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Famous Cocked Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Heaney, Seamus
...wardrum
Mustering force. His parasitical
And ignmorant little fists already
Beat at your borders and I know they're cocked
At me across the water. No treaty
I foresee will salve completely your tracked
And stretchmarked body, the big pain
That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again...Read more of this...



by Heaney, Seamus
...that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it....Read more of this...

by Sandburg, Carl
...rtising
Association on the trade resources of South America.
And the way he lighted a three-for-a-nickel stogie and
cocked it at an angle regardless of the manners of
our best people,
I knew he had a clutch on a real happiness even though
some of the reporters on his newspaper say he is
the living double of Jack London's Sea Wolf.
In the mayor's office the mayor himself told me he was
happy though it is a hard job to satisfy all the office-
seekers and eat all the din...Read more of this...

by Collins, Billy
...y the Bear heads
into the autumn woods
with a red can of gasoline
and a box of wooden matches.

His ranger's hat is cocked
at a disturbing angle.

His brown fur gleams
under the high sun
as his paws, the size
of catcher's mitts,
crackle into the distance.

He is sick of dispensing
warnings to the careless,
the half-wit camper,
the dumbbell hiker.

He is going to show them
how a professional does it....Read more of this...

by Marvell, Andrew
...Charlton advances next, whose coif does awe 
The Mitre troop, and with his looks gives law. 
He marched with beaver cocked of bishop's brim, 
And hid much fraud under an aspect grim. 
Next the lawyers' merecenary band appear: 
Finch in the front, and Thurland in the rear. 
The troop of privilege, a rabble bare 
Of debtors deep, fell to Trelawney's care. 
Their fortune's error they supplied in rage, 
Nor any further would than these engage. 
Then marched th...Read more of this...



by Carver, Raymond
...ainst the front fender of a 1934 Ford. 
He would like to pose bluff and hearty for his posterity, 
Wear his old hat cocked over his ear. 
All his life my father wanted to be bold. 

But the eyes give him away, and the hands 
that limply offer the string of dead perch 
and the bottle of beer. Father, I love you, 
yet how can I say thank you, I who can't hold my liquor either, 
and don't even know the places to fish?...Read more of this...

by Troupe, Quincy
...we walk through a calligraphy of hats slicing off foreheads
ace-deuce cocked, they slant, razor sharp, clean through imagination, our
spirits knee-deep in what we have forgotten entrancing our bodies now to
dance, like enraptured water lilies
the rhythm in liquid strides of certain looks
eyeballs rippling through breezes
riffing choirs of trees, where a trillion slivers of sunlight prance across
filigreeing leaves, a zillion v...Read more of this...

by Plath, Sylvia
...ile on spotted branch
 of the sycamore
two black rooks hunch
 and darkly glare,

watching for night,
 with absinthe eye
cocked on the lone, late,
 passer-by....Read more of this...

by Scannell, Vernon
...desk. Yet lift the lid and see,
Amidst frayed books and pencils, other shapes:
Vicious rope, glaring blade, the gun cocked to kill....Read more of this...

by Whittier, John Greenleaf
...ush-pile showed, 
A fenceless drift what once was road; 
The bridle-post an old man sat 
With loose-flung coat and high cocked hat; 
The well-curb had a Chinese roof; 
And even the long sweep, high aloof, 
In its slant spendor, seemed to tell 
Of Pisa's leaning miracle. 

A prompt, decisive man, no breath 
Our father wasted: "Boys, a path!" 
Well pleased (for when did farmer boy 
Count such a summons less than joy?) 
Our buskins on our feet we drew; 
With mittened hands, ...Read more of this...

by Kipling, Rudyard
...ve:
There was not a rock for twenty mile, there was not a clump of tree,
But covered a man of my own men with his rifle cocked on his knee.
If I had raised my bridle-hand, as I have held it low,
The little jackals that flee so fast were feasting all in a row:
If I had bowed my head on my breast, as I have held it high,
The kite that whistles above us now were gorged till she could not fly."
Lightly answered the Colonel's son: "Do good to bird and beast,
But count who ...Read more of this...

by St Vincent Millay, Edna
...r>"
But I knew it was for me.

