Famous Builder Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Builder poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous builder poems. These examples illustrate what a famous builder poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Burns, Robert
...a maid.—R. B. [back]
Note 7. When the corn is in a doubtful state, by being too green or wet, the stack-builder, by means of old timber, etc., makes a large apartment in his stack, with an opening in the side which is fairest exposed to the wind: this he calls a “fause-house.”—R. B. [back]
Note 8. Burning the nuts is a favorite charm. They name the lad and lass to each particular nut, as they lay them in the fire; and according as they ...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Robert
...same self, same love, same God: ay, what was, shall be.
Therefore to whom turn I but to thee, the ineffable Name?
Builder and maker, thou, of houses not made with hands!
What, have fear of change from thee who art ever the same?
Doubt that thy power can fill the heart that thy power expands?
There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;
The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound;
What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Robert
...rly wont:
'Tis John in the Desert, I surmise,
But has borne the weather's brunt---
XIX.
Not from the fault of the builder, though,
For a pent-house properly projects
Where three carved beams make a certain show,
Dating---good thought of our architect's---
'Five, six, nine, he lets you know.
XX.
And all day long a bird sings there,
And a stray sheep drinks at the pond at times;
The place is silent and aware;
It has had its scenes, its joys and crimes,
But that ...Read more of this...
by
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
...o shines on all;
Him radiant, sharpest-sighted god
None can bewilder;
Whose eyes pierce
The Universe,
Path-finder, road-builder,
Mediator, royal giver,
Rightly-seeing, rightly-seen,
Of joyful and transparent mien.
'Tis a sparkle passing
From each to each, from me to thee,
Perpetually,
Sharing all, daring all,
Levelling, misplacing
Each obstruction, it unites
Equals remote, and seeming opposites.
And ever and forever Love
Delights to build a road;
Unheeded Danger near ...Read more of this...
by
Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...t first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.
His rhythm was present in the nursery b...Read more of this...
by
Hughes, Langston
...Dream nourished in common,
Keep your hand on the plow! Hold on!
If the house is not yet finished,
Don't be discouraged, builder!
If the fight is not yet won,
Don't be weary, soldier!
The plan and the pattern is here,
Woven from the beginning
Into the warp and woof of America:
ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL.
NO MAN IS GOOD ENOUGH
TO GOVERN ANOTHER MAN
WITHOUT HIS CONSENT.
BETTER DIE FREE,
THAN TO LIVE SLAVES.
Who said those things? Americans!
Who owns those words?...Read more of this...
by
Auden, Wystan Hugh (W H)
...br> One rational voice is dumb. Over his gravethe household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved:sad is Eros, builder of cities,and weeping anarchic Aphrodite....Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...tness—such are some of the words of poems.
The sailor and traveler underlie the maker of poems, the answerer;
The builder, geometer, chemist, anatomist, phrenologist, artist—all these underlie
the
maker of
poems, the answerer.
The words of the true poems give you more than poems,
They give you to form for yourself, poems, religions, politics, war, peace, behavior,
histories,
essays, romances, and everything else,
They balance ranks, colors, races, creeds, a...Read more of this...
by
Smart, Christopher
...Urchin, who took up his parable and provided himself for the adversary to kick against the pricks.
Let Boaz, the Builder of Judah, bless with the Rat, which dwelleth in hardship and peril, that they may look to themselves and keep their houses in order.
Let Obed-Edom with a Dormouse praise the Name of the Lord God his Guest for increase of his store and for peace.
Let Abishai bless with the Hyaena -- the terror of the Lord, and the fierceness, of his wrath ...Read more of this...
by
Smart, Christopher
...chon rejoice with Parcas who is a serpent more innocent than others.
Let Lapidoth with Percnos -- the Lord is the builder of the wall of CHINA -- REJOICE.
Let Ahinoam rejoice with Prester -- The seed of the woman hath bruised the serpents head.
Let Phurah rejoice with Penelopes, the servant of Gideon with the fowl of the brook.
Let Jether, the son of Gideon, rejoice with Ecchetae which are musical grashoppers.
Let Hushai rejoice with the Ospray w...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...amer Alice May that sailed the Yukon foam.
And touched in every river camp from Dawson down to Nome.
