Famous Butter Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Butter poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous butter poems. These examples illustrate what a famous butter poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
See also:
by
James Whitcomb Riley
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock,
And you hear the kyouck and gobble of the struttin' turkey-cock,
And the clackin' of the guineys, and the cluckin' of the hens,
And the rooster's hallylooyer as he tiptoes on the fence;
O, it's then's the times a feller is a-feelin' at his best,
With the risin' sun to greet...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
I stood before a candy shop
Which with a Christmas radiance shone;
I saw my parents pass and stop
To grin at me and then go on.
The sweets were heaped in gleamy rows;
On each I feasted - what a game!
Against the glass with flatted nose,
Gulping my spittle as it came;
So still I stood, and stared and dreamed,
Savouring sweetness with my eyes,
Devouring dainties...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
Russell Edson
A woman prepared a mouse for her husband's dinner,
roasting it with a blueberry in its mouth.
At table he uses a dentist's pick and a surgeon's scalpel,
bending over the tiny roastling with a jeweler's loupe . . .
Twenty years of this: curried mouse, garlic and butter
mouse, mouse sauteed in its own fur, Salisbury mouse,
mouse-in-the-trap, baked in...Read more of this...
by
Carolyn Kizer
For Ann London
As you described your mastectomy in calm detail
and bared your chest so I might see
the puckered scar,
"They took a hatchet to your breast!" I said. "What an
Amazon you are."
When we were girls we climbed Mt. Tamalpais
chewing bay leaves we had plucked
along the way;
we got high all right, from animal pleasure in each other,
shouting to the sky.
On...Read more of this...
by
Jenny Joseph
When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandles, and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
I TOOK away three pictures.
One was a white gull forming a half-mile arch from the pines toward Waukegan.
One was a whistle in the little sandhills, a bird crying either to the sunset gone or the dusk come.
One was three spotted waterbirds, zigzagging, cutting scrolls and jags, writing a bird Sanscrit of wing points, half over the sand, half over...Read more of this...
by
Connie Wanek
Butter, like love,
seems common enough
yet has so many imitators.
I held a brick of it, heavy and cool,
and glimpsed what seemed like skin
beneath a corner of its wrap;
the decolletage revealed
a most attractive fat!
And most refined.
Not milk, not cream,
not even creme de la creme.
It was a delicacy which assured me
that bliss follows agitation,
that even pasture daisies
through the alchemy of four stomachs
may...Read more of this...
by
Amy Lowell
Bath
The day is fresh-washed and fair, and there is
a smell of tulips and narcissus
in the air.
The sunshine pours in at the bath-room window and
bores through the water
in the bath-tub in lathes and planes of greenish-white. It
cleaves the water
into flaws like a jewel, and cracks it to bright light.
Little spots of sunshine lie on the surface of...Read more of this...
by
Henry Van Dyke
I
Ah, who will tell me, in these leaden days,
Why the sweet Spring delays,
And where she hides, -- the dear desire
Of every heart that longs
For bloom, and fragrance, and the ruby fire
Of maple-buds along the misty hills,
And that immortal call which fills
The waiting wood with songs?
The snow-drops came so long ago,
It seemed that Spring...Read more of this...
by
Robert Herrick
First offer incense; then, thy field and meads
Shall smile and smell the better by thy beads.
The spangling dew dredged o'er the grass shall be
Turn'd all to mell and manna there for thee.
Butter of amber, cream, and wine, and oil,
Shall run as rivers all throughout thy soil.
Would'st thou to sincere silver turn thy mould?
--Pray once, twice pray; and turn thy...Read more of this...
by
John Crowe Ransom
Conrad, Conrad, aren't you old
To sit so late in your mouldy garden?
And I think Conrad knows it well,
Nursing his knees, too rheumy and cold
To warm the wraith of a Forest of Arden.
Neuralgia in the back of his neck,
His lungs filling with such miasma,
His feet dipping in leafage and muck:
Conrad! you've forgotten...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
THE RIVER is gold under a sunset of Illinois.
It is a molten gold someone pours and changes.
A woman mixing a wedding cake of butter and eggs
Knows what the sunset is pouring on the river here.
The river twists in a letter S.
A gold S now speaks to the Illinois sky....Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
[They picked him up in the grass where he had lain two
days in the rain with a piece of shrapnel in his lungs.]
COME to me only with playthings now. . .
