Famous Cobbles Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The Paris Commune

by Barry Tebb
 From the French of Andr? Fr?naud



France was born there and it is from there she sings

Of Joan of Ark and Varlin both.

We must dig deep, o motherland,

Beneath those heavy cobbles.

Country of the Commune, so dear to me,

My very own which make my blood burn

And that same blood will one day flow again

Between those very stones.

It is there when I...Read more of this...

A Way to Love God

by Robert Penn Warren
 Here is the shadow of truth, for only the shadow is true.
And the line where the incoming swell from the sunset Pacific
First leans and staggers to break will tell all you need to know
About submarine geography, and your father's death rattle
Provides all biographical data required for the Who's Who of the dead.

I cannot recall what I started to tell...Read more of this...

Portraits From Memory

by Barry Tebb
 I

Through my bedroom window

The coal carts jolted over the cobbles

A slow heavy rhythm full,

Light and fast returning empty.



The coal office manager was a dwarf

With sixty year old skin

On a ten year old’s body and

Hornrims on a wizened wizard’s face.



The enormous shire horses neighed

In warning if you went near,

Their polished brasses gleaming,

Their worn blinkers waxed;

When they brought in lorries

A two...Read more of this...

The Legless Man

by Robert William Service
 (The Dark Side)

My mind goes back to Fumin Wood, and how we stuck it out,
Eight days of hunger, thirst and cold, mowed down by steel and flame;
Waist-deep in mud and mad with woe, with dead men all about,
We fought like fiends and waited for relief that never came.
Eight days and nights they rolled on us in battle-frenzied mass!
"Debout les...Read more of this...

Market days

by Jonas Mekas
 Mondays, way before dawn,
before even the first hint of blue in the windows,
we'd hear it start, off the road past our place,
over on the highway nearby,
in a clatter of market-bound traffic.

Riding the rigs packed with fruit and crated live fowl,
or on foot, with cattle hitched to tailgates slowing the pace,
or sitting up high, on raised seats
(the women all wore...Read more of this...

Campo di Fiori

by Czeslaw Milosz
 In Rome on the Campo di Fiori
Baskets of olives and lemons,
Cobbles spattered with wine
And the wreckage of flowers.
Vendors cover the trestles
With rose-pink fish;
Armfuls of dark grapes
Heaped on peach-down.

On this same square
They burned Giordano Bruno.
Henchmen kindled the pyre
Close-pressed by the mob.
Before the flames had died
The taverns were full again,
Baskets of olives and lemons
Again on the vendors' shoulders.

I thought of the...Read more of this...

A Memory At Sixty

by Barry Tebb
 They have vanished, the pop men with their varnished crates

Of Tizer and dandy, American ice-cream soda and one percent shandy.

The clunk of frothy quarts dumped on donkey-stoned doorsteps

Is heard no more, nor the neighs of restless mares between the shafts.

The shining brass of harness hangs in bar-rooms or droops

From imitation beams.



Gelded stallions no longer chomp and champ

In stalls beneath...Read more of this...

Bridge Over The Aire Book 3

by Barry Tebb
 THE KINGDOM OF MY HEART





1



The halcyon settled on the Aire of our days

Kingfisher-blue it broke my heart in two

Shall I forget you? Shall I forget you?



I am the mad poet first love

You never got over

You are my blue-eyed

Madonna virgin bride

I shall carve ‘MG loves BT’

On the bark of every 

Wind-bent tree in 

East End Park



2



The park itself will blossom

And...Read more of this...

Letter From Haworth

by Barry Tebb
 Poems do not always satisfy the soul,

The feel of cobbles underfoot is at this moment more

Than all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the unending vistas

Of the moor, an infinity of purity that excels even Mallarm?.

I sit on the cracked steps to the church, sipping tea

With my eye on the Black Bull where Bramwell worshipped

Until a mobile phone playing ‘The Bluebells of...Read more of this...