It was her builder, owner, pilot, Captain Silas Geer,
Who took her through the angry ice, the last boat of the year;
Who patched her cracks with gunny sacks and wound her pipes with wire,
And cut the spruce upon the banks to feed her boiler fire;
Who headed her into the stream and bucked its mighty flow,
And nosed her up the little creeks where no one else would go;
Wh...Read more of this...
by
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
...edulous, through the granite seeming
Seest the smile of Reason beaming;
Can thy style-discerning eye
The hidden-working Builder spy,
Who builds, yet makes no chips, no din,
With hammer soft as snow-flake's flight;
Knowest thou this?
O pilgrim, wandering not amiss!
Already my rocks lie light,
And soon my cone will spin.
For the world was built in order,
And the atoms march in tune,
Rhyme the pipe, and time the warder,
Cannot forget the sun, the moon.
Orb and atom forth...Read more of this...
by
Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...y motes of prejudice
Between you and the man who made the dust.
Call him a genius or a gentleman,
A prophet or a builder, or what not,
But hold your disposition off the balance,
And weigh him in the light. Once (I believe
I tell you nothing new to your surmise,
Or to the tongues of towns and villages)
I nourished with an adolescent fancy—
Surely forgivable to you, my friend—
An innocent and amiable conviction
That I was, by the grace of honest fortune,
A sav...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...I envy not those gay galoots
Who count on dying in their boots;
For that, to tell the sober truth
Sould be the privilege of youth;
But aged bones are better sped
To heaven from a downy bed.
So prop me up with pillows two,
And serve me with the barley brew;
And put a pencil in my hand,
A copy book at my command;
And let my final effort be
To ring a rhy...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...lazing fire at night, the sweet taste of supper, the talk, the bed of hemlock boughs,
and
the
bear-skin;
—The house-builder at work in cities or anywhere,
The preparatory jointing, squaring, sawing, mortising,
The hoist-up of beams, the push of them in their places, laying them regular,
Setting the studs by their tenons in the mortises, according as they were prepared,
The blows of mallets and hammers, the attitudes of the men, their curv’d limbs,
Bending, standing, a...Read more of this...
by
Schiller, Friedrich von
...the law!
Bliss-dowered! O daughter of the skies,
Hail, holy order, whose employ
Blends like to like in light and joy--
Builder of cities, who of old
Called the wild man from waste and wold.
And, in his hut thy presence stealing,
Roused each familiar household feeling;
And, best of all the happy ties,
The centre of the social band,--
The instinct of the Fatherland!
United thus--each helping each,
Brisk work the countless hands forever;
For naught its power to strength ca...Read more of this...
by
Clare, John
...re,
What scarcely seem materials, down and hair ;
For from men's haunts she nothing seems to win.
Yet Nature is the builder, and contrives
Homes for her children's comfort, even here ;
Where Solitude's disciples spend their lives
Unseen, save when a wanderer passes near
That loves such pleasant places. Deep adown,
The nest is made a hermit's mossy cell.
Snug lie her curious eggs in number five,
Of deadened green, or rather olive brown ;
And the old prickly thorn-b...Read more of this...
by
Hugo, Victor
...ng shaped—are baking in the sun.
THE THIRD SPHINX.
Equal to archangel, for one short while,
Was Nimroud, builder of tall Babel's pile.
His sceptre reached across the space between
The sites where Sol to rise and set is seen.
Baal made him terrible to all alike,
The greatest cow'ring when he rose to strike.
Unbelief had shown in ev'ry eye,
Had any dared to say: "Nimroud will die!"
He lived and ruled, but is—at this time, where?
Winds blow...Read more of this...
by
Lindsay, Vachel
...l past in their pride.
The roofs now are clouds and storms that they ride.
And there with the huntsmen of mound-builder days
Through jungle and meadow I stride.
And the Tiger Tree leaf is falling around
As it fell when the world began:
Like a monstrous tiger-skin, stretched on the ground,
Or the cloak of a medicine man.
A deep-crumpled gossamer web,
Fringed with the fangs of a snake.
The wind swirls it down from the leperous boughs.
It shimmers on clay...Read more of this...
by
Harrison, Tony
...mi mam says, almost killed 'er.
Death after life on t'dole won't seem as 'ard!
Look at this ****, Wordsworth, organ builder,
This fucking 'aberdasher Appleyard!
If mi mam's up there, don't want to meet 'er
listening to me list mi dirty deeds,
and 'ave to pipe up to St fucking Peter
ah've been on t'dole all mi life in fucking Leeds!
Then t'Alleluias stick in t'angels' gobs.
When dole-wallahs **** off to the void
What'll t'mason carve up for their jobs?
The cunts who ...Read more of this...
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