Famous Boulder Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Boulder poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous boulder poems. These examples illustrate what a famous boulder poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Robert William Service
Gold! We leapt from our benches. Gold! We sprang from our stools.
Gold! We wheeled in the furrow, fired with the faith of fools.
Fearless, unfound, unfitted, far from the night and the cold,
Heard we the clarion summons, followed the master-lure--Gold!
Men from the sands of the Sunland; men from the woods of the West;
Men from the farms and the cities, into...Read more of this...
by
Allen Ginsberg
To Struga Festival Golden Wreath Laureates
& International Bards 1986
Stand up against governments, against God.
Stay irresponsible.
Say only what we know & imagine.
Absolutes are coercion.
Change is absolute.
Ordinary mind includes eternal perceptions.
Observe what's vivid.
Notice what you notice.
Catch yourself thinking.
Vividness is self-selecting.
If we don't show anyone, we're free to write anything.
Remember the future.
Advise only yourself.
Don't drink yourself to death.
Two molecules clanking against...Read more of this...
by
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Cool is the wind, for the summer is waning,
Who 's for the road?
Sun-flecked and soft, where the dead leaves are raining,
Who 's for the road?
Knapsack and alpenstock press hand and shoulder,
Prick of the brier and roll of the boulder;[Pg 164]
This be your lot till the season grow older;
Who 's for the road?
Up and away in the hush of...Read more of this...
by
Robert Frost
"You ought to have seen what I saw on my way
To the village, through Mortenson's pasture to-day:
Blueberries as big as the end of your thumb,
Real sky-blue, and heavy, and ready to drum
In the cavernous pail of the first one to come!
And all ripe together, not some of them green
And some of them ripe!...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
1913
These are our regulations--
There's just one law for the Scout
And the first and the last, and the present and the past,
And the future and the perfect is "Look out!"
I, thou and he, look out!
We, ye and they, look out!
Though you didn't or you wouldn't
Or you hadn't or you couldn't;
You...Read more of this...
by
Rainer Maria Rilke
Encircled by her arms as by a shell,
she hears her being murmur,
while forever he endures
the outrage of his too pure image...
Wistfully following their example,
nature re-enters herself;
contemplating its own sap, the flower
becomes too soft, and the boulder hardens...
It's the return of all desire that enters
toward all life embracing itself from afar...
Where does it fall? Under the dwindling
surface, does it hope...Read more of this...
by
Allen Ginsberg
I
What new element before us unborn in nature? Is there
a new thing under the Sun?
At last inquisitive Whitman a modern epic, detonative,
Scientific theme
First penned unmindful by Doctor Seaborg with poison-
ous hand, named for Death's planet through the
sea beyond Uranus
whose chthonic ore fathers this magma-teared Lord of
Hades, Sire of avenging Furies, billionaire Hell-
...Read more of this...
by
Eamon Grennan
Looking for distinctive stones, I found the dead otter
rotting by the tideline, and carried all day the scent of this savage
valediction. That headlong high sound the oystercatcher makes
came echoing through the rocky cove
where a cormorant was feeding and submarining in the bay
and a heron rose off a boulder where he'd been invisible,
drifted a little, stood again -- a hieroglyph
or...Read more of this...
by
Eugene Field
Play that my knee was a calico mare
Saddled and bridled for Bumpville;
Leap to the back of this steed, if you dare,
And gallop away to Bumpville!
I hope you'll be sure to sit fast in your seat,
For this calico mare is prodigiously fleet,
And many adventures you're likely to meet
As you journey along to Bumpville.
This calico mare both gallops and trots
While whisking...Read more of this...
by
Robert Frost
Love and forgetting might have carried them
A little further up the mountain side
With night so near, but not much further up.
They must have halted soon in any case
With thoughts of a path back, how rough it was
With rock and washout, and unsafe in darkness;
When they were halted by a tumbled wall
With barbed-wire binding. They stood facing this,
Spending what onward...Read more of this...
by
James Wright
Deep into spring, winter is hanging on. Bitter and skillful in his
hopelessness, he stays alive in every shady place, starving along the
Mediterranean: angry to see the glittering sea-pale boulder alive
with lizards green as Judas leaves. Winter is hanging on. He still
believes. He tries to catch a lizard by the shoulder. One olive tree
below Grottaglie welcomes the winter into noontime...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
When I was a child
there was an old woman in our neighborhood whom we called The Witch.
All day she peered from her second story
window
from behind the wrinkled curtains
and sometimes she would open the window
and yell: Get out of my life!
She had hair like kelp
and a voice like a boulder.
I think of her sometimes now
and wonder if I am becoming...Read more of this...
by
Robinson Jeffers
To be an ape in little of the mountain-making mother
Like swarthy Cheops, but my own hands
For only slaves, is a far sweeter toil than to cut
Passions in verse for a sick people.
I'd liefer bed one boulder in the house-wall than be the time's
Archilochus: we name not Homer: who now
Can even imagine the fabulous dawn when bay-leaves (to a blind
Beggar)...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
Once, on a glittering ice-field, ages and ages ago,
Ung, a maker of pictures, fashioned an image of snow.
Fashioned the form of a tribesman -- gaily he whistled and sung,
Working the snow with his fingers. Read ye the Story of Ung!
Pleased was his tribe with that image -- came in their hundreds to scan --
Handled it, smelt it, and grunted:...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
Said President MacConnachie to Treasurer MacCall:
"We ought to have a piper for our next Saint Andrew's Ball.
Yon squakin' saxophone gives me the syncopated gripes.
I'm sick of jazz, I want to hear the skirling of the pipes."
"Alas! it's true," said Tam MacCall. "The young folk of to-day
Are fox-trot mad and dinna ken a reel from Strathspey.
Now, what we want's a...Read more of this...
by
A R Ammons
The drop seeps whole
from boulder-lichen
or ledge moss and drops,
joining, to trickle,
run, fall, dash,
sprawl in held deeps,
to rush shallows, spill
thin through heights,
but then, edging,
to eddy aside, nothing
of all but nothing's
curl of motion spent....Read more of this...
by
Jane Kenyon
There's just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.
And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Lee Masters
My thanks, friends of the County Scientific Association,
For this modest boulder,
And its little tablet of bronze.
Twice I tried to join your honored body,
And was rejected,
And when my little brochure
On the intelligence of plants
Began to attract attention
You almost voted me in.
After that I grew beyond the need of you
And your recognition.
Yet I do not reject your memorial stone,
Seeing that I...Read more of this...
by
Allen Ginsberg
I -- A Pleasant Afternoon
for Michael Brownstein and Dick Gallup
One day 3 poets and 60 ears sat under a green-striped Chau-
tauqua tent in Aurora
listening to Black spirituals, tapping their feet, appreciating
words singing by in mountain winds
on a pleasant sunny day of rest -- the wild wind blew thru
blue Heavens
filled with fluffy clouds stretched from Central...Read more of this...
by
Rg Gregory
i
i shall die yearning
a hand
reaching out to
a face that isn't there
a face
seeking a hand
a stone
leaving its mountain-
wall in a wind
anxious to be a bird
a bird
crying to be a wall
ii
north wales
the goat pisses
the hawk hangs
the mountain leans forward out of the mist
iii
on this hill
between the stone wind
and the wall of stones
i am a hollow
scooped out by the sun
my substance dropped
over...Read more of this...
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