Famous Barnyard Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Barnyard poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous barnyard poems. These examples illustrate what a famous barnyard poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Burns, Robert
...ding to the priority of placing the “runts,” the names in question.—R. B. [back]
Note 6. They go to the barnyard, and pull each, at three different times, a stalk of oats. If the third stalk wants the “top-pickle,” that is, the grain at the top of the stalk, the party in question will come to the marriage-bed anything but a maid.—R. B. [back]
Note 7. When the corn is in a doubtful state, by being too green or wet, the stack-builder, by mean...Read more of this...
by
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
...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 us,
We can make our lives sublime,
And when roasted, leave behind us,
Hen tracks on the sands of time.
Hen tracks that perhaps another
Chicken drooping in the rain,
Some forlorn and henpecked brother,
When he sees, shall crow again....Read more of this...
by
Knight, Etheridge
...aid my daddy chopped cotton
And he drank his liquor straight.
When I left that Sunday morning
He was leaning on the barnyard gate.
Left my mama standing
With the sun shining in her eyes.
Left her standing in the yard
With the sun shining in her eyes.
And I headed North
As straight as the Wild Goose Flies,
I been to Detroit & Chicago
Been to New York city too.
I been to Detroit & Chicago
Been to New York city too.
Said I done strolled all those funky av...Read more of this...
by
Bishop, Elizabeth
...ead.
But sometimes mornings after drinking bouts
(he hid the pints behind the two-by-fours),
the sunrise glazed the barnyard mud with red
the burning puddles seemed to reassure.
And then he thought he almost might endure
his exile yet another year or more.
But evenings the first star came to warn.
The farmer whom he worked for came at dark
to shut the cows and horses in the barn
beneath their overhanging clouds of hay,
with pitchforks, faint forked lightnings...Read more of this...
by
Butler, Ellis Parker
...Whene’er I feed the barnyard folk
My gentle soul is vexed;
My sensibilities are torn
And I am sore perplexed.
The rooster so politely stands
While waiting for his food,
But when I feed him, what a change!
He then is rough and rude.
He crowds his gentle wives aside
Or pecks them on the head;
Sometimes I think it would be best
If he were never fed.
And so I o...Read more of this...
by
Kilmer, Joyce
...t on his shining arm.
He bears a sword of flame but not to harm
The wakened life that feels his quickening sway
And barnyard voices shrilling "It is day!"
Take by his grace a new and alien charm.
But in the city, like a wounded thing
That limps to cover from the angry chase,
He steals down streets where sickly arc-lights sing,
And wanly mock his young and shameful face;
And tiny gongs with cruel fervor ring
In many a high and dreary sleeping place....Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...When I was daft (as urchins are),
And full if fairy lore,
I aimed an arrow at a star
And hit - the barnyard door.
I've shot at heaps of stars since then,
but always it's the same -
A barnyard door has mocked me when
Uranus was my aim.
So, I'll shoot starward as of yore,
Though wide my arrows fall;
I'd rather hit a big barn door
Then never aim at all....Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...e food rack gave it place;
It ate and ate, it preened a bit,
By way way of gratitude and grace.
It parleyed with my barnyard cock,
Then resolutely winged away;
But I am fey in feather talk,
And this is what I heard it say:
"I know that you and all your tribe
Are shielded warm and fenced from fear;
With food and comfort you would bribe
My weary wings to linger here.
An outlaw scarred and leather-lean,
I battle with the winds of woe:
You think me scaly and unclean....Read more of this...
by
Masters, Edgar Lee
...this morning?
Be chivalric, heroic, or aspiring,
Metaphysical, religious, or rebellious,
You shall never get out of the barnyard
Except by way of over the fence
Mixed with potato peelings and such into the trough!...Read more of this...
by
Plath, Sylvia
...for heckling,
About to be
Glorified for prime flesh and golden crackling
In a parsley halo;
Nor even one of the common barnyard sows,
Mire-smirched, blowzy,
Maunching thistle and knotweed on her snout-
cruise--
Bloat tun of milk
On the move, hedged by a litter of feat-foot ninnies
Shrilling her hulk
To halt for a swig at the pink teats. No. This vast
Brobdingnag bulk
Of a sow lounged belly-bedded on that black
compost,
Fat-rutted eyes
Dream-filmed. What a visi...Read more of this...
by
Sandburg, Carl
...d in the sun.
A gray village flecks by and the horses hitched in front of the post-office never blink an eye.
A barnyard and fifteen Holstein cows, dabs of white on a black wall map, never blink an eye.
A signalman in a tower, the outpost of Kansas City, keeps his place at a window with the serenity of a bronze statue on a dark night when lovers pass whispering....Read more of this...
by
Plath, Sylvia
...d, and properly jointed.
Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles
Proceed from your great lips.
It's worse than a barnyard.
Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,
Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.
Thirty years now I have labored
To dredge the silt from your throat.
I am none the wiser.
Scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails of Lysol
I crawl like an ant in mourning
Over the weedy acres of your brow
To mend the immense skull-pla...Read more of this...
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