Famous Bank Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Bank poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous bank poems. These examples illustrate what a famous bank poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Robert Burns
WAE worth thy power, thou cursed leaf!
Fell source o’ a’ my woe and grief!
For lack o’ thee I’ve lost my lass!
For lack o’ thee I scrimp my glass!
I see the children of affliction
Unaided, through thy curst restriction:
I’ve seen the oppressor’s cruel smile
Amid his hapless victim’s spoil;
And for thy potence vainly wished,
To crush the villain in the dust:
For lack o’...Read more of this...
by
Rabindranath Tagore
Take back your coins, King's Councillor. I am of those women you
sent to the forest shrine to decoy the young ascetic who had never
seen a women. I failed in your bidding.
Dimly day was breaking when the hermit boy came to bathe in
the stream, his tawny locks crowded on his shoulders, like a
cluster of morning clouds, and his limbs shining...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
1896
Mine was the woman to me, darkling I found her:
Haling her dumb from the camp, held her and bound her.
Hot rose her tribe on our track ere I had proved her;
Hearing her laugh in the gloom, greatly I loved her.
Swift through the forest we ran, none stood to guard us,
Few were my people and fa; then the flood barred...Read more of this...
by
Philip Larkin
Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park
The crowns of hats the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August bank Holiday lark;
And the shut shops the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds
The farthings and sovereigns
Adn dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens
The tin advertisements
For cocoa...Read more of this...
by
Robert Burns
ON a bank of flowers, in a summer day,
For summer lightly drest,
The youthful, blooming Nelly lay,
With love and sleep opprest;
When Willie, wand’ring thro’ the wood,
Who for her favour oft had sued;
He gaz’d, he wish’d
He fear’d, he blush’d,
And trembled where he stood.
Her closèd eyes, like weapons sheath’d,
Were seal’d in soft repose;
Her lip, still as she...Read more of this...
by
A E Housman
On moonlit heath and lonesome bank
The sheep beside me graze;
And yon the gallows used to clank
Fast by the four cross ways.
A careless shepherd once would keep
The flocks by moonlight there, *
And high amongst the glimmering sheep
The dead man stood on air.
They hang us now in Shrewsbury jail:
The whistles blow forlorn,...Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
Last night upon the river bank we lay,
I with my wine-cup, and a maiden gay,
So bright it shone, like pearl within its shell,
The watchman cried, «Behold the break of day!»...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
THE KINGDOM OF MY HEART
1
The halcyon settled on the Aire of our days
Kingfisher-blue it broke my heart in two
Shall I forget you? Shall I forget you?
I am the mad poet first love
You never got over
You are my blue-eyed
Madonna virgin bride
I shall carve ‘MG loves BT’
On the bark of every
Wind-bent tree in
East End Park
2
The park itself will blossom
And...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Lee Masters
Your attention, Thomas Rhodes, president of the bank;
Coolbaugh Wedon, editor of the Argus;
Rev. Peet, pastor of the leading church;
A.D. Blood, several times Mayor of Spoon River;
And finally all of you, members of the Social Purity Club--
Your attention to Cambronne's dying words,
Standing with heroic remnant
Of Napoleon's guard on Mount Saint Jean
At the battle field of Waterloo,
When Maitland, the Englishman, called...Read more of this...
by
Percy Bysshe Shelley
I DREAM'D that as I wander'd by the way
Bare winter suddenly was changed to spring,
And gentle odours led my steps astray,
Mix'd with a sound of waters murmuring
Along a shelving bank of turf, which lay 5
Under a copse, and hardly dared to fling
Its green arms round the bosom of the stream,
But kiss'd it and...Read more of this...
by
William Stafford
Paw marks near one burrow show Graydigger
at home, I bend low, from down there swivel
my head, grasstop level--the world
goes on forever, the mountains a bigger
burrow, their snow like last winter. From a room
inside the world even the strongest wind
has a soft sound: a new house will hide
in the grass; footsteps are only the summer people.
The real estate agent is...Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
In the sweet spring a grassy bank I sought,
And thither wine, and a fair Houri brought;
And, though the people called me graceless dog,
Gave not to Paradise another thought!...Read more of this...
by
David Lehman
Don't walk away, Renee,
I'm just getting warmed up
your body is like a river
and I'm going to swim across
I want to explore the left
bank of you then the right
you're the only woman in
this room with a sunflower
in her hair and you take
forever in the bathroom
making me wait finally you
emerge with a bottle of beer
in one hand an ashtray in
the other...Read more of this...
by
Kathleen Raine
Wearing worry about money like a hair shirt
I lie down in my bed and wrestle with my angel.
