Famous Baggage Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Baggage poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous baggage poems. These examples illustrate what a famous baggage poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Kunitz, Stanley
...se guerilla war.
Thanks to your lightfoot genius
no Eighth Route Army
kept its lines more fluid,
traveled with less baggage
so nibbled the advantage.
Even with your small bad heart
you made a dance of departures.
In the cold spring rains
when last you failed me
I had nothing left to spend
but a red crayon language
on the character of the enemy
to break appointments,
to fight us not
with his strength
but with his weakness,
to kill us
not with his health
but with hi...Read more of this...
by
Hugo, Victor
...Stamp impatiently it seems,
Yours has heavenward soaring wings,
Mine is of the land of dreams.
"What's our baggage? only vows,
Happiness, and all our care,
And the flower that sweetly shows
Nestling lightly in your hair.
"Come, the oaks all dark appear,
Twilight now will soon depart,
Railing sparrows laugh to hear
Chains thou puttest round my heart.
"Not my fault 'twill surely be
If the hills should vocal prove,
And the trees w...Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
...I
In the depths of the Greyhound Terminal
sitting dumbly on a baggage truck looking at the sky
waiting for the Los Angeles Express to depart
worrying about eternity over the Post Office roof in
the night-time red downtown heaven
staring through my eyeglasses I realized shuddering
these thoughts were not eternity, nor the poverty
of our lives, irritable baggage clerks,
nor the millions of weeping relatives su...Read more of this...
by
Marvell, Andrew
...ter.
The gravelled Count did with the answer faint--
His character was that which thou didst paint--
Trusses his baggage and the camp does fly.
Yet Louis writes and, lest our heart should break,
Consoles us morally out of Seneque.
Two letters next unto Breda are sent:
In cipher one to Harry Excellent;
The first instructs our (verse the name abhors)
Plenipotentiary ambassadors
To prove by Scripture treaty does imply
Cessation, as the look adultery,
And...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...brains tend to the vapid.
But how beautifully dressed
Is this army! How impressed
Tommy is when at his heel
All his baggage wagons wheel
About the patterned carpet, and
Moving up his heavy guns
He sees them glow with diamond suns
Flashing all along each barrel.
And the gold and blue apparel
Of his gunners is a joy.
Tommy is a lucky boy.
Boom! Boom! Ta-ra!
The old mandarin nods under his purple umbrella. The
rose in his hand
shoots its petals up in thin q...Read more of this...
by
Kipling, Rudyard
...There were the sold-out shops and the bank
And the wet, wide-open town;
And we were doing escort-duty
To somebody's baggage-train,
And I smelt wattle by Lichtenberg--
Riding in, in the rain.
It was all Australia to me--
All I had found or missed:
Every face I was crazy to see,
And every woman I'd kissed:
All that I should n't ha' done, God knows!
(As He knows I'll do it again),
That smell of the wattle round Lichtenberg,
Riding in, in the rain!
And I sa...Read more of this...
by
Huchel, Peter
...t touches neither time nor space.
Coldly the wind blows
against the old homestead,
in the yard pale folk,
sledges, baggage, lamps covered with snow,
in the pots death,
in the pitchers poison,
the last will nailed to a post.
The hidden thing
under the rocks' claws,
the opening into night,
the terror of death
thrust into flesh like stinging salt.
Let us go down
in the language of angels
to the broken bricks of Babel....Read more of this...
by
Mayakovsky, Vladimir
...huge and long
with at least
20 fangs
poison-tipped.
The porter's eyes
give a significant flick
(I'll carry your baggage
for nix,
mon ami...)
The gendarmes enquiringly
look at the tec,
the tec, -
at the gendarmerie.
With what delight
that gendarme caste
would have me
strung-up and whipped raw
because I hold
in my hands
hammered-fast
sickle-clasped
my red Soviet passport.
I'd tear
like a wolf
at bureaucracy.
For mandates
my respect's ...Read more of this...
by
Atwood, Margaret
...rs crow
for hours before dawn, and a prodded
child howls & howls
on the pocked road to school.
In the hold with the baggage
there are two prisoners,
their heads shaved by bayonets, & ten crates
of queasy chicks. Each spring
there's race of cripples, from the store
to the church. This is the sort of junk
I carry with me; and a clipping
about democracy from the local paper.
Outside the window
they're building the damn hotel,
nail by nail, someone's
crumbling dr...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...The porter in the Pullman car
Was charming, as they sometimes are.
He scanned my baggage tags: "Are you
The man who wrote of Lady Lou?"
