Famous Bug Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Bug poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous bug poems. These examples illustrate what a famous bug poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...eeding the "praste" cried aloud in his haste,
"Come out and be christened, you divil!"
But he lay there as snug as a bug in a rug,
And his parents in vain might reprove him,
Till his reverence spoke (he was fond of a joke)
"I've a notion," says he, "that'll move him."
"Poke a stick up the log, give the spalpeen a prog;
Poke him aisy—don't hurt him or maim him,
'Tis not long that he'll stand, I've the water at hand,
As he rushes out this end I'll name him.
"Here he ...Read more of this...
by
Paterson, Andrew Barton
...umped higher and higher, black as
stone—
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass....Read more of this...
by
Stevens, Wallace
...knifes his lug off
all spirits then succumb to fear
depression takes the gloss off wonder
and people (lost) tell god to bug off
the twentieth century drowns in sheer
excuse that life is comic blunder
temporality dons its gear
forbidden thought soon rips its gag off
stained glass (you think) must be bystander
its leaded eyes seek far not near
the day's bleak dirt it learns to shrug off
(ii)
the history of the race confuses
heady spirit with bloody need
nothing can stop the s...Read more of this...
by
Gregory, Rg
...mes a flower
became submerged with us. A million years
went by. A hundred. Swarm of hoverflies,
cockroach, assassin bug, all
trapped, suspended
in that moment of fullness,
a Pompeii, the mother
covering her child's head forever....Read more of this...
by
Flynn, Nick
...eeding the `praste' cried aloud in his haste,
`Come out and be christened, you divil!'
But he lay there as snug as a bug in a rug,
And his parents in vain might reprove him,
Till his reverence spoke (he was fond of a joke)
`I've a notion,' says he, `that'll move him.'
`Poke a stick up the log, give the spalpeen a prog;
Poke him aisy -- don't hurt him or maim him,
'Tis not long that he'll stand, I've the water at hand,
As he rushes out this end I'll name him.
`Her...Read more of this...
by
Paterson, Andrew Barton
...ner strictly masculine.
They would not know, or want to know,
More than what they saw of him,
Nor would they wish to bug the bone
Walls of skull and listen in
To whatever whisperings
Pittered quietly in that dark:
An excellent place to sip your gin.
Then---sting of interruption! voice
Pierced the private walls and shook
His thoughtful calm with delicate shock.
A waiter, with white napkin face
And shining toe-cap hair, excused
The oiled intrusion, asking if
His n...Read more of this...
by
Scannell, Vernon
...d:
back from wherever, with it said.
Hit a high long note, for a lover found
needing a lower into friendlier ground
to bug among worms no more
around um jungles where ah blurt 'What for?'
Weeds, too, he favoured as most men don't favour men.
The Garden Master's gone....Read more of this...
by
Berryman, John
...curd of ass's milk?
Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel?
Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?"
Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings,
This painted child of dirt that stinks and stings;
Whose buzz the witty and the fair annoys,
Yet wit ne'er tastes, and beauty ne'r enjoys,
So well-bred spaniels civilly delight
In mumbling of the game they dare not bite.
Eternal smiles his emptiness betray,
As shallow streams run dimpling all the way.
Whether in florid impotence he spe...Read more of this...
by
Pope, Alexander
...ne,
the flat-fisted dream
of stars and dew
formed when he walked
with his telescope
through grasses spotted
by the spit bug.
A raucous noise,
the dawn of great beauty
and he with his tripod
matting the grasses as he walked.
I never saw him dead
on a bed of white down.
Never heard past
the death rattle,
and so, for me, he lives
there in the ragged, noxious weeds
that make up North America.
He with his freely creeping root system,
milk-juiced,
the most persistent
of all my...Read more of this...
by
Skillman, Judith
...; they march their black feathers past a blue pool; they celebrate an old festival.
A spider is trying his webs, a pink bug sits on my hand washing his forelegs.
I might ask: Who are these people?...Read more of this...
by
Sandburg, Carl
...Parade these generals forth to fight.
