Famous Box Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Box poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous box poems. These examples illustrate what a famous box poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Vasko Popa
Sing little box
Don't let sleep overtake you
The world's awake within you
In your four-sided emptiness
We turn distance into nearness
Forgetfulness into memory
Don't let your nails come loose
For the very first time
We watch sights beyond this world
Through your keyhole
Turn your key in our mouths
Swallow words and numbers
Out of your song
Don't let your lid fly open
Your bottom drop
Sing little box...Read more of this...
by
Vasko Popa
Don't box down to the little box
Which supposedly contains everything
Your star and all other stars
Empty yourself
In her emptiness
Take two nails out of her
And give them to the owners
To eat
Make a hold in her middle
And stick on your clapper
Fill her with blueprints
And the skin of her craftsmen
And trample on her with both feet
Tie her to a cat's tail
And chase the...Read more of this...
by
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Dey was oncet a awful quoil 'twixt de skillet an' de pot;
De pot was des a-bilin' an' de skillet sho' was hot.
Dey slurred each othah's colah an' dey called each othah names,[Pg 269]
Wile de coal-oil can des gu-gled, po'in oil erpon de flames.
De pot, hit called de skillet des a flat, disfiggered t'ing,
An' de skillet 'plied dat all...Read more of this...
by
Conrad Aiken
Well,—it was two days after my husband died—
Two days! And the earth still raw above him.
And I was sweeping the carpet in their hall.
In number four—the room with the red wall-paper—
Some chorus girls and men were singing that song
'They'll soon be lighting candles
Round a box with silver handles'—and hearing them sing it
I started to cry. Just then he came...Read more of this...
by
Langston Hughes
I could take the Harlem night
and wrap around you,
Take the neon lights and make a crown,
Take the Lenox Avenue busses,
Taxis, subways,
And for your love song tone their rumble down.
Take Harlem's heartbeat,
Make a drumbeat,
Put it on a record, let it whirl,
And while we listen to it play,
Dance with you till day--
Dance with you, my sweet brown Harlem girl....Read more of this...
by
Delmore Schwartz
Remember midsummer: the fragrance of box, of white
roses
And of phlox. And upon a honeysuckle branch
Three snails hanging with infinite delicacy
-- Clinging like tendril, flake and thread, as self-tormented
And self-delighted as any ballerina,
just as in the orchard,
Near the apple trees, in the over-grown grasses
Drunken wasps clung to over-ripe pears
Which had fallen: swollen and disfigured.
For now it is...Read more of this...
by
Vasko Popa
We'll return the little box
Into the arms
Of her inconspicuously honest properties
We won't do anything
Against her will
We'll simply take her apart
We'll crucify her
On her own cross
Piece her bloated emptiness
And let ooze
All the blue cosmic blood she gathered
We'll sweet her clean of stars
And anti-stars
And everything else that rots inside her
We won't make her suffer
We'll simply put her together again
We'll give back...Read more of this...
by
Vasko Popa
Open little box
We kiss your bottom and cover
Keyhole and key
The whole world lies crumpted in you
It resembles everything
Except itself
Not even your clear-sky mother
Would recognize it anymore
The rust will eat your key
Our world and us there inside
And finally you too
We kiss your four sides
And four corners
And twenty-four nails
And anything else you have
Open little box...Read more of this...
by
Vasko Popa
Not even in a dream
Should you have anything to do
With the little box
If you saw her full of stars once
You'd wake up
Without heart or soul in your chest
If you slid your tongue
Into her keyhole once
You'd wake up with a hole in your forehead
If you ground her to bits once
Between your teeth
You'd get up with a square head
If you ever...Read more of this...
by
Vasko Popa
Don't open the little box
Heaven's hat will fall out of her
Don't close her for any reason
She'll bite the trouser-leg of eternity
Don't drop her on the earth
The sun's eggs will break inside her
Don't throw her in the air
Earth's bones will break inside her
Don't hold her in your hands
The dough of the...Read more of this...
by
Vasko Popa
Throw into the little box
A stone
You'll take out a bird
Throw in your shadow
You'll take out the shirt of happiness
Throw in your father's root
You'll take out the axle of the universe
The little box works for you
Throw into the little box
A mouse
You'll take out a quaking hill
Throw in your head
You'll take out two
The little box works for you...Read more of this...
by
Sylvia Plath
I ordered this, clean wood box
Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift.
I would say it was the coffin of a midget
Or a square baby
Were there not such a din in it.
The box is locked, it is dangerous.
I have to live with it overnight
And I can't keep away from it.
