Famous Beard Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Beard poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous beard poems. These examples illustrate what a famous beard poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Lew Welch
Not yet 40, my beard is already white.
Not yet awake, my eyes are puffy and red,
like a child who has cried too much.
What is more disagreeable
than last night's wine?
I'll shave.
I'll stick my head in the cold spring and
look around at the pebbles.
Maybe I can eat a can of peaches.
Then I can finish the rest of the wine,
write poems 'til...Read more of this...
by
Oscar Wilde
I.
O goat-foot God of Arcady!
This modern world is grey and old,
And what remains to us of thee?
No more the shepherd lads in glee
Throw apples at thy wattled fold,
O goat-foot God of Arcady!
Nor through the laurels can one see
Thy soft brown limbs, thy beard of gold
And what remains to us of thee?
And dull and dead our Thames would be,
For here...Read more of this...
by
David Lehman
for Jim Cummins
In Iowa, Jim dreamed that Della Street was Anne Sexton's
twin. Dave drew a comic strip called the "Adventures of Whitman,"
about a bearded beer-guzzler in Superman uniform. Donna dressed
like Wallace Stevens
in a seersucker summer suit. To town came Ted Berrigan,
saying, "My idea of a bad poet is Marvin Bell."
But no one has...Read more of this...
by
Edward Lear
There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, "It is just as I feared! --
Two Owls and a Hen, four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard....Read more of this...
by
Edward Lear
There was an Old Man with a beard,Who sat on a Horse when he reared;But they said, "Never mind! you will fall off behind,You propitious Old Man with a beard!" ...Read more of this...
by
Andrew Barton Paterson
'Twas Driver Smith of Battery A was anxious to see a fight;
He thought of the Transvaal all the day, he thought of it all the night --
"Well, if the battery's left behind, I'll go to the war," says he,
"I'll go a-driving and ambulance in the ranks of the A.M.C.
"I'm fairly sick of these here parades...Read more of this...
by
Donald Hall
The clock of my days winds down.
The cat eats sparrows outside my window.
Once, she brought me a small rabbit
which we devoured together, under
the Empire Table
while the men shrieked
repossessing the gold umbrella.
Now the beard on my clock turns white.
My cat stares into dark corners
missing her gold umbrella.
She is in love
with the Alligator Bride.
Ah, the tiny fine white
teeth! The Bride, propped...Read more of this...
by
John Clare
The wild duck startles like a sudden thought,
And heron slow as if it might be caught.
The flopping crows on weary wings go by
And grey beard jackdaws noising as they fly.
The crowds of starnels whizz and hurry by,
And darken like a clod the evening sky.
The larks like thunder rise and suthy round,
Then drop and nestle in the stubble ground.
The wild...Read more of this...
by
William Topaz McGonagall
Edward Teach was a native of Bristol, and sailed from that port
On board a privateer, in search of sport,
As one of the crew, during the French War in that station,
And for personal courage he soon gained his Captain's approbation.
'Twas in the spring of 1717, Captajn Harnigold and Teach sailed from Providence
For the continent of America, and no further...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
Of course you've heard of the Nancy Lee, and how she sailed away
On her famous quest of the Arctic flea, to the wilds of Hudson's Bay?
For it was a foreign Prince's whim to collect this tiny cuss,
And a golden quid was no more to him than a copper to coves like us.
So we sailed away and our hearts were...Read more of this...
by
Siegfried Sassoon
You like my bird-sung gardens: wings and flowers;
Calm landscapes for emotion; star-lit lawns;
And Youth against the sun-rise ... ‘Not profound;
‘But such a haunting music in the sound:
‘Do it once more; it helps us to forget’.
Last night I dreamt an old recurring scene—
Some complex out of childhood; (sex, of course!)
I can’t remember how the...Read more of this...
by
Henry Lawson
Tall and freckled and sandy,
Face of a country lout;
This was the picture of Andy,
Middleton's Rouseabout.
Type of a coming nation,
In the land of cattle and sheep,
Worked on Middleton's station,
'Pound a week and his keep.'
On Middleton's wide dominions
Plied the stockwhip and shears;
Hadn't any opinions,
Hadn't any 'idears'.
