Famous Business Poems by Famous Poets

These are examples of famous Business poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous business poems. These examples illustrate what a famous business poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).

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The Rhyme Of The Remittance Man

by Robert William Service
 There's a four-pronged buck a-swinging in the shadow of my cabin,
 And it roamed the velvet valley till to-day;
But I tracked it by the river, and I trailed it in the cover,
 And I killed it on the mountain miles away.
Now I've had my lazy supper, and the level sun is gleaming
 On the water where the silver salmon...Read more of this...

Tam OShanter

by Robert Burns
 A Tale

"Of Brownyis and of Bogilis full is this Buke."
 —Gawin Douglas.

When chapman billies leave the street,
And drouthy neebors neebors meet,
As market-days are wearing late,
An' folk begin to tak' the gate;
While we sit bousing at the nappy,
An' getting fou and unco happy,
We think na on the lang Scots miles,
The mosses, waters, slaps, and stiles,
That lie between us and our...Read more of this...

The Liner Shes a Lady

by Rudyard Kipling
 The Liner she's a lady, an' she never looks nor 'eeds --
The Man-o'-War's 'er 'usband, an' 'e gives 'er all she needs;
But, oh, the little cargo-boats, that sail the wet seas roun',
They're just the same as you an' me a-plyin' up an' down!

 Plyin' up an' down, Jenny, 'angin' round the Yard,
 All the way by Fratton tram down...Read more of this...

A Grammarians Funeral

by Robert Browning
 SHORTLY AFTER THE REVIVAL OF
LEARNING IN EUROPE.

Let us begin and carry up this corpse,
Singing together.
Leave we the common crofts, the vulgar thorpes
Each in its tether
Sleeping safe on the bosom of the plain,
Cared-for till cock-crow:
Look out if yonder be not day again
Rimming the rock-row!
That's the appropriate country; there, man's thought,
Rarer, intenser,
Self-gathered for an outbreak, as it ought,
Chafes in the censer.
Leave...Read more of this...

The Owl And The Sparrow

by John Trumbull
 In elder days, in Saturn's prime,
Ere baldness seized the head of Time,
While truant Jove, in infant pride,
Play'd barefoot on Olympus' side,
Each thing on earth had power to chatter,
And spoke the mother tongue of nature.
Each stock or stone could prate and gabble,
Worse than ten labourers of Babel.
Along the street, perhaps you'd see
A Post disputing with a Tree,
And mid their arguments...Read more of this...

The World

by Katherine Philips
 Wee falsely think it due unto our friends,
That we should grieve for their too early ends:
He that surveys the world with serious eys,
And stripps Her from her grosse and weak disguise,
Shall find 'tis injury to mourn their fate;
He only dy's untimely who dy's Late.
For if 'twere told to children in the womb,
To what a stage of mischief they must...Read more of this...

Bombay

by John Matthew
 In your bosom we wake up with fear,
In your sky there’s only unending tears,
You always roar, but within,
Hangs silence like a shroud of death.

You are rocked, periodically, by bombs,
Yet, we go about our business,
As if nothing happened, all’s well,
Are we too dazed to protest?

In your hungry, convoluted entrails, 
Lie pauper and millionaire,
Separated only by the whimsy,
Of your very partial...Read more of this...

Resolution And Independence

by William Wordsworth
 I 

There was a roaring in the wind all night; 
The rain came heavily and fell in floods; 
But now the sun is rising calm and bright; 
The birds are singing in the distant woods; 
Over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods; 
The Jay makes answer as the Magpie chatters; 
And all the air is filled with pleasant...Read more of this...

Drum-Taps

by Walt Whitman
 1
FIRST, O songs, for a prelude, 
Lightly strike on the stretch’d tympanum, pride and joy in my city, 
How she led the rest to arms—how she gave the cue, 
How at once with lithe limbs, unwaiting a moment, she sprang; 
(O superb! O Manhattan, my own, my peerless!
O strongest you in the hour of danger, in crisis! O truer...Read more of this...

The Craftsman

by Rudyard Kipling
 Once, after long-drawn revel at The Mermaid,
He to the overbearing Boanerges
Jonson, uttered (if half of it were liquor,
 Blessed be the vintage!)

Saying how, at an alehouse under Cotswold,
He had made sure of his very Cleopatra,
Drunk with enormous, salvation-con temning
 Love for a tinker.

How, while he hid from Sir Thomas's keepers,
Crouched in a ditch and drenched by the midnight
Dews, he...Read more of this...

Tommy

by Rudyard Kipling
 I went into a public-'ouse to get a pint o' beer,
The publican 'e up an' sez, "We serve no red-coats here."
The girls be'ind the bar they laughed an' giggled fit to die,
I outs into the street again an' to myself sez I:
 O it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, go away";
 But it's "Thank you, Mister Atkins",...Read more of this...

Peter Anderson And Co

by Henry Lawson
 He had offices in Sydney, not so many years ago, 
And his shingle bore the legend `Peter Anderson and Co.', 
But his real name was Careless, as the fellows understood -- 
And his relatives decided that he wasn't any good. 
'Twas their gentle tongues that blasted any `character' he had -- 
He was fond of beer and leisure --...Read more of this...

