Famous Copper Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Copper poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous copper poems. These examples illustrate what a famous copper poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Andrew Barton Paterson
"Aye," said the boozer, "I tell you it's true, sir,
I once was a punter with plenty of pelf,
But gone is my glory, I'll tell you the story
How I stiffened my horse and got stiffened myself.
"'Twas a mare called the Cracker, I came down to back her,
But found she was favourite all of a rush,...Read more of this...
by
Anna Akhmatova
I pray to the sunbeam from the window -
It is pale, thin, straight.
Since morning I have been silent,
And my heart - is split.
The copper on my washstand
Has turned green,
But the sunbeam plays on it
So charmingly.
How innocent it is, and simple,
In the evening calm,
But to me in this deserted temple...Read more of this...
by
Elinor Wylie
Why should this ***** insolently stride
Down the red noonday on such noiseless feet?
Piled in his barrow, tawnier than wheat,
Lie heaps of smouldering daisies, sombre-eyed,
Their copper petals shriveled up with pride,
Hot with a superfluity of heat,
Like a great brazier borne along the street
By captive leopards, black and burning pied.
Are there no water-lilies, smooth...Read more of this...
by
Allen Ginsberg
Pigeons shake their wings on the copper church roof
out my window across the street, a bird perched on the cross
surveys the city's blue-grey clouds. Larry Rivers
'll come at 10 AM and take my picture. I'm taking
your picture, pigeons. I'm writing you down, Dawn.
I'm immortalizing your exhaust, Avenue A bus.
O Thought! Now you'll have to think the same thing forever!
...Read more of this...
by
Elinor Wylie
She has danced for leagues and leagues,
Over thorns and thistles,
Prancing to a tune of Griegg's
Performed on willow whistles.
Antelopes behold her, dazed,
Velvet-eyed, and furry;
Polar flowers, crackle-glazed,
Snap beneath her hurry.
In a wig of copper wire,
A gown of scalloped gauzes,
She capers like a flame of fire
Over Arctic mosses.
All her tears have turned to...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
COUNT these reminiscences like money.
The Greeks had their picnics under another name.
The Romans wore glad rags and told their neighbors, “What of it?”
The Carlovingians hauling logs on carts, they too
Stuck their noses in the air and stuck their thumbs to their noses
And tasted life as a symphonic dream of fresh eggs broken over a frying pan left by an...Read more of this...
by
William Henry Davies
When April scatters charms of primrose gold
Among the copper leaves in thickets old,
And singing skylarks from the meadows rise,
To twinkle like black stars in sunny skies;
When I can hear the small woodpecker ring
Time on a tree for all the birds that sing;
And hear the pleasant cuckoo, loud and long --
The simple bird that...Read more of this...
by
Elizabeth Bishop
Earliest morning, switching all the tracks
that cross the sky from cinder star to star,
coupling the ends of streets
to trains of light.
now draw us into daylight in our beds;
and clear away what presses on the brain:
put out the neon shapes
that float and swell and glare
down the gray avenue between the eyes
in pinks and yellows,...Read more of this...
by
Edward Lear
There was an Old Man of Columbia,Who was thirsty, and called out for some beer;But they brought it quite hot, in a small copper pot,Which disgusted that man of Columbia. ...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
THE FINE cloth of your love might be a fabric of Egypt,
Something Sinbad, the sailor, took away from robbers,
Something a traveler with plenty of money might pick up
And bring home and stick on the walls and say:
“There’s a little thing made a hit with me
When I was in Cairo—I think I must see Cairo again some day.”
So there are...Read more of this...
by
Nazim Hikmet
Sometimes, I, too, tell the ah's
of my heart one by one
like the blood-red beads
of a ruby rosary strung
on strands of golden hair!
But my
poetry's muse
takes to the air
on wings made of steel
like the I-beams
of my suspension bridges!
I don't pretend
the nightingale's lament
to the rose isn't easy on the ears...
But the language
that really speaks to me
are Beethoven sonatas...Read more of this...
by
Amy Lowell
In the brown water,
Thick and silver-sheened in the sunshine,
Liquid and cool in the shade of the reeds,
A pike dozed.
Lost among the shadows of stems
He lay unnoticed.
Suddenly he flicked his tail,
And a green-and-copper brightness
Ran under the water.
Out from under the reeds
Came the olive-green light,
And orange flashed up
Through the sun-thickened water.