There...Read more of this...
by
Randall Jarrell
Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All,
I take a box
And add it to my wild rice, my Cornish game hens.
The slacked or shorted, basketed, identical
Food-gathering flocks
Are selves I overlook. Wisdom, said William James,
Is learning what to overlook. And I am wise
If that is wisdom.
Yet somehow, as I buy All from these shelves
And the boy takes it to...Read more of this...
by
D. H. Lawrence
At the open door of the room I stand and look at the night,
Hold my hand to catch the raindrops, that slant into sight,
Arriving grey from the darkness above suddenly into the light of the room.
I will escape from the hollow room, the box of light,
And be out in the bewildering darkness, which is always fecund, which might
Mate...Read more of this...
by
Seamus Heaney
I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbors drove me home.
In the porch I met my father crying--
He had always taken funerals in his stride--
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.
The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was...Read more of this...
by
Vasko Popa
to Karl Max Ostojic
Why do you stare at the little box
That in her emptiness
Holds the whole world
If the little box holds
The world in her emptiness
Then the antiworld
Holds the little box in its antihand
Who'll bite off the antiworld's antihand
And on that hand
Five hundred antifingers
Do you believe
You'll bite it off...Read more of this...
by
Jane Kenyon
We lie back to back. Curtains
lift and fall,
like the chest of someone sleeping.
Wind moves the leaves of the box elder;
they show their light undersides,
turning all at once
like a school of fish.
Suddenly I understand that I am happy.
For months this feeling
has been coming closer, stopping
for short visits, like a timid suitor....Read more of this...
by
John Betjeman
Across the wet November night
The church is bright with candlelight
And waiting Evensong.
A single bell with plaintive strokes
Pleads louder than the stirring oaks
The leafless lanes along.
It calls the hoirboys from their tea
And villagers, the two or three,
Damp down the kitchen fire,
Let out the cat, and up the lane
Go paddling through the gentle rain
Of misty Oxfordshire.
How warm the many candles shine
Of...Read more of this...
by
Vasko Popa
The little box which contains the world
Fell in love with herself
And conceived
Still another little box
The little box of the little box
Also fell in love with herself
And conceived
Still another little box
And so it went on forever
The world from the little box
Ought to be inside
The last offspring of the little box
But not one of the little boxes
Inside the little box in...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
A-sitttin' on a cracker box an' spittin' in the stove,
I took a sudden notion that I'd kindo' like to rove;
An' so I bought a ticket, jest as easy as could be,
From Pumpkinville in Idaho to Rome in Italy;
An' found myself in seven days of mostly atmosphere
A-starin' at a statoo called Appoller Belvydeer.
Now I'm a rum-soaked sinner, an' religion ain't...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
In Ebon Box, when years have flown
To reverently peer,
Wiping away the velvet dust
Summers have sprinkled there!
To hold a letter to the light --
Grown Tawny now, with time --
To con the faded syllables
That quickened us like Wine!
Perhaps a Flower's shrivelled check
Among its stores to find --
Plucked far away, some morning --
By gallant -- mouldering hand!
A curl, perhaps, from foreheads
Our Constancy...Read more of this...
by
Vasko Popa
The little box gets her first teeth
And her little length
Little width little emptiness
And all the rest she has
The little box continues growing
The cupboard that she was inside
Is now inside her
And she grows bigger bigger bigger
Now the room is inside her
And the house and the city and the earth
And the...Read more of this...
by
Rg Gregory
the policeman on the streets
found christmas in a box
tipped it down a manhole
it wasn't wearing socks
a little old lady nearby -
the poor sod's done no harm
she got hit with a truncheon
for spreading false alarm
the policeman then went home
pleased his job was done
called for his christmas dinner
but dinner there was none
his wife with the lodger
his children gone for good
he...Read more of this...
by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
THIS box, mine own sweet darling, thou wilt find
With many a varied sweetmeat's form supplied;
The fruits are they of holy Christmas tide,
But baked indeed, for children's use design'd.
I'd fain, in speeches sweet with skill combin'd,
Poetic sweetmeats for the feast provide;
But why in such frivolities confide?
Perish the thought, with flattery to blind!
One sweet thing there is still, that from within,
Within...Read more of this...
by
Vasko Popa
Line the inside of the little box
With your precious skin
And make yourself cozy
Just as you would in your own home
Make space voyages inside her
Gather stars make time squirt its milk
And sleep in the clouds
Just don't go around pretending
You're more important than her length
And wiser than her width
If you do...Read more of this...
Dont forget to view our wonderful member Box poems.