When I said "yes" he made a fuss -
Oh, he was most assiduous;
And I was pleased to think that he
Enjoyed my brand of poetry.
He was forever at my call,
So when we got to Montreal
And he had brushed me off, I said:
"I'm glad my poems you have read.
I feel quite flattered, I confess,
And if you gi...Read more of this...
by
Abercrombie, Lascelles
...y basking,
In such a hurry he tript against the hills
And stumbling forward spilt over his shoulders
All his black baggage held,
Streaking downpour of hail.
Then fled dismayed, and the sun in golden glee
And the high white clouds laught down his dusky ghost.
For all that's left of winter
Is moisture in the ground.
When I came down the valley last, the sun
Just thawed the grass and made me gentle turf,
But still the frost was bony underneath.
Now moles take bur...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...n cold blood of four hundred and twelve young
men.
Retreating, they had form’d in a hollow square, with their baggage for
breastworks;
Nine hundred lives out of the surrounding enemy’s, nine times their number,
was the price they took in advance;
Their colonel was wounded and their ammunition gone;
They treated for an honorable capitulation, receiv’d writing and seal, gave
up their arms, and march’d back prisoners of war.
They were the glory of th...Read more of this...
by
Webb, Charles
...as so little she didn't blush.
The right front corner has been punctured and crushed.
(I could have choked the baggage handler.)
The handle—blue plastic doorknocker—
is fringed with wrinkled tags from United, Delta,
U.S. Air (which crunched the hole, flying
the suitcase back from Houston). I'd gone there
to see Mom in the "home," and save some boyhood
relics before my sister gave them to Good Will.
"Take mine," Mom said, hearing my suitcase was ...Read more of this...
by
Chaucer, Geoffrey
...ce
as He bore the Cross, and received it back with an impression
of His countenance upon it.
58. Mail: packet, baggage; French, "malle," a trunk.
59. The Bell: apparently another Southwark tavern; Stowe
mentions a "Bull" as being near the Tabard.
60. Cheap: Cheapside, then inhabited by the richest and most
prosperous citizens of London.
61. Herberow: Lodging, inn; French, "Herberge."
62. The watering of Saint Thomas: At the second ...Read more of this...
by
Nwakanma, Obi
...e ascent;
each eye veiled by remorse, or anger or
a forlorn thought -
for as they came, weighed down by ancient baggage,
a skin of water, a measure of wheat, some
penicillin, in case of epidemic
a stretcher to fetch the dead;
an hourglass, and then the gloved idol,
the one that ordered the massacre -
who rode ahead of the light;
muttered a command: 'halt!'.
From The Horsemen and Other Poems...Read more of this...
by
Abercrombie, Lascelles
...tly basking,
In such a hurry he tript against the hills
And stumbling forward spilt over his shoulders
All his black baggage held,
Streaking downpour of hail.
Then fled dismayed, and the sun in golden glee
And the high white clouds laught down his dusky ghost.
For all that's left of winter
Is moisture in the ground.
When I came down the valley last, the sun
Just thawed the grass and made me gentle turf,
But still the frost was bony underneath.
No...Read more of this...
by
Larkin, Philip
...br> I and you now, alone.
So for your face I have exchanged all faces,
For your few properties bargained the brisk
Baggage, the mask-and-magic-man's regalia.
Now you become my boredom and my failure,
Another way of suffering, a risk,
A heavier-than-air hypostasis....Read more of this...
by
Plath, Sylvia
...ently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage ----
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.
I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat
Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.
They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.
Scared and bare o...Read more of this...
by
Tzara, Tristan
...two smiles meet towards
the child-wheel of my zeal
the bloody baggage of creatures
made flesh in physical legends-lives
the nimble stags storms cloud over
rain falls under the scissors of
the dark hairdresser-furiously
swimming under the clashing arpeggios
in the machine's sap grass
grows around with sharp eyes
here the share of our caresses
dead and departed with the waves
gives itself up to the judgment of time
pa...Read more of this...
by
von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang
...e the wealthy
Settled themselves in the marsh.
Easy 'tis following the chariot
That by Fortune is driven,
Like the baggage that moves
Over well-mended highways
After the train of a prince.
But who stands there apart?
In the thicket, lost is his path;
Behind him the bushes
Are closing together,
The grass springs up again,
The desert engulphs him.
Ah, who'll heal his afflictions,
To whom balsam was poison,
Who, from love's fullness,
Drank in misanthropy only?
Fir...Read more of this...
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