Famous Banked Poems by Famous Poets

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

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An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow

...ts leave the Greek Club:
There's a fellow crying in Martin Place. They can't stop him.

The traffic in George Street is banked up for half a mile
and drained of motion. The crowds are edgy with talk
and more crowds come hurrying. Many run in the back streets
which minutes ago were busy main streets, pointing:
There's a fellow weeping down there. No one can stop him.

The man we surround, the man no one approaches
simply weeps, and does not cover it, weeps
not like a child, no...Read more of this...
by Murray, Les


Bridge Over The Aire Book 1

...ght

I wandered

The Parish Church’s

Stone lit by a

Hundred bulbs but

Its graveyard

Shifted aside.



Where are the banked

Stones of the dead?

Behind screens they raised

Their bones and counted

Their skulls and moved

Them in barrows.

The railway’s banks

Are buttressed with the

Moved memorial stones

The diggers wore sacking

Over their faces and

Burned their shovels.





8



Every garden and park

Is a hypothesis for God

When I hear a distant buzz

I cannot te...Read more of this...
by Tebb, Barry

Bridge Over The Aire Book 6

...leather

And clashing brass

Strident as Belshazzar’s

Feast, rich as yeast

On Auntie Nellie’s

Baking board, barrels

Banked on barrels

From the cooper’s yard.





13



Margaret, are you listening?

Are your eyes still distant

And dreaming? Can you hear

My voice in Eden?

My poems are all for you

The one who never knew

Silent and most generous

Muse, eternal primavera

Under the streetlamps

Of Leeds Nine.





14



Margaret, hold my hand

As we set out into the

La...Read more of this...
by Tebb, Barry

Cain and Abel

...n.
 (Koop-la! Come along! Co-hoe!)

And Cain he farmed by the river-side,
So he did not care how much it dried.

For he banked, and he sluiced, and he ditched and he led
 (And the Corn don't care for the Horn)--
A-half Euphrates out of her bed
 To water his dam' Corn!

But Abel herded out on the plains
Where you have to go by the dams and rains.

It happened, after a three-year drought,
The wells, and the springs, and the dams gave out.

The Herd-bulls came to Cain's new hous...Read more of this...
by Kipling, Rudyard

Casualty

...e habitual
Slow consolation
Of a dawdling engine,
The line lifted, hand
Over fist, cold sunshine
On the water, the land
Banked under fog: that morning
I was taken in his boat,
The screw purling, turning
Indolent fathoms white,
I tasted freedom with him.
To get out early, haul
Steadily off the bottom,
Dispraise the catch, and smile
As you find a rhythm
Working you, slow mile by mile,
Into your proper haunt
Somewhere, well out, beyond...

Dawn-sniffing revenant,
Plodder through...Read more of this...
by Heaney, Seamus


Colors Passing Through Us

..., as women 
color each other with henna 
on hands and on feet. 

Red as henna, as cinnamon, 
as coals after the fire is banked, 
the cardinal in the feeder, 
the roses tumbling on the arbor 
their weight bending the wood 
the red of the syrup I make from petals. 

Orange as the perfumed fruit 
hanging their globes on the glossy tree, 
orange as pumpkins in the field, 
orange as butterflyweed and the monarchs 
who come to eat it, orange as my 
cat running lithe through the hig...Read more of this...
by Piercy, Marge

I. The Witch of Coös

...be there.
The bulkhead double-doors were double-locked
And swollen tight and buried under snow.
The cellar windows were banked up with sawdust
And swollen tight and buried under snow.
It was the bones. I knew them -” and good reason.
My first impulse was to get to the knob
And hold the door. But the bones didn-™t try
The door; they halted helpless on the landing,
Waiting for things to happen in their favor.-
The faintest restless rustling ran all through them.
I never could ...Read more of this...
by Frost, Robert

Koening Of The River

...Well, even ghosts must rest.
If he knew he was lost he was not lost.
It was when you pretended that you were a fool.
He banked and leaned tiredly on the pole.
If I'm a character called Koenig, then I
shall dominate my future like a fiction
in which there is a real river and real sky,
so I'm not really tired, and should push on.

The lights between the leaves were beautiful,
and, as in that far life, now he was grateful
for any pool of light between the dull, usual
clouds of l...Read more of this...
by Walcott, Derek

Lines to a Don

...n in Iambic Verse
To fifty lines. I never cut;
I far prefer to end it--but
Believe me I shall soon return.
My fires are banked, but still they burn
To write some more about the Don
That dared attack my Chesterton....Read more of this...
by Belloc, Hilaire

Meditation By The Stove

...I have banked the fires
of my body
into a small but steady blaze
here in the kitchen
where the dough has a life of its own,
breathing under its damp cloth
like a sleeping child;
where the real child plays under the table,
pretending the tablecloth is a tent,
practicing departures; where a dim
brown bird dazzled by light
has flown into the windowpane
and lies stunne...Read more of this...
by Pastan, Linda

Paris

...