No more each British colonel runs
From whizzing beetles, as air-guns;
Thinks horn-bugs bullets, or thro' fears
Muskitoes takes for musketeers;
Nor scapes, as if you'd gain'd supplies,
From Beelzebub's whole host of flies.
No bug these warlike hearts appalls;
They better know the sound of balls.
I hear the din of battle bray;
The trump of horror marks its way.
I see afar the sack of cities,
The gallows strung with Whig-committees;
Your mod...Read more of this...
by
Trumbull, John
...n low hut my monarch found.
He was no eagle and no earl,
Alas! my foundling was a churl,
With heart of cat, and eyes of bug,
Dull victim of his pipe and mug;
Woe is me for my hopes' downfall!
Lord! is yon squalid peasant all
That this proud nursery could breed
For God's vicegerency and stead?
Time out of mind this forge of ores,
Quarry of spars in mountain pores,
Old cradle, hunting ground, and bier
Of wolf and otter, bear, and deer;
Well-built abode of many a race;
Tower of ...Read more of this...
by
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
...took to be a voice: a man
Was something I would never hear.
He faces his second winter in the Sierra
A hard brown bug, maybe a beetle,
Packing a ball of sparrow **** --
What shall I call it?
**** beetle? Why's it pushing here
At this great height in the thin air
With its ridiculous waddle
Up the hard side of Hard Luck Hill?
And the furred thing that frightened me --
Bobcat, coyote, wild dog --
Flat eyes in winter bush, stiff tail
Holding his ground,...Read more of this...
by
Levine, Philip
...over the wharf or levee;
As the woolly-pates hoe in the sugar-field, the overseer views them from his
saddle;
The bugle calls in the ball-room, the gentlemen run for their partners, the
dancers bow to each other;
The youth lies awake in the cedar-roof’d garret, and harks to the musical
rain;
The Wolverine sets traps on the creek that helps fill the Huron;
The squaw, wrapt in her yellow-hemm’d cloth, is offering moccasins and
bead-bags for sale;
The connoiss...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...is: their Lenin is a waxen, show-case SHAM.
Such was the yarn he handed me,
Down there in Casey's Bar,
That Rooshun bug with the scrambled mug
From the land of the Commissar.
It may be true, I leave it you
To figger out how far....Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...I objurgate the centipede,
A bug we do not really need.
At sleepy-time he beats a path
Straight to the bedroom or the bath.
You always wallop where he's not,
Or, if he is, he makes a spot....Read more of this...
by
Nash, Ogden
...d the praying mantis?
From outer space, or lost Atlantis?
glimpse the grin, green metal mug
at masks the pseudo-saintly bug,
Orthopterous, also carnivorous,
And faintly whisper, Lord deliver us....Read more of this...
by
Nash, Ogden
...e and hunger, faint and die,
Were made majestic then and magnified
By sight so clearly purged and deified.
The smallest bug that crawls was taller than
A tree, the mustard seed loomed like a man.
The earth that writhes eternally with pain
Of birth, and woe of taking back her slain,
Laid bare her teeming bosom to my sight,
And all was struggle, gasping breath, and fight.
A blind worm here dug tunnels to the light,
And there a seed, racked with heroic pain,
Thrust eager tentacl...Read more of this...
by
Cullen, Countee
...)
getting his kicks out of the death call,
would understand.
The insomniac
listening to his heart
thumping like a June bug,
listening on his transistor
to Long John Nebel arguing from New York,
lying on his bed like a stone table,
would understand.
The night nurse
with her eyes slit like Venetian blinds,
she of the tubes and the plasma,
listening to the heart monitor,
the death cricket bleeping,
she who calls you "we"
and keeps vigil like a ballistic missile,
would understa...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...ng for the doctors.
I like a man that's got nerve and can pull off a great
original performance, but you--you're only a bug-
house peddler of second-hand gospel--you're only
shoving out a phoney imitation of the goods this
Jesus wanted free as air and sunlight.
You tell people living in shanties Jesus is going to fix it
up all right with them by giving them mansions in
the skies after they're dead and the worms have
eaten 'em.
You tell $6 a week department store girls all th...Read more of this...
by
Sandburg, Carl
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