than wild,
Hear the child's story.' 'Yea, my well-beloved,
An 'twere but of the goose and golden eggs.'
And Gareth answered her with kindling eyes,
'Nay, nay, good mother, but this egg of mine
Was finer gold than any goose can lay;
For this an Eagle, a royal Eagle, laid
Almost beyond eye-reach, on such a palm
As glitters gilded in thy Book of Hours.
And there was ever haunting round the palm
A lusty youth, but poor, who often saw
The splendour...Read more of this...
by
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...ail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innoce...Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
...
While he was here alive who could answer them,
And in their teeth fling confirmations
Harder than agates against an egg-shell?
But now the man was dead, and would come again
Never, though she might honor ineffably
The flimsy wraith of him she conjured
Out of a dream with his wand of absence.
And if the truth were now but a mummery,
Meriting pride’s implacable irony,
So much the worse for pride. Moreover,
Save her or fail, there was conscience always.
Meanwhile, ...Read more of this...
by
Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...e told
that you're sick
and then be forced
to watch
you
come
down with the hammer.
Today life opened inside me like an egg
and there inside
after considerable digging
I found the answer.
What a bargain!
There was the sun,
her yolk moving feverishly,
tumbling her prize --
and you realize she does this daily!
I'd known she was a purifier
but I hadn't thought
she was solid,
hadn't known she was an answer.
God! It's a dream,
lovers sprouting in the yard
like celery stalks
and be...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...mears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."...Read more of this...
by
Collins, Billy
...osed each to the other, not to unity,
which in cycloid inclusiveness
has dwarfed the demonstration
of Columbus with the egg --
a triumph of simplicity --
that charitive Euroclydon
of frightening disinterestedness
which the world hates,
admitting:
"I am such a cow,
if I had a sorrow,
I should feel it a long time;
I am not one of those
who have a great sorrow
in the morning
and a great joy at noon;"
which says: "I have encountered it
among those unpretentious
proteg?s of wisdo...Read more of this...
by
Moore, Marianne
...over
Those behinds,
Men.
One day they hold you in the
Palms of their hands, gentle, as if you
Were the last raw egg in the world. Then
They tighten up. Just a little. The
First squeeze is nice. A quick hug.
Soft into your defenselessness. A little
More. The hurt begins. Wrench out a
Smile that slides around the fear. When the
Air disappears,
Your mind pops, exploding fiercely, briefly,
Like the head of a kitchen match. Shattered.
It is your juice
That runs d...Read more of this...
by
Angelou, Maya
...tto's pupils and assistants.
* 6 Rough cast.
* 7 Painter, sculptor, and goldsmith.
* 8 Distemper---mixture of water and egg yolk.
* 9 Sculptor and architect, died 1313-
*10 All Saints.
*11 A Florentine painter, died 1576.
*12 Tartar king.
*13 A woodcock...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Robert
...of a
can full of water on their table and died under the table, gasp-
ing for watery breath while their mother fried eggs on the
Coleman stove.
The mother apologized. She was supposed to be watching
the fish --THIS IS MY EARTHLY FAILURE-- holding the
dead fish by the tail, the fish taking all the bows like a young
Jewish comedian talking about Adlai Stevenson.
The third-year student in engineering at the University of
Montana took a tin can and punched an elaborat...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...ese, something that the cat brought in.
Nick me with any old name.
Class me up for a fish, a gorilla, a slant head, an egg, a ham.
Only … slam me across the ears sometimes … and hunt for a white star
In my forehead and twist the bang of my forelock around it.
Make a wish for me. Maybe I will light out like a streak of wind....Read more of this...
by
Sandburg, Carl
...f the trapper in the open air in the far west—the bride
was a red girl;
Her father and his friends sat near, cross-legged and dumbly smoking—they
had moccasins to their feet, and large thick blankets hanging from their
shoulders;
On a bank lounged the trapper—he was drest mostly in skins—his
luxuriant beard and curls protected his neck—he held his bride by the hand;
She had long eyelashes—her head was bare—her coarse straight locks
descended upon her voluptuo...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...on tier, with glass and iron façades.
Gladdening the sun and sky—enhued in cheerfulest hues,
Bronze, lilac, robin’s-egg, marine and crimson,
Over whose golden roof shall flaunt, beneath thy banner, Freedom,
The banners of The States, the flags of every land,
A brood of lofty, fair, but lesser Palaces shall cluster.
Somewhere within the walls of all,
Shall all that forwards perfect human life be started,
Tried, taught, advanced, visibly exhibited.
Here shall you tr...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...fear with my whiskers.
Envy lashes my tail. Love speaks me entire, a word
of fur. I will teach you to be still as an egg
and to slip like the ghost of wind through the grass....Read more of this...
by
Piercy, Marge
...Jimmy joked and took his sup
And sang his song of "Up, come up."
Jane brought the bowl of stewing gin
And poured the egg and lemon in,
And whisked it up and served it out
While bawdy questions went about.
Jack chucked her chin, and Jim accost her
With bits out of the "Maid of Gloster."
And fifteen arms went round her waist.
(And then men ask, Are Barmaids chaste?}
O young men, pray to be kept whole
from bringing down a weaker soul.
Your minute's joy so meet in do...Read more of this...
by
Masefield, John
...ug full of bones wheaten hair falling out
enraged and reddening eye as he lay aching huge hairy head on his paws
by the egg-crate bookcase filled up with thin volumes of Plato, & Buddha.
Sat by his side every night averting my eyes from his hungry motheaten
face
stopped eating myself he got weaker and roared at night while I had
nightmares
Eaten by lion in bookstore on Cosmic Campus, a lion myself starved by
Professor Kandisky, dying in a lion's flophouse circus,
I woke ...Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
...he price of his Shadow, sold.
With the first twilight he struck a match
And watched the little blue stars hatch
Into an egg of perfect flame.
He lit his candle, and almost in shame
At his eagerness, lifted his eyes.
The Shadow was there, and its precise
Outline etched the cold, white wall.
The young man swore, "By God! You, Paul,
There's something the matter with your brain.
Go home now and sleep off the strain."
The next day was a storm, the rain
Whispered and scratched at ...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...e urges.
The Pill will become available to the general public,
starting up a new waiting in that other depth.
The egg will have to keep believing in its timeless moment
of completion without any proof except in the longing
of its own body. Maris will break Babe Ruth's record
while Orbison will have his first major hit with
"Only the Lonely," trying his best to sound like Elvis.
© 1999, Fleda Brown
(first published in The Iowa Review, 29 [1999])
...Read more of this...
by
Brown, Fleda
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