And looking out over the domes and towers 
That chime the fleeting quarters and the hours, 
While the bright clouds banked eastward back of them 
Blush in the sunset, pink as hawthorn flowers, 


You cannot fail to think, as I have done, 
Some of life's ends attained, so you be one 
Who measures life's attainment by the hours 
That Joy has rescued from oblivion. 

II 


Come out into the evening streets. The green light lessens in the west. 
The city laughs and liveliest ...Read more of this...
by Seeger, Alan

Snow

...d up balanced rations.
You can’t get too much winter in the winter.’
Those were his words. And he went home and all
But banked the daylight out of Avery’s windows.
Now you and I would go to no such length.
At the same time you can’t deny it makes
It not a mite worse, sitting here, we three,
Playing our fancy, to have the snowline run
So high across the pane outside. There where
There is a sort of tunnel in the frost
More like a tunnel than a hole—way down
At the far end of it...Read more of this...
by Frost, Robert

Street Cries

...he rabble of souls,' cried Sense,
`Did shrivel and turn and beg and burn,
Thrust back in the brimstone from above --
Is banked of violet, rose, and fern:'
`How?' quoth Love:

"`For lakes of pain, yon pleasant plain
Of woods and grass and yellow grain
Doth ravish the soul and sense:
And never a sigh beneath the sky,
And folk that smile and gaze above --'
`But saw'st thou here, with thine own eye,
Hell?' quoth Love.

"`I saw true hell with mine own eye,
True hell, or light hath...Read more of this...
by Lanier, Sidney

Sussex

...which we hold
 No more than Sussex weed;
Or south where windy Piddinghoe's
 Begilded dolphin veers,
And red beside wide-banked Ouse
 Lie down our Sussex steers.

So to the land our hearts we give
 Til the sure magic strike,
And Memory, Use, and Love make live
 Us and our fields alike --
That deeper than our speech and thought,
 Beyond our reason's sway,
Clay of the pit whence we were wrought
 Yearns to its fellow-clay.

God gives all men all earth to love,
 But, since man's h...Read more of this...
by Kipling, Rudyard

The Rhyme of the Three Sealers

...nd blue,
But three were down on the Baltic's deck and two of the Stralsund's crew.
An arm's-length out and overside the banked fog held them bound,
But, as they heard or groan or word, they fired at the sound.
For one cried out on the Name of God, and one to have him cease,
And the questing volley found them both and bade them hold their peace;
And one called out on a heathen joss and one on the Virgin's Name,
And the schooling bullet leaped across and showed them whence they...Read more of this...
by Kipling, Rudyard

The Rowers

...The banked oars fell an hundred strong,
 And backed and threshed and ground,
But bitter was the rowers' song
 As they brought the war-boat round.


They had no heart for the rally and roar
 That makes the whale-bath smoke --
When the great blades cleave and hold and leave
 As one on the racing stroke.


They sang:--What reckoning do you keep,
 And steer by what ...Read more of this...
by Kipling, Rudyard

This Beautiful Black Marriage

...Photograph negative
her black arm: a diving porpoise,
sprawled across the ice-banked pillow.
Head: a sheet of falling water.
Her legs: icicle branches breaking into light.

This woman, 
photographed sleeping.
The man,
making the photograph in the acid pan of his brain.
Sleep stain them both,
as if cloudy semen
rubbed shiningly over the surface
will be used to develop their images.

 on the desert
 the porpoises curl up,
 their skeleto...Read more of this...
by Wakoski, Diane

Those Winter Sundays

...
And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and...Read more of this...
by Hayden, Robert

Tomlinson

...in --
For I mind that I borrowed my neighbour's wife to sin the deadly sin."
The Devil he grinned behind the bars, and banked the fires high:
"Did ye read of that sin in a book?" said he; and Tomlinson said, "Ay!"
The Devil he blew upon his nails, and the little devils ran,
And he said: "Go husk this whimpering thief that comes in the guise of a man:
Winnow him out 'twixt star and star, and sieve his proper worth:
There's sore decline in Adam's line if this be spawn of earth...Read more of this...
by Kipling, Rudyard

Voyages

...low trees, clustered like bees. 
I counted the hours from noon to noon 
and got nowhere. At last the Captain slept. 
I banked the fire, raised anchor, cast off, 
and jumping ship left her drifting out 
on the black bay. I walked seven miles 
to the Interstate and caught a meat truck 
heading west, and came to over beer, 
hashbrowns, and fried eggs in a cafe 
northwest of Omaha. I could write 
how the radio spoke of war, how 
the century was half its age, how 
dark clouds gat...Read more of this...
by Levine, Philip

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