Famous Chuckle Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Laughter In The Senate

by Sidney Lanier
 In the South lies a lonesome, hungry Land;
He huddles his rags with a cripple's hand;
He mutters, prone on the barren sand,
What time his heart is breaking.

He lifts his bare head from the ground;
He listens through the gloom around:
The winds have brought him a strange sound
Of distant merrymaking.

Comes now the Peace so long delayed?
Is it the cheerful voice of Aid?
Begins...Read more of this...

Finis

by Walter Savage Landor
 Now it's over, and now it's done; 
Why does everything look the same? 
Just as bright, the unheeding sun, -- 
Can't it see that the parting came? 
People hurry and work and swear, 
Laugh and grumble and die and wed, 
Ponder what they will eat and wear, -- 
Don't they know that our love is dead? 

Just as busy,...Read more of this...

Homing Swallows

by Claude McKay
 Swift swallows sailing from the Spanish main, 
O rain-birds racing merrily away 
From hill-tops parched with heat and sultry plain 
Of wilting plants and fainting flowers, say-- 

When at the noon-hour from the chapel school 
The children dash and scamper down the dale, 
Scornful of teacher's rod and binding rule 
Forever broken and without avail, 

Do they still stop...Read more of this...

The Mystery Of Mister Smith

by Robert William Service
 For supper we had curried tripe.
I washed the dishes, wound the clock;
Then for awhile I smoked my pipe -
Puff! Puff! We had no word of talk.
The Misses sewed - a sober pair;
Says I at last: "I need some air."

A don't know why I acted so;
I had no thought, no plot, no plan.
I did not really mean to go -
I'm...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...

Adolescence II

by Rita Dove
 Although it is night, I sit in the bathroom, waiting.
Sweat prickles behind my knees, the baby-breasts are alert.
Venetian blinds slice up the moon; the tiles quiver in pale strips.

Then they come, the three seal men with eyes as round
As dinner plates and eyelashes like sharpened tines.
They bring the scent of licorice. One sits in the washbowl,

One on the bathtub...Read more of this...

When A Woman Loves A Man

by David Lehman
 When she says Margarita she means Daiquiri.
When she says quixotic she means mercurial.
And when she says, "I'll never speak to you again,"
she means, "Put your arms around me from behind
as I stand disconsolate at the window."

He's supposed to know that.

When a man loves a woman he is in New York and she is in Virginia
or he is in Boston,...Read more of this...

My Rocking-Chair

by Robert William Service
 When I am old and worse for wear
I want to buy a rocking-chair,
And set it on a porch where shine
The stars of morning-glory vine;
With just beyond, a gleam of grass,
A shady street where people pass;
And some who come with time to spare,
To yarn beside my rocking-chair.
Then I will light my corn-cob pipe
And dose and dream and rarely gripe.
My morning...Read more of this...

Plebeian Plutocrat

by Robert William Service
 I own a gorgeous Cadillac,
 A chauffeur garbed in blue;
And as I sit behind his back
 His beefy neck I view.
Yet let me whisper, though you may
 Think me a ***** old cuss,
From Claude I often sneak away
 To board a bus.

A democrat, I love the crowd,
 The bustle and the din;
The market wives who gab aloud
 As they...Read more of this...

The Warm and the Cold

by Ted Hughes
 Freezing dusk is closing
 Like a slow trap of steel
On trees and roads and hills and all
 That can no longer feel.
 But the carp is in its depth
 Like a planet in its heaven.
 And the badger in its bedding
 Like a loaf in the oven.
 And the butterfly in its mummy
 Like a viol in its case.
...Read more of this...

Successful Failure

by Robert William Service
 I wonder if successful men
 Are always happy?
And do they sing with gusto when
 Springtime is sappy?
Although I am of snow-white hair
 And nighly mortal,
Each time I sniff the April air
 I chortle.

I wonder if a millionaire
 Jigs with enjoyment,
Having such heaps of time to spare
 For daft employment.
For as I dance the Highland Fling
 My glee is muckle,
And...Read more of this...

The Undertakers Horse

by Rudyard Kipling
 The eldest son bestrides him,
And the pretty daughter rides him,
And I meet him oft o' mornings on the Course;
And there kindles in my bosom
An emotion chill and gruesome
As I canter past the Undertaker's Horse.

Neither shies he nor is restive,
But a hideously suggestive
Trot, professional and placid, he affects;
And the cadence of his hoof-beats
To my mind this grim reproof beats: --
"Mend...Read more of this...

Fleurette

by Robert William Service
 (The Wounded Canadian Speaks)

My leg? It's off at the knee.
Do I miss it? Well, some. You see
 I've had it since I was born;
 And lately a devilish corn.
(I rather chuckle with glee
 To think how I've fooled that corn.)

But I'll hobble around all right.
 It isn't that, it's my face.
Oh I know I'm a hideous sight,
 Hardly a...Read more of this...

If I Were Tickled By the Rub of Love

by Dylan Thomas
 If I were tickled by the rub of love,
A rooking girl who stole me for her side,
Broke through her straws, breaking my bandaged string,
If the red tickle as the cattle calve
Still set to scratch a laughter from my lung,
I would not fear the apple nor the flood
Nor the bad blood of spring.

Shall it be male or female? say the...Read more of this...

The Congo: A Study of the Negro Race

by Vachel Lindsay
 I. THEIR BASIC SAVAGERY

Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,
Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable,
Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table, 
A deep rolling bass.
Pounded on the table,
Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom,
Hard as they were able,
Boom, boom, BOOM,
With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom,
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM.
THEN I had religion, THEN...Read more of this...

Miss Mischievous

by Robert William Service
 Miss Don't-do-this and Don't-do-that
 Has such a sunny smile
You cannot help but chuckle at
 Her cuteness and her guile.
Her locks are silken floss of gold,
 Her eyes are pansy blue:
Maybe of years to eighty old
 The best is two.

Miss Don't-do-this and Don't-do-that
 To roguishness is fain;
To guard that laughter-loving brat
 Is quite a strain;
But when she tires of prank...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...

Dave Lilly

by Joyce Kilmer
 There's a brook on the side of Greylock that used 
to be full of trout,
But there's nothing there now but minnows; they say it is all fished 
out.
I fished there many a Summer day some twenty years ago,
And I never quit without getting a mess of a dozen or so.
There was a man, Dave Lilly, who lived on the...Read more of this...

Contentment

by Robert William Service
 An Ancient gaffer once I knew,
Who puffed a pipe and tossed a tankard;
He claimed a hundred years or two,
And for a dozen more he hankered;
So o'er a pint I asked how he
Had kept his timbers tight together;
He grinned and answered: "It maun be
Because I likes all kinds o' weather.

"Fore every morn when I get up
I lights my clay pipe...Read more of this...

The Truce of the Bear

by Rudyard Kipling
 Yearly, with tent and rifle, our careless white men go
By the Pass called Muttianee, to shoot in the vale below.
Yearly by Muttianee he follows our white men in --
Matun, the old blind beggar, bandaged from brow to chin.

Eyeless, noseless, and lipless -- toothless, broken of speech,
Seeking a dole at the doorway he mumbles his tale to each;
Over and over...Read more of this...

The Fire Sermon

by T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
  The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
  Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
  Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
  Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
  The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
  Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
  Or...Read more of this...

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