Swiftly the years went over,
Liquor and drought prevailed;
Middleton went as a drover,
After his...Read more of this...
by
Edward Lear
There was an Old Man with a beard,Who said, "It is just as I feared!—Two Owls and a Hen, four Larks and a Wren,Have all built their nests in my beard." ...Read more of this...
by
Rg Gregory
now pay attention
(said the teacher)
and look up here
the children looked up
this is william shakespeare
four centuries up
on a pedestal
was shakespeare's head
he was what we call
a great man
the children got sore necks
looking up
and some began to look down
no no
you mustn't look down
(said the teacher)
apart from winston churchill
shakespeare was the greatest
englishman who ever lived
the children's eyes
drained to their feet
and their minds
played around...Read more of this...
by
Stephen Crane
Friend, your white beard sweeps the ground.
Why do you stand, expectant?
Do you hope to see it
In one of your withered days?
With your old eyes
Do you hope to see
The triumphal march of justice?
Do not wait, friend!
Take your white beard
And your old eyes
To more tender lands....Read more of this...
by
Sylvia Plath
The black bull bellowed before the sea.
The sea, till that day orderly,
Hove up against Bendylaw.
The queen in the mulberry arbor stared
Stiff as a queen on a playing card.
The king fingered his beard.
A blue sea, four horny bull-feet,
A bull-snouted sea that wouldn't stay put,
Bucked at the garden gate.
Along box-lined walks in the florid sun
Toward the rowdy bellow and back again
The...Read more of this...
by
Peter Orlovsky
A rainbow comes pouring into my window, I am electrified.
Songs burst from my breast, all my crying stops, mistory fills
the air.
I look for my shues under my bed.
A fat colored woman becomes my mother.
I have no false teeth yet. Suddenly ten children sit on my lap.
I grow a beard in one day....Read more of this...
by
Henry Van Dyke
I
LEGEND
Long ago Apollo called to Aristæus,
youngest of the shepherds,
Saying, "I will make you keeper of my bees."
Golden were the hives, and golden was the honey;
golden, too, the music,
Where the honey-makers hummed among the trees.
Happy Aristæus loitered in the garden, wandered
in the orchard,
Careless and contented, indolent and free;
Lightly took his labour, lightly took his...Read more of this...
by
Robert Burns
NO Spartan tube, no Attic shell,
No lyre Æolian I awake;
’Tis liberty’s bold note I swell,
Thy harp, Columbia, let me take!
See gathering thousands, while I sing,
A broken chain exulting bring,
And dash it in a tyrant’s face,
And dare him to his very beard,
And tell him he no more is feared—
No more the despot of Columbia’s race!
A tyrant’s...Read more of this...
by
Wallace Stevens
After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.
If the rejected things, the things denied,
Slid over the western cataract, yet one,
One only, one thing that was firm, even
No greater than a cricket's horn, no more
Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech
Of the...Read more of this...
by
John Clare
Up this green woodland-ride let's softly rove,
And list the nightingale— she dwells just here.
Hush ! let the wood-gate softly clap, for fear
The noise might drive her from her home of love ;
For here I've heard her many a merry year—
At morn, at eve, nay, all the live-long day,
As though she lived on song. This very spot,
Just where that old-man's-beard...Read more of this...
by
William Topaz McGonagall
A pathetic tragedy I will relate,
Concerning poor Fred. Marsden's fate,
Who suffocated himself by the fumes of gas,
On the 18th of May, and in the year of 1888, alas!
Fred. Marsden was a playwright, the theatrical world knows,
And was highly esteemed by the people, and had very few foes;
And in New York, in his bedroom, he took his life away,
And...Read more of this...
by
Aleister Crowley
I
The cloud my bed is tinged with blood and foam.
The vault yet blazes with the sun
Writhing above the West, brave hippodrome
Whose gladiators shock and shun
As the blue night devours them, crested comb
Of sleep's dead sea
That eats the shores of life, rings round eternity!
II
So, he is gone whose giant sword shed flame
Into my bowels; my blood's bewitched;
My brain's afloat with...Read more of this...
by
William Strode
Looke how the russet morne exceeds the night,
How sleekest Jett yields to the di'monds light,
So farr the glory of the gray-bright eye
Out-vyes the black in lovely majesty.
A morning mantl'd with a fleece of gray
Laughs from her brow and shewes a spotlesse day:
This di'mond-like doth not his lustre owe
To borrowed helpe, as black thinges cast a show,
It needs noe day...Read more of this...
by
Marge Piercy
In flat America, in Chicago,
Graceland cemetery on the German North Side.
Forty feet of Corinthian candle
celebrate Pullman embedded
lonely raisin in a cake of concrete.
The Potter Palmers float
in an island parthenon.
Barons of hogfat, railroads and wheat
are postmarked with angels and lambs.
But the Getty tomb: white, snow patterned
in a triangle of trees...Read more of this...
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