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Best Famous Repetition Poems

Here is a collection of the all-time best famous Repetition poems. This is a select list of the best famous Repetition poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Repetition poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of repetition poems.

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Written by Robert Pinsky | Create an image from this poem

Impossible To Tell

 to Robert Hass and in memory of Elliot Gilbert


Slow dulcimer, gavotte and bow, in autumn,
Bashõ and his friends go out to view the moon;
In summer, gasoline rainbow in the gutter,

The secret courtesy that courses like ichor
Through the old form of the rude, full-scale joke,
Impossible to tell in writing. "Bashõ"

He named himself, "Banana Tree": banana
After the plant some grateful students gave him,
Maybe in appreciation of his guidance

Threading a long night through the rules and channels
Of their collaborative linking-poem
Scored in their teacher's heart: live, rigid, fluid

Like passages etched in a microscopic cicuit.
Elliot had in his memory so many jokes
They seemed to breed like microbes in a culture

Inside his brain, one so much making another
It was impossible to tell them all:
In the court-culture of jokes, a top banana.

Imagine a court of one: the queen a young mother,
Unhappy, alone all day with her firstborn child
And her new baby in a squalid apartment

Of too few rooms, a different race from her neighbors.
She tells the child she's going to kill herself.
She broods, she rages. Hoping to distract her,

The child cuts capers, he sings, he does imitations
Of different people in the building, he jokes,
He feels if he keeps her alive until the father

Gets home from work, they'll be okay till morning.
It's laughter versus the bedroom and the pills.
What is he in his efforts but a courtier?

Impossible to tell his whole delusion.
In the first months when I had moved back East
From California and had to leave a message

On Bob's machine, I used to make a habit
Of telling the tape a joke; and part-way through,
I would pretend that I forgot the punchline,

Or make believe that I was interrupted--
As though he'd be so eager to hear the end
He'd have to call me back. The joke was Elliot's,

More often than not. The doctors made the blunder
That killed him some time later that same year.
One day when I got home I found a message

On my machine from Bob. He had a story
About two rabbis, one of them tall, one short,
One day while walking along the street together

They see the corpse of a Chinese man before them,
And Bob said, sorry, he forgot the rest.
Of course he thought that his joke was a dummy,

Impossible to tell--a dead-end challenge.
But here it is, as Elliot told it to me:
The dead man's widow came to the rabbis weeping,

Begging them, if they could, to resurrect him.
Shocked, the tall rabbi said absolutely not.
But the short rabbi told her to bring the body

Into the study house, and ordered the shutters
Closed so the room was night-dark. Then he prayed
Over the body, chanting a secret blessing

Out of Kabala. "Arise and breathe," he shouted;
But nothing happened. The body lay still. So then
The little rabbi called for hundreds of candles

And danced around the body, chanting and praying
In Hebrew, then Yiddish, then Aramaic. He prayed
In Turkish and Egyptian and Old Galician

For nearly three hours, leaping about the coffin
In the candlelight so that his tiny black shoes
Seemed not to touch the floor. With one last prayer

Sobbed in the Spanish of before the Inquisition
He stopped, exhausted, and looked in the dead man's face.
Panting, he raised both arms in a mystic gesture

And said, "Arise and breathe!" And still the body
Lay as before. Impossible to tell
In words how Elliot's eyebrows flailed and snorted

Like shaggy mammoths as--the Chinese widow
Granting permission--the little rabbi sang
The blessing for performing a circumcision

And removed the dead man's foreskin, chanting blessings
In Finnish and Swahili, and bathed the corpse
From head to foot, and with a final prayer

In Babylonian, gasping with exhaustion,
He seized the dead man's head and kissed the lips
And dropped it again and leaping back commanded,

"Arise and breathe!" The corpse lay still as ever.
At this, as when Bashõ's disciples wind
Along the curving spine that links the renga

Across the different voices, each one adding
A transformation according to the rules
Of stasis and repetition, all in order

And yet impossible to tell beforehand,
Elliot changes for the punchline: the wee
Rabbi, still panting, like a startled boxer,

Looks at the dead one, then up at all those watching,
A kind of Mel Brooks gesture: "Hoo boy!" he says,
"Now that's what I call really dead." O mortal

Powers and princes of earth, and you immortal
Lords of the underground and afterlife,
Jehovah, Raa, Bol-Morah, Hecate, Pluto,

What has a brilliant, living soul to do with
Your harps and fires and boats, your bric-a-brac
And troughs of smoking blood? Provincial stinkers,

Our languages don't touch you, you're like that mother
Whose small child entertained her to beg her life.
Possibly he grew up to be the tall rabbi,

The one who washed his hands of all those capers
Right at the outset. Or maybe he became
The author of these lines, a one-man renga

The one for whom it seems to be impossible
To tell a story straight. It was a routine
Procedure. When it was finished the physicians

Told Sandra and the kids it had succeeded,
But Elliot wouldn't wake up for maybe an hour,
They should go eat. The two of them loved to bicker

In a way that on his side went back to Yiddish,
On Sandra's to some Sicilian dialect.
He used to scold her endlessly for smoking.