She wove a pair of breeches
Quicker than that!
She wove a pair of boots
And a little cocked hat.

She wove a pair of mittens,
Shw wove a little blouse,
She wove all night
In the still, cold house.

She sang as she worked,
And the harp-strings spoke;
Her voice never faltered,
And the thread never broke,
And when I awoke,—

There sat my mother
With the harp against her shoulder,
Looking nineteeen,
And not a day older, 

A smile about h...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Amy
...Lotta in her currants watched, dismayed.
He seemed a proper fellow standing there
In the bright moonshine. His cocked hat was laced
With silver, and he wore his own brown hair
Tied, but unpowdered. His whole bearing graced
A fine cloth coat, and ruffled shirt, and chased
Sword-hilt. Charlotta looked, but her position
Was hardly easy. When would his volition
Suggest his walking on? And then that 
tune!
A half-a-dozen bars from `Orfeo'
Gone over and over, a...Read more of this...

by Chesterton, G K
...rone of thunder now! 
Drink to the wrath of God. 

High in the wreck I held the cup, 
I clutched my rusty sword, 
I cocked my tattered feather 
To the glory of the Lord. 
Not undone were the heaven and earth, 
This hollow world thrown up, 
Before one man had stood up straight, 
And drained it like a cup....Read more of this...

by Noyes, Alfred
...nd 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 of claret velvet, and breeches of brown doeskin;
They fitted with never a wrinkle: his boots were up to the thigh!
 And he rode with a jewelled twinkle,
 His pistol butts a-twinkle
His rapier hilt a-twinkle, under the jewelled sky.

Over the cobbles he clattered and clashed in the dard inn-y...Read more of this...

by Yeats, William Butler
...An old man cocked his car upon a bridge;
 He and his friend, their faces to the South,
 Had trod the uneven road. Their hoots were soiled,
 Their Connemara cloth worn out of shape;
 They had kept a steady pace as though their beds,
 Despite a dwindling and late-risen moon,
 Were distant still. An old man cocked his ear.

Aherne. What made that Sound?

R...Read more of this...

by Plath, Sylvia
...ers, the outriders, the Grand Army!
A red tatter, Napoleon!

The last badge of victory.
The swarm is knocked into a cocked straw hat.
Elba, Elba, bleb on the sea!
The white busts of marshals, admirals, generals
Worming themselves into niches.

How instructive this is!
The dumb, banded bodies
Walking the plank draped with Mother France's upholstery
Into a new mausoleum,
An ivory palace, a crotch pine.

The man with gray hands smiles --
The smile of a man of bus...Read more of this...

by Troupe, Quincy
...licing foreheads off in the middle
of crowds that need explaining, the calligraphy of this penumbra
slanting ace-deuce, cocked, carrying the perforated legacy of bebop
these bold, peccadillo, pirouetting pellagras
razor-sharp clean, they cut into our rip-tiding dreams carrying
their whirlpooling imaginations, their rivers of schemes
assaulted by pellets of raindrops
these broken mirrors catching fragments
of sonorous words, entrapping us between parentheses
two bat wings curv...Read more of this...

by Chesterton, G K
...stars away as suds go down a sink, 
The seven heavens came roaring down for the throats of hell to drink, 
And Noah he cocked his eye and said, "It looks like rain, I think, 
The water has drowned the Matterhorn as deep as a Mendip mine, 
But I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine." 

But Noah he sinned, and we have sinned; on tipsy feet we trod, 
Till a great big black teetotaller was sent to us for a rod, 
And you can't get wine at a P.S....Read more of this...

by Kumin, Maxine
...rose up hard,
the hawkeye killer came on stage forthwith.

There's one chuck left. Old wily fellow, he keeps
me cocked and ready day after day after day.
All night I hunt his humped-up form.I dream
I sight along the barrel in my sleep.
If only they'd all consented to die unseen
gassed underground the quiet Nazi way....Read more of this...

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