Famous Carrying Out Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Wherein Obscurely

by Charles Simic
 On the road with billowing poplars,
In a country flat and desolate
To the far-off gray horizon, wherein obscurely,
A man and a woman went on foot,

Each carrying a small suitcase.
They were tired and had taken off
Their shoes and were walking on
Their toes, staring straight ahead.

Every time a car passed fast,
As they're wont to on such a stretch of
Road, empty as the...Read more of this...

The Hog The Sheep And Goat Carrying To A FAIR

by Anne Kingsmill Finch
 Who does not wish, ever to judge aright, 
And, in the Course of Life's Affairs, 
To have a quick, and far extended Sight, 
Tho' it too often multiplies his Cares? 
And who has greater Sense, but greater Sorrow shares? 

This felt the Swine, now carrying to the Knife; 
And whilst the Lamb and silent Goat 
In the same fatal...Read more of this...

Good and Evil XXII

by Kahlil Gibran
 And one of the elders of the city said, "Speak to us of Good and Evil." 

And he answered: 

Of the good in you I can speak, but not of the evil. 

For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst? 

Verily when good is hungry it seeks food even in dark caves, and when...Read more of this...

The happy household

by Eugene Field
 It's when the birds go piping and the daylight slowly breaks,
That, clamoring for his dinner, our precious baby wakes;
Then it's sleep no more for baby, and it's sleep no more for me,
For, when he wants his dinner, why it's dinner it must be!
And of that lacteal fluid he partakes with great ado,
While gran'ma laughs,
And gran'pa laughs,
And wife, she laughs,
And...Read more of this...

Mummys Curse

by Charles Simic
 Befriending an eccentric young woman
The sole resident of a secluded Victorian mansion.
She takes long walks in the evening rain,
And so do I, with my hair full of dead leaves.

In her former life, she was an opera singer.
She remembers the rich Neapolitan pastries,
Points to a bit of fresh whipped cream
Still left in the corner of her lower lip,
Tells me she...Read more of this...

The Earth Turned to Bring Us Closer

by Eugenio Montejo
The earth turned to bring us closer,
it spun on itself and within us,
and finally joined us together in this dream
as written in the Symposium.
Nights passed by, snowfalls and solstices;
time passed in minutes and millennia.
An ox cart that was on its way to Nineveh
arrived in Nebraska.
A rooster was singing some distance from the world,
in one of the thousand pre-lives of our...Read more of this...

The Neighbor

by Marge Piercy
 Man stomping over my bed in boots 
carrying a large bronze church bell 
which you occasionally drop: 
gross man with iron heels 
who drags coffins to and fro at four in the morning, 
who hammers on scaffolding all night long, 
who entertains sumo wrestlers and fat acrobats--
I pass you on the steps, we smile and nod. 
Rage swells in...Read more of this...

The Old Women

by Arthur Symons
 They pass upon their old, tremulous feet, 
Creeping with little satchels down the street, 
And they remember, many years ago, 
Passing that way in silks. They wander, slow 
And solitary, through the city ways, 
And they alone remember those old days 
Men have forgotten. In their shaking heads 
A dancer of old carnivals yet treads 
The measure of past...Read more of this...

The Burglar Of Babylon

by Elizabeth Bishop
 On the fair green hills of Rio
 There grows a fearful stain:
The poor who come to Rio
 And can't go home again.

On the hills a million people,
 A million sparrows, nest,
Like a confused migration
 That's had to light and rest,

Building its nests, or houses,
 Out of nothing at all, or air.
You'd think a breath would end them,
 They perch...Read more of this...

Potato Blossom Songs and Jigs

by Carl Sandburg
 RUM tiddy um,
 tiddy um,
 tiddy um tum tum.
My knees are loose-like, my feet want to sling their selves.
I feel like tickling you under the chin—honey—and a-asking: Why Does a Chicken Cross the Road?
When the hens are a-laying eggs, and the roosters pluck-pluck-put-akut and you—honey—put new potatoes and gravy on the table, and there ain’t too much rain or...Read more of this...

Subtraction Flower

by Lisa Zaran
 You could die for it-- 
love, 
or refuse it altogether 
and know nothing 
except the urgency 
of youth. Men 

have been 
solitary 
for ages 
carrying the 
stoniest of hearts 
in their broad chests 
while we women 

begin too early 
brush the brown leaves 
from our shoulders, go 
from bloom to fade 
as soon as 
we see the sunrise 

We...Read more of this...

To the Pay Toilet

by Marge Piercy
 You strop my anger, especially
when I find you in restaurant or bar
and pay for the same liquid, coming and going.
In bus depots and airports and turnpike plazas
some woman is dragging in with three kids hung off her
shrieking their simple urgency like gulls.
She's supposed to pay for each of them
and the privilege of not dirtying the corporate floor.
Sometimes a woman...Read more of this...

Grandad And A Pramload Of Clocks

by John Lindley
 Wheeling them in,
the yard gate at half-mast 
with its ticking hinge,
the tin bucket with a hairnet of webs,
the privy door ajar,
the path gloved with moss
ploughed by metal 
through a scalped tyre -
in the shadows of the hood,
in the ripped silk
of the rocking, buckled pram,
none of the dead clocks moving.