A picture of a singing woman with blue eyes
Standing at a fence of hollyhocks, poppies and sunflowers. . .
Or an old man I remember sitting with children telling stories
Of...Read more of this...
by
Les Murray
It was built of things that must not mix:
paint, cream, and water, fire and dusty oil.
You heard the water dreaming in its large
kneed pipes, up from the weir. And the cordwood
our fathers cut for the furnace stood in walls
like the sleeper-stacks of a continental railway.
The cream arrived in lorried tides; its procession
crossed a platform of workers' stagecraft: Come here
Friday-Legs!...Read more of this...
by
Lewis Carroll
A short direction
To avoid dejection,
By variations
In occupations,
And prolongation
Of relaxation,
And combinations
Of recreations,
And disputation
On the state of the nation
In adaptation
To your station,
By invitations
To friends and relations,
By evitation
Of amputation,
By permutation
In conversation,
And deep reflection
You'll avoid dejection.
Learn well your grammar,
And never stammer,
Write well...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
IN the Shenandoah Valley, one rider gray and one rider blue, and the sun on the riders wondering.
Piled in the Shenandoah, riders blue and riders gray, piled with shovels, one and another, dust in the Shenandoah taking them quicker than mothers take children done with play.
The blue nobody remembers, the gray nobody remembers, it’s all old and old nowadays...Read more of this...
by
Kenneth Slessor
North Country, filled with gesturing wood,
With trees that fence, like archers' volleys,
The flanks of hidden valleys
Where nothing's left to hide
But verticals and perpendiculars,
Like rain gone wooden, fixed in falling,
Or fingers blindly feeling
For what nobody cares;
Or trunks of pewter, bangled by greedy death,
Stuck with black staghorns, quietly sucking,
And trees whose...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
I could have sold him up because
His rent was long past due;
And Grimes, my lawyer, said it was
The proper thing to do:
But how could I be so inhuman?
And me a gentle-woman.
Yet I am poor as chapel mouse,
Pinching to make ends meet,
And have to let my little house
To buy enough to eat:
Why, even now to...Read more of this...
by
Wang Wei
Farewell to the bushy clump close to the river
And the flags where the butter-bump hides in forever;
Farewell to the weedy nook, hemmed in by waters;
Farewell to the miller's brook and his three bonny daughters;
Farewell to them all while in prison I lie—
In the prison a thrall sees naught but the sky.
Shut out are the green fields and birds in...Read more of this...
by
Edward Lear
There was an Old Man of Calcutta,Who perpetually ate bread and butter;Till a great bit of muffin, on which he was stuffing,Choked that horrid Old Man of Calcutta. ...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
Frau Doktor,
Mama Brundig,
take out your contacts,
remove your wig.
I write for you.
I entertain.
But frogs come out
of the sky like rain.
Frogs arrive
With an ugly fury.
You are my judge.
You are my jury.
My guilts are what
we catalogue.
I'll take a knife
and chop up frog.
Frog has not nerves.
Frog is as old as a cockroach.
Frog is my father's genitals.
Frog is a malformed doorknob.
Frog is a soft...Read more of this...
by
Marge Piercy
Purple as tulips in May, mauve
into lush velvet, purple
as the stain blackberries leave
on the lips, on the hands,
the purple of ripe grapes
sunlit and warm as flesh.
Every day I will give you a color,
like a new flower in a bud vase
on your desk. Every day
I will paint you, as women
color...Read more of this...
by
Walter de la Mare
Over the fence, the dead settle in
for a journey. Nine o'clock.
You are alone for the first time
today. Boys asleep. Husband out.
A beer bottle sweats in your hand,
and sea lavender clogs the air
with perfume. Think of yourself.
Your arms rest with nothing to do
after weeks spent attending to others.
Your thoughts turn to whether
butter will last the week, how much
longer the car...Read more of this...
by
Robert Louis Stevenson
STILL I love to rhyme, and still more, rhyming, to wander
Far from the commoner way;
Old-time trills and falls by the brook-side still do I ponder,
Dreaming to-morrow to-day.
Come here, come, revive me, Sun-God, teach me, Apollo,
Measures descanted before;
Since I ancient verses, I emulous follow,
Prints in the marbles of yore.
Still strange, strange, they sound in old-young raiment invested,
Songs for the brain...Read more of this...
Dont forget to view our wonderful member Butter poems.