Dream Song 2: Big Buttons Cornets: the advance

by John Berryman
 The jane is zoned! no nightspot here, no bar
there, no sweet freeway, and no premises
for business purposes,
no loiterers or needers. Henry are
baffled. Have ev'ybody head for Maine,
utility-man take a train?

Arrive a time when all coons lose dere grip,
but is he come? Le's do a hoedown, gal,
one blue, one shuffle,
if them is all you seem to réquire. Strip,
ol benger, skip...Read more of this...

Decalogue

by Ambrose Bierce
 Thou shalt no God but me adore:
'Twere too expensive to have more.

No images nor idols make
For Roger Ingersoll to break.

Take not God's name in vain: select
A time when it will have effect.

Work not on Sabbath days at all,
But go to see the teams play ball.

Honor thy parents. That creates
For life insurance lower rates.

Kill not, abet not those who kill;
Thou...Read more of this...

Since all man's business in this world of woe

by Omar Khayyam
Since all man's business in this world of woe
Is sorrow's pangs to feel, and grief to know,
Happy are they that never come at all,
And they that, having come, the soonest go!...Read more of this...

A Ballad upon a Wedding

by Sir John Suckling
 I tell thee, Dick, where I have been, 
Where I the rarest things have seen, 
O, things without compare! 
Such sights again cannot be found 
In any place on English ground, 
Be it at wake or fair.

At Charing Cross, hard by the way 
Where we, thou know'st, do sell our hay, 
There is a house with stairs; 
And there...Read more of this...

Business Girls

by John Betjeman
 From the geyser ventilators
Autumn winds are blowing down
On a thousand business women
Having baths in Camden Town

Waste pipes chuckle into runnels,
Steam's escaping here and there,
Morning trains through Camden cutting
Shake the Crescent and the Square.

Early nip of changeful autumn,
Dahlias glimpsed through garden doors,
At the back precarious bathrooms
Jutting out from upper floors;

And behind their frail partitions
Business women lie and soak,
Seeing through the...Read more of this...

Screw-Guns

by Rudyard Kipling
 Smokin' my pipe on the mountings, sniffin' the mornin' cool,
I walks in my old brown gaiters along o' my old brown mule,
With seventy gunners be'ind me, an' never a beggar forgets
It's only the pick of the Army that handles the dear little pets -- 'Tss! 'Tss!
 For you all love the screw-guns -- the screw-guns they all love you!
...Read more of this...

Meditations In Time Of Civil War

by William Butler Yeats
 I. Ancestral Houses

Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns,
Amid the rustle of his planted hills,
Life overflows without ambitious pains;
And rains down life until the basin spills,
And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains
As though to choose whatever shape it wills
And never stoop to a mechanical
Or servile shape, at others' beck and call.

Mere dreams, mere dreams! Yet Homer had...Read more of this...

On Don Surly

by Ben Jonson
XXVIII. ? ON DON SURLY.     Don SURLY, to aspire the glorious name  Of a great man, and to be thought the same, Makes serious use of all great trade he knows,  He speaks to men with a rhinocerote's nose, Which he thinks great ; and so reads verses too :  And that is done, as he saw...Read more of this...

The Ivy Crown

by William Carlos (WCW) Williams
 The whole process is a lie,
 unless,
 crowned by excess,
It break forcefully,
 one way or another,
 from its confinement—
or find a deeper well.
 Antony and Cleopatra
 were right;
they have shown
 the way. I love you
 or I do not live
at all.

Daffodil time
 is past. This is
 summer, summer!
the heart says,
 and not even the full of it.
 No doubts
are...Read more of this...

The Road to Hogans Gap

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 Now look, you see, it’s this way like, 
You cross the broken bridge 
And run the crick down till you strike 
The second right-hand ridge. 
The track is hard to see in parts, 
But still it’s pretty clear; 
There’s been two Injin hawkers’ carts 
Along that road this year. 

Well, run that right-hand ridge along— 
It ain’t, to say,...Read more of this...

Who dares to take this life from me Knows no better

by T Wignesan
for Eric Mottram

"Nur wenn das Herz erschlossen,

Dann ist die Erde schön."

Goethe.

I

An important thing in living
Is to know when to go;
He who does not know this
Has not far to go,
Though death may come and go
When you do not know.


Come, give me your hand,
Together shoulder and cheek to shoulder
We'll go, sour kana in cheeks
And in the mornings cherry sticks
To gum: the infectious...Read more of this...

To The Commissioners Of Northern Lights

by Robert Louis Stevenson
 I SEND to you, commissioners,
A paper that may please ye, sirs
(For troth they say it might be worse
An' I believe't)
And on your business lay my curse
Before I leav't.

I thocht I'd serve wi' you, sirs, yince,
But I've thocht better of it since;
The maitter I will nowise mince,
But tell ye true:
I'll service wi' some ither prince,
An' no wi' you.

I've no been...Read more of this...

The Dream

by George (Lord) Byron
 I

Our life is twofold; Sleep hath its own world,
A boundary between the things misnamed
Death and existence: Sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality,
And dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy;
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,
They take a weight from off waking toils,
They do divide our being;...Read more of this...

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