When she got back from dinner with their children
The doctors had to tell them about the mistake.
Oh swirling petals, falling leaves! The movement

Of linking renga coursing from moment to moment
Is meaning, Bob says in his Haiku book.
Oh swirling petals, all living things are contingent,

Falling leaves, and transient, and they suffer.
But the Universal is the goal of jokes,
Especially certain ethnic jokes, which taper

Down through the swirling funnel of tongues and gestures
Toward their preposterous Ithaca. There's one
A journalist told me. He heard it while a hero

Of the South African freedom movement was speaking
To elderly Jews. The speaker's own right arm
Had been blown off by right-wing letter-bombers.

He told his listeners they had to cast their ballots
For the ANC--a group the old Jews feared
As "in with the Arabs." But they started weeping

As the old one-armed fighter told them their country
Needed them to vote for what was right, their vote
Could make a country their children could return to

From London and Chicago. The moved old people
Applauded wildly, and the speaker's friend
Whispered to the journalist, "It's the Belgian Army

Joke come to life." I wish I could tell it
To Elliot. In the Belgian Army, the feud
Between the Flemings and Walloons grew vicious,

So out of hand the army could barely function.
Finally one commander assembled his men
In one great room, to deal with things directly.

They stood before him at attention. "All Flemings,"
He ordered, "to the left wall." Half the men
Clustered to the left. "Now all Walloons," he ordered,

"Move to the right." An equal number crowded
Against the right wall. Only one man remained
At attention in the middle: "What are you, soldier?"

Saluting, the man said, "Sir, I am a Belgian."
"Why, that's astonishing, Corporal--what's your name?"
Saluting again, "Rabinowitz," he answered:

A joke that seems at first to be a story
About the Jews. But as the renga describes
Religious meaning by moving in drifting petals

And brittle leaves that touch and die and suffer
The changing winds that riffle the gutter swirl,
So in the joke, just under the raucous music

Of Fleming, Jew, Walloon, a courtly allegiance
Moves to the dulcimer, gavotte and bow,
Over the banana tree the moon in autumn--

Allegiance to a state impossible to tell.


Written by Robert Frost | Create an image from this poem

Devotion

 The heart can think of no devotion
Greater than being shore to the ocean--
Holding the curve of one position,
Counting an endless repetition.
Written by Maya Angelou | Create an image from this poem

Momma Welfare Roll

 Her arms semaphore fat triangles,
Pudgy HANDS bunched on layered hips
Where bones idle under years of fatback
And lima beans.

Her jowls shiver in accusation
Of crimes cliched by Repetition. 
Her children, strangers
To childhood's TOYS, play
Best the games of darkened doorways,
Rooftop tag, and know the slick feel of
Other people's property.

Too fat to whore,
Too mad to work,
Searches her dreams for the
Lucky sign and walks bare-handed
Into a den of bereaucrats for her portion.

'They don't give me welfare.
I take it.'
Written by Marge Piercy | Create an image from this poem

Visiting a Dead Man on a Summer Day

 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 swims dappled with leaf shadow, 
sketched light arch within arch 
delicate as fingernail moons. 

The green doors should not be locked. 
Doors of fern and flower should not be shut. 
Louis Sullivan, I sit on your grave. 
It is not now good weather for prophets.
Sun eddies on the steelsmoke air like sinking honey. 

On the inner green door of the Getty tomb 
(a thighbone's throw from your stone) 
a marvel of growing, blooming, thrusting into seed: 
how all living wreathe and insinuate 
in the circlet of repetition that never repeats: 
ever new birth never rebirth. 
Each tide pool microcosm spiraling from your hand. 

Sullivan, you had another five years 
when your society would give you work. 
Thirty years with want crackling in your hands. 
Thirty after years with cities 
flowering and turning grey in your beard. 

All poets are unemployed nowadays. 
My country marches in its sleep. 
The past structures a heavy mausoleum 
hiding its iron frame in masonry. 
Men burn like grass 
while armies grow. 