Change

by Barry Tebb
 As milled silver I was welcome

In every gutter, tinkling over cobbles

I rang the truth loudly on solid-oak counters

And tills tolled for me clear as bells.



Boldly I gave myself to many,

Slipped from moist palm to pocket,

Pirouetting without points, jingling

With dull coppers and important keys.



First I was lost in a hundred

Children’s essays, found myself

With pearls in secret pockets,

Counterfeit and shiny.

Then I...Read more of this...

The Highwayman

by Alfred Noyes
 PART ONE

The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
 And the highwayman came riding--
 Riding--riding--
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inndoor.

He'd a French cocked-hat on his forehead, a bunch of lace at his chin,
A coat...Read more of this...

Anahorish

by Seamus Heaney
 My "place of clear water,"
the first hill in the world
where springs washed into
the shiny grass

and darkened cobbles
in the bed of the lane.
Anahorish, soft gradient
of consonant, vowel-meadow,

after-image of lamps
swung through the yards
on winter evenings.
With pails and barrows

those mound-dwellers
go waist-deep in mist
to break the light ice
at wells and dunghills....Read more of this...

The Last Day Of Another Home Holiday

by Barry Tebb
 I sat on a low stone wall

Watching the blue blood of the azaleas

Spatter on Haworth’s cobbles.



A seamless transparency of rain

Lowering over the turning trees

My thoughts drifting to Claudel’s

‘Five Great Odes’, to the stone marker

To the swathes of heather.

I stood on the moor top

Where the tracks cross

The fellside green

The fellside ochre,

Shifting reflections

Of C?zanne’s last winter....Read more of this...

Inspiration From A Visitation Of My Muse

by Barry Tebb
 Memories bursting like tears or waves

On some lonely Adriatic shore

Beating again and again

Threshings of green sea foam

Flecked like the marble Leonardo

Chipped for his ‘Moses’.

And my tears came as suddenly

In that dream, criss-crossed

With memory and desire.

Grandad Nicky had worked

Down the pits for a pittance

To bring up his six children

But nothing left over for more

Than a few nuts and an orange

For...Read more of this...

From the Roof

by Denise Levertov
 This wild night, gathering the washing as if it were flowers animal vines twisting over the line and
slapping my face lightly, soundless merriment
in the gesticulations of shirtsleeves,
I recall out of my joy a night of misery

walking in the dark and the wind over broken earth,
halfmade foundations and unfinished drainage trenches and the spaced-out circles of glaring light marking streets...Read more of this...

Ballad Of The Long-Legged Bait

by Dylan Thomas
 The bows glided down, and the coast
Blackened with birds took a last look
At his thrashing hair and whale-blue eye;
The trodden town rang its cobbles for luck.

Then good-bye to the fishermanned
Boat with its anchor free and fast
As a bird hooking over the sea,
High and dry by the top of the mast,

Whispered the affectionate sand
And the bulwarks of the dazzled quay.
For...Read more of this...

The Fruit Shop

by Amy Lowell
 Cross-ribboned shoes; a muslin gown,
High-waisted, girdled with bright blue;
A straw poke bonnet which hid the frown
She pluckered her little brows into
As she picked her dainty passage through
The dusty street. "Ah, Mademoiselle,
A dirty pathway, we need rain,
My poor fruits suffer, and the shell
Of this nut's too big for its kernel, lain
Here in the sun it has shrunk again.
The baker down...Read more of this...

A Fine Madness

by Barry Tebb
 Any poets about or bored muses fancying a day out?

Rainy, windy, cold Leeds City Station

Half-way through its slow chaotic transformation

Contractors’ morning break, overalls, hard hats and harness

Flood McDonalds where I sip my tea and try to translate Val?ry.



London has everything except my bardic inspiration

I’ve only to step off the coach in Leeds and it whistles

Its bravuras down every wind,...Read more of this...

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