And carrying them in
to a kitchen table,
a near-lifetime’s Woodies
coating each cough,
he...Read more of this...

The Paper Windmill

by Amy Lowell
 The little boy pressed his face against the window-pane 
and looked out
at the bright sunshiny morning. The cobble-stones of 
the square
glistened like mica. In the trees, a breeze danced and 
pranced,
and shook drops of sunlight like falling golden coins into the brown 
water
of the canal. Down stream slowly drifted a long string 
of galliots
piled with crimson cheeses. The little...Read more of this...

Butch Weldy

by Edgar Lee Masters
 After I got religion and steadied down
They gave me a job in the canning works,
And every morning I had to fill
The tank in the yard with gasoline,
That fed the blow-fires in the sheds
To heat the soldering irons.
And I mounted a rickety ladder to do it,
Carrying buckets full of the stuff.
One morning, as I stood there pouring,
The air grew still...Read more of this...

Earth-Moon

by Ted Hughes
 Once upon a time there was a person
He was walking along
He met the full burning moon
Rolling slowly twoards him
Crushing the stones and houses by the wayside.
She shut his eyes from the glare.
He drew his dagger
And stabbed and stabbed and stabbed.
The cry that quit the moon's wounds
Circled the earth.
The moon shrank, like a punctured airship,
Shrank, shrank, smaller, smaller,
Till it was...Read more of this...

Lovers Gifts XVI: She Dwelt Here by the Pool

by Rabindranath Tagore
 She dwelt here by the pool with its landing-stairs in ruins. Many
an evening she had watched the moon made dizzy by the shaking of
bamboo leaves, and on many a rainy day the smell of the wet earth
had come to her over the young shoots of rice.
Her pet name is known here among those date-palm groves and
in the courtyards where...Read more of this...

Skin

by Philip Larkin
 Obedient daily dress,
You cannot always keep
That unfakable young surface.
You must learn your lines -
Anger, amusement, sleep;
Those few forbidding signs

Of the continuous coarse
Sand-laden wind, time;
You must thicken, work loose
Into an old bag
Carrying a soiled name.
Parch then; be roughened; sag;

And pardon me, that
I Could find, when you were new,
No brash festivity
To wear you at, such as
Clothes are entitled to
Till the fashion...Read more of this...

The Grown-Up

by Rainer Maria Rilke
 All this stood upon her and was the world
and stood upon her with all its fear and grace
as trees stand, growing straight up, imageless
yet wholly image, like the Ark of God,
and solemn, as if imposed upon a race.

As she endured it all: bore up under
the swift-as-flight, the fleeting, the far-gone,
the inconceivably vast, the still-to-learn,
serenely as a woman carrying water
moves...Read more of this...

A Servant to Servants

by Robert Frost
 I didn't make you know how glad I was 
To have you come and camp here on our land. 
I promised myself to get down some day 
And see the way you lived, but I don't know! 
With a houseful of hungry men to feed 
I guess you'd find.... It seems to me 
I can't express my feelings any...Read more of this...

Bored

by Margaret Atwood
 All those times I was bored
out of my mind. Holding the log
while he sawed it. Holding
the string while he measured, boards,
distances between things, or pounded
stakes into the ground for rows and rows
of lettuces and beets, which I then (bored)
weeded. Or sat in the back
of the car, or sat still in boats,
sat, sat, while at the prow, stern, wheel
he drove,...Read more of this...

The Battle of the Nile

by William Topaz McGonagall
 'Twas on the 18th of August in the year of 1798,
That Nelson saw with inexpressible delight
The City of Alexandria crowded with the ships of France,
So he ordered all sail to be set, and immediately advance. 

And upon the deck, in deep anxiety he stood,
And from anxiety of mind he took but little food;
But now he ordered dinner and prepared...Read more of this...

Jack McGuire

by Edgar Lee Masters
 They would have lynched me
Had I not been secretly hurried away
To the jail at Peoria.
And yet I was going peacefully home,
Carrying my jug, a little drunk,
When Logan, the marshal, halted me,
Called me a drunken hound and shook me,
And, when I cursed him for it, struck me
With that Prohibition loaded cane --
All this before I shot him.
They would have hanged...Read more of this...

Ship Starting The

by Walt Whitman
 LO! the unbounded sea! 
On its breast a Ship starting, spreading all her sails—an ample Ship,
 carrying even her moonsails; 
The pennant is flying aloft, as she speeds, she speeds so stately—below,
 emulous waves press forward, 
They surround the Ship, with shining curving motions, and foam....Read more of this...

The Burning of the Ship Kent

by William Topaz McGonagall
 Good people of high and low degree,
I pray ye all to list to me,
And I'll relate a harrowing tale of the sea
Concerning the burning of the ship "Kent" in the Bay of Biscay,
Which is the most appalling tale of the present century. 

She carried a crew, including officers, of 148 men,
And twenty lady passengers along with them;
Besides 344 men...Read more of this...

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