Thirty years in the vast rumbling gut 
of this society you stormed 
to be used, screamed 
no louder than any other breaking voice. 
The waste of a good man 
bleeds the future that's come 
in Chicago, in flat America, 
where the poor still bleed from the teeth, 
housed in sewers and filing cabinets, 
where prophets may spit into the wind 
till anger sleets their eyes shut, 
where this house that dances the seasons 
and the braid of all living 
and the joy of a man making his new good thing 
is strange, irrelevant as a meteor, 
in Chicago, in flat America 
in this year of our burning.
Written by Robert Lowell | Create an image from this poem

Homecoming

What was is...since 1930;
The boys in my old gang
are senior partners. They start up
bald like baby birds
to embrace retirement.

At the altar of surrender 
I met you
in the hour of credulity.
How your misfortune came our clearly
to us at twenty.

At the gingerbread casino 
how innocent the nights we made it.
on our Vesuvio martinis
with no vermouth but vodka
to sweeten the dry gin-

the lash across my face
that night we adored...
soon every night and all 
when your sweet amorous
repetition changed.


Written by Adrienne Rich | Create an image from this poem

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

 My swirling wants. Your frozen lips.
The grammar turned and attacked me.
Themes, written under duress.
Emptiness of the notations.

They gave me a drug that slowed the healing of wounds.

I want you to see this before I leave:
the experience of repetition as death
the failure of criticism to locate the pain
the poster in the bus that said:
my bleeding is under control

A red plant in a cemetary of plastic wreaths.

A last attempt: the language is a dialect called metaphor.
These images go unglossed: hair, glacier, flashlight.
When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time.
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
I could say: those mountains have a meaning
but further than that I could not say.

To do something very common, in my own way.
Written by Lewis Carroll | Create an image from this poem

Fit the Fifth ( Hunting of the Snark )

 The Beaver's Lesson 

They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care; 
They pursued it with forks and hope; 
They threatened its life with a railway-share; 
They charmed it with smiles and soap. 

Then the Butcher contrived an ingenious plan 
For making a separate sally; 
And fixed on a spot unfrequented by man, 
A dismal and desolate valley. 


But the very same plan to the Beaver occurred: 
It had chosen the very same place: 
Yet neither betrayed, by a sign or a word, 
The disgust that appeared in his face. 

Each thought he was thinking of nothing but "Snark" 
And the glorious work of the day; 
And each tried to pretend that he did not remark 
That the other was going that way. 

But the valley grew narrow and narrower still, 
And the evening got darker and colder, 
Till (merely from nervousness, not from goodwill) 
They marched along shoulder to shoulder. 

Then a scream, shrill and high, rent the shuddering sky, 
And they knew that some danger was near: 
The Beaver turned pale to the tip of its tail, 
And even the Butcher felt *****. 

He thought of his childhood, left far far behind-- 
That blissful and innocent state-- 
The sound so exactly recalled to his mind 
A pencil that squeaks on a slate! 


"'Tis the voice of the Jubjub!" he suddenly cried. 
(This man, that they used to call "Dunce.") 
"As the Bellman would tell you," he added with pride, 
"I have uttered that sentiment once. 

"'Tis the note of the Jubjub! Keep count, I entreat; 
You will find I have told it you twice. 
'Tis the song of the Jubjub! The proof is complete, 
If only I've stated it thrice." 

The Beaver had counted with scrupulous care, 
Attending to every word: 
But it fairly lost heart, and outgrabe in despair, 
When the third repetition occurred. 

It felt that, in spite of all possible pains, 
It had somehow contrived to lose count, 
And the only thing now was to rack its poor brains 
By reckoning up the amount. 

"Two added to one--if that could but be done," 
It said, "with one's fingers and thumbs!" 
Recollecting with tears how, in earlier years, 
It had taken no pains with its sums. 

"The thing can be done," said the Butcher, "I think. 
The thing must be done, I am sure. 
The thing shall be done! Bring me paper and ink, 
The best there is time to procure." 

The Beaver brought paper,portfolio, pens, 
And ink in unfailing supplies: 
While strange creepy creatures came out of their dens, 
And watched them with wondering eyes. 

So engrossed was the Butcher, he heeded them not, 
As he wrote with a pen in each hand, 
And explained all the while in a popular style 
Which the Beaver could well understand. 

"Taking Three as the subject to reason about-- 
A convenient number to state-- 
We add Seven, and Ten, and then multiply out 
By One Thousand diminished by Eight. 