My bank-manager could not sanction my continuance for another day
But life itself wakes me each morning, and love
Urges me to give although I have no money
In the bank at this moment, and ought properly
To cease to exist in a world where poverty
Is...Read more of this...
by
Sir Walter Scott
Oh! young Lochinvar is come out of the west,
Through all the wide Border his steed was the best;
And save his good broadsword he weapons had none.
He rode all unarmed and he rode all alone.
So faithful in love and so dauntless in war,
There never was knight like the young Lochinvar.
He stayed not for brake and he stopped not for stone,
He...Read more of this...
by
Rabindranath Tagore
I long to go over there to the further bank of the river.
Where those boats are tied to the bamboo poles in a line;
Where men cross over in their boats in the morning with
ploughs on their shoulders to till their far-away fields;
Where the cowherds make their lowing cattle swim across to the
riverside pasture;
Whence they all come back home in...Read more of this...
by
Langston Hughes
I went down to the river,
I set down on the bank.
I tried to think but couldn't,
So I jumped in and sank.
I came up once and hollered!
I came up twice and cried!
If that water hadn't a-been so cold
I might've sunk and died.
But it was Cold in that water! It was cold!
I took the elevator
Sixteen floors above the ground.
I thought...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
SPONTANEOUS me, Nature,
The loving day, the mounting sun, the friend I am happy with,
The arm of my friend hanging idly over my shoulder,
The hill-side whiten’d with blossoms of the mountain ash,
The same, late in autumn—the hues of red, yellow, drab, purple, and light and dark
green,
The rich coverlid of the grass—animals and birds—the private untrimm’d
...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
I much admire, I must admit,
The man who robs a Bank;
It takes a lot of guts and grit,
For lack of which I thank
The gods: a chap 'twould make of me
You wouldn't ask to tea.
I do not mean a burglar cove
Who climbs into a house,
From room to room flash-lit to rove
As quiet as a mouse;
Ah...Read more of this...
by
Seamus Heaney
Perch on their water perch hung in the clear Bann River
Near the clay bank in alder dapple and waver,
Perch they called ‘grunts’, little flood-slubs, runty and ready,
I saw and I see in the river’s glorified body
That is passable through, but they’re bluntly holding the
pass,
Under the water-roof, over the bottom, adoze
On the current, against it, all muscle and slur
In...Read more of this...
by
Mary Darby Robinson
FLOW soft RIVER, gently stray,
Still a silent waving tide
O'er thy glitt'ring carpet glide,
While I chaunt my ROUNDELAY,
As I gather from thy bank,
Shelter'd by the poplar dank,
King-cups, deck'd in golden pride,
Harebells sweet, and daisies pied;
While beneath the evening sky,
Soft the western breezes fly.
Gentle RIVER, should'st thou be
Touch'd with mournful...Read more of this...
by
Philip Larkin
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.
Up to then there'd only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.
Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite...Read more of this...
by
Patrick Kavanagh
Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal
Pouring redemption for me, that I do
The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal,
Grow with nature again as before I grew.
The bright stick trapped, the breeze adding a third
Party to the couple kissing on an old seat,
And a bird gathering materials for the nest for the Word
Eloquently new and...Read more of this...
by
William Carlos (WCW) Williams
Tracks of rain and light linger in
the spongy greens of a nature whose
flickering mountain—bulging nearer,
ebbing back into the sun
hollowing itself away to hold a lake,—
or brown stream rising and falling at the roadside, turning about,
churning itself white, drawing
green in over it,—plunging glassy funnels
fall—
And—the other world—
the windshield a blunt barrier:
Talk...Read more of this...
by
Vachel Lindsay
The whole world on a raft! A King is here,
The record of his grandeur but a smear.
Is it his deacon-beard, or old bald pate
That makes the band upon his whims to wait?
Loot and mud-honey have his soul defiled.
Quack, pig, and priest, he drives camp-meetings wild
Until they shower their pennies like spring rain
That he may preach upon the Spanish main.
What...Read more of this...
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