So the fish passed across the pool,
Green and copper,
A darkness and...Read more of this...
by
Ezra Pound
For the Marriage in Cana of Galilee
Dark-eyed,
O woman of my dreams,
Ivory sandalled,
There is none like thee among the dancers,
None with swift feet.
I have not found thee in the tents,
In the broken darkness.
I have not found thee at the well-head
Among the women with pitchers.
Thine arms are as a young sapling under the bark;
Thy face...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
I CRIED over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts.
The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper sunburned woman, the mother of the year, the taker of seeds.
The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes, new beautiful things come in the first spit of snow on the northwest wind,...Read more of this...
by
Jean Toomer
whisper of yellow globes
gleaming on lamp-posts that sway
like bootleg licker drinkers in the fog
and let your breath be moist against me
like bright beads on yellow globes
telephone the power-house
that the main wires are insulate
(her words play softly up and down
dewy corridors of billboards)
then with your tongue remove the tape
and press your lips to mine
till they are incandescent...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
She lay like a saint on her copper couch;
Like an angel asleep she lay,
In the stare of the ghoulish folks that slouch
Past the Dead and sneak away.
Then came old Jules of the sightless gaze,
Who begged in the streets for bread.
Each day he had come for a year of days,
And groped his way to the Dead.
"What's...Read more of this...
by
Paul Laurence Dunbar
"In the fight at Brandywine, Black Samson, a giant ***** armed with a scythe, sweeps his way through the red ranks...." C. M. Skinner's "Myths and Legends of Our Own Land." Gray are the pages of record,
Dim are the volumes of eld;
Else had old Delaware told us
[Pg 206]More that her history held.
Told us with pride in the...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
ON the one hand the steel works.
On the other hand the penitentiary.
Sante Fé trains and Alton trains
Between smokestacks on the west
And gray walls on the east.
And Lockport down the river.
Part of the valley is God’s.
And part is man’s.
The river course laid out
A thousand years ago.
The canals ten years back.
The sun on two canals and one river
Makes three stripes of...Read more of this...
by
William Carlos (WCW) Williams
I bought a dishmop—
having no daughter—
for they had twisted
fine ribbons of shining copper
about white twine
and made a tousled head
of it, fastened it
upon a turned ash stick
slender at the neck
straight, tall—
when tied upright
on the brass wallbracket
to be a light for me
and naked
as a girl should seem
to her father....Read more of this...
by
Coventry Patmore
My little Son, who look'd from thoughtful eyes
And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,
Having my law the seventh time disobey'd,
I struck him, and dismiss'd
With hard words and unkiss'd,
—His Mother, who was patient, being dead.
Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep,
I visited his bed,
But found him slumbering deep,
With darken'd eyelids,...Read more of this...
by
Hayden Carruth
"Form follows function follows form . . . , etc."
--Dr. J. Anthony Wadlington
Here I am writing my first villanelle
At seventy-two, and feeling old and tired--
"Hey, Pops, why dontcha give us the old death knell?"--
And writing it what's more on the rim of hell
In blazing Arizona when all I desired
Was north and solitude and not a villanelle,
Working...Read more of this...
by
G K Chesterton
White founts falling in the Courts of the sun,
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard;
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips;
For the inmost sea of all the...Read more of this...
by
William Henry Davies
A dear old couple my grandparents were,
And kind to all dumb things; they saw in Heaven
The lamb that Jesus petted when a child;
Their faith was never draped by Doubt: to them
Death was a rainbow in Eternity,
That promised everlasting brightness soon.
An old seafaring man was he; a rough
Old man, but kind; and hairy,...Read more of this...
by
Elizabeth Bishop
At four o'clock
in the gun-metal blue dark
we hear the first crow of the first cock
just below
the gun-metal blue window
and immediately there is an echo
off in the distance,
then one from the backyard fence,
then one, with horrible insistence,
grates like a wet match
from the broccoli patch,
flares,and all over town begins to catch.
Cries galore
come from the water-closet door,
from the dropping-plastered henhouse floor,
where...Read more of this...
by
Edward Dorn
The Candidate, answering a question
about El Salvador, generalized
by saying he thought
we should support human rights
everywhere they were being abrogated--
South Korea, South Africa
or South Yemen. He didn't have
the moral perspicuity
to mention South Dakota.
Perhaps it's too far north....Read more of this...
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