"The result we proceed to divide, as you see, 
By Nine Hundred and Ninety Two: 
Then subtract Seventeen, and the answer must be 
Exactly and perfectly true. 

"The method employed I would gladly explain, 
While I have it so clear in my head, 
If I had but the time and you had but the brain-- 
But much yet remains to be said. 

"In one moment I've seen what has hitherto been 
Enveloped in absolute mystery, 
And without extra charge I will give you at large 
A Lesson in Natural History." 

In his genial way he proceeded to say 
(Forgetting all laws of propriety, 
And that giving instruction, without introduction, 
Would have caused quite a thrill in Society), 

"As to temper the Jubjub's a desperate bird, 
Since it lives in perpetual passion: 
Its taste in costume is entirely absurd-- 
It is ages ahead of the fashion: 

"But it knows any friend it has met once before: 
It never will look at a bride: 
And in charity-meetings it stands at the door, 
And collects--though it does not subscribe. 

" Its flavor when cooked is more exquisite far 
Than mutton, or oysters, or eggs: 
(Some think it keeps best in an ivory jar, 
And some, in mahogany kegs) 

"You boil it in sawdust: you salt it in glue: 
You condense it with locusts and tape: 
Still keeping one principal object in view-- 
To preserve its symmetrical shape." 

The Butcher would gladly have talked till next day, 
But he felt that the lesson must end, 
And he wept with delight in attempting to say 
He considered the Beaver his friend. 

While the Beaver confessed, with affectionate looks 
More eloquent even than tears, 
It had learned in ten minutes far more than all books 
Would have taught it in seventy years. 

They returned hand-in-hand, and the Bellman, unmanned 
(For a moment) with noble emotion, 
Said "This amply repays all the wearisome days 
We have spent on the billowy ocean!" 

Such friends, as the Beaver and Butcher became, 
Have seldom if ever been known; 
In winter or summer, 'twas always the same-- 
You could never meet either alone. 

And when quarrels arose--as one frequently finds 
Quarrels will, spite of every endeavor-- 
The song of the Jubjub recurred to their minds, 
And cemented their friendship for ever!
Written by Dylan Thomas | Create an image from this poem

I Have Longed To Move Away

 I have longed to move away
From the hissing of the spent lie
And the old terrors' continual cry
Growing more terrible as the day
Goes over the hill into the deep sea;
I have longed to move away
From the repetition of salutes,
For there are ghosts in the air
And ghostly echoes on paper,
And the thunder of calls and notes.

I have longed to move away but am afraid;
Some life, yet unspent, might explode
Out of the old lie burning on the ground,
And, crackling into the air, leave me half-blind.
Neither by night's ancient fear,
The parting of hat from hair,
Pursed lips at the receiver,
Shall I fall to death's feather.
By these I would not care to die,
Half convention and half lie.
Written by Les Murray | Create an image from this poem

Poetry And Religion

 Religions are poems. They concert
our daylight and dreaming mind, our
emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture

into the only whole thinking: poetry.
Nothing's said till it's dreamed out in words
and nothing's true that figures in words only.

A poem, compared with an arrayed religion,
may be like a soldier's one short marriage night
to die and live by. But that is a small religion. 

Full religion is the large poem in loving repetition;
like any poem, it must be inexhaustible and complete
with turns where we ask Now why did the poet do that?

You can't pray a lie, said Huckleberry Finn;
you can't poe one either. It is the same mirror:
mobile, glancing, we call it poetry,

fixed centrally, we call it a religion,
and God is the poetry caught in any religion,
caught, not imprisoned. Caught as in a mirror

that he attracted, being in the world as poetry
is in the poem, a law against its closure.
There'll always be religion around while there is poetry

or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent,
as the action of those birds - crested pigeon, rosella parrot -
who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut.
Written by Emily Dickinson | Create an image from this poem

Tell as a Marksman -- were forgotten

 Tell as a Marksman -- were forgotten
Tell -- this Day endures
Ruddy as that coeval Apple
The Tradition bears --

Fresh as Mankind that humble story
Though a statelier Tale
Grown in the Repetition hoary
Scarcely would prevail --

Tell had a son -- The ones that knew it
Need not linger here --
Those who did not to Human Nature
Will subscribe a Tear --

Tell would not bare his Head
In Presence
Of the Ducal Hat --
Threatened for that with Death -- by Gessler --
Tyranny bethought

Make of his only Boy a Target
That surpasses Death --
Stolid to Love's supreme entreaty
Not forsook of Faith --

Mercy of the Almighty begging --
Tell his Arrow sent --
God it is said replies in Person
When the cry is meant --

Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry