Famous Cows Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Poems Done on a Late Night Car

by Carl Sandburg
 I. CHICKENS

I am The Great White Way of the city:
When you ask what is my desire, I answer:
"Girls fresh as country wild flowers,
With young faces tired of the cows and barns,
Eager in their eyes as the dawn to find my mysteries,
Slender supple girls with shapely legs,
Lure in the arch of their little shoulders
And wisdom from the prairies to cry...Read more of this...

Last Hill In A Vista

by Louise Bogan
 Come, let us tell the weeds in ditches
How we are poor, who once had riches,
And lie out in the sparse and sodden
Pastures that the cows have trodden,
The while an autumn night seals down
The comforts of the wooden town.

Come, let us counsel some cold stranger
How we sought safety, but loved danger.
So, with stiff walls about us, we
Chose this more fragile...Read more of this...

In May

by William Henry Davies
 Yes, I will spend the livelong day 
With Nature in this month of May; 
And sit beneath the trees, and share 
My bread with birds whose homes are there; 
While cows lie down to eat, and sheep 
Stand to their necks in grass so deep; 
While birds do sing with all their might, 
As though they felt the earth...Read more of this...

Smoke

by Carl Sandburg
 I SIT in a chair and read the newspapers.

Millions of men go to war, acres of them are buried, guns and ships broken, cities burned, villages sent up in smoke, and children where cows are killed off amid hoarse barbecues vanish like finger-rings of smoke in a north wind.

I sit in a chair and read the newspapers....Read more of this...

The Man Into Whose Yard You Should Not Hit Your Ball

by Thomas Lux
 each day mowed
and mowed his lawn, his dry quarter acre,
the machine slicing a wisp
from each blade's tip. Dust storms rose
around the roar: 6:00 P.M., every day,
spring, summer, fall. If he could mow
the snow he would.
On one side, his neighbors the cows
turned their backs to him
and did what they do to the grass.
Where he worked, I don't know
but it sets...Read more of this...

On the Ning Nang Nong

by Spike Milligan
 On the Ning Nang Nong 
Where the Cows go Bong! 
and the monkeys all say BOO! 
There's a Nong Nang Ning 
Where the trees go Ping! 
And the tea pots jibber jabber joo. 
On the Nong Ning Nang 
All the mice go Clang 
And you just can't catch 'em when they do! 
So its Ning Nang Nong 
Cows go...Read more of this...

Room Ghost

by Robert William Service
 Though elegance I ill afford,
My living-room is green and gold;
The former tenant was a lord
Who died of drinking, I am told.
I fancy he was rather bored;
I don't think he was over old.

And where on books I dully browse,
And gaze in rapture at the sea,
My predecessor world carouse
In lavish infidelity
With ladies amoral as cows;
But interesting, you'll agree.

I'm dull as water...Read more of this...

The City Bushman

by Henry Lawson
 It was pleasant up the country, City Bushman, where you went, 
For you sought the greener patches and you travelled like a gent; 
And you curse the trams and buses and the turmoil and the push, 
Though you know the squalid city needn't keep you from the bush; 
But we lately heard you singing of the `plains where shade...Read more of this...

The Mountain

by Robert Frost
 The mountain held the town as in a shadow 
I saw so much before I slept there once: 
I noticed that I missed stars in the west, 
Where its black body cut into the sky. 
Near me it seemed: I felt it like a wall 
Behind which I was sheltered from a wind. 
And yet between the town and...Read more of this...

Snow

by Carl Sandburg
 SNOW took us away from the smoke valleys into white mountains, we saw velvet blue cows eating a vermillion grass and they gave us a pink milk.

Snow changes our bones into fog streamers caught by the wind and spelled into many dances.

Six bits for a sniff of snow in the old days bought us bubbles beautiful to forget floating...Read more of this...

The Wildy Ones

by Robert William Service
 The sheep are in the silver wood,
 The cows are in the broom;
The goats are in the wild mountain
 And won't be home by noon.

My mother sang that olden tune
 Most every night,
And to her newest she would croon
 By candle light;
While cuddling in the velvet gloom
 I'd dream of cows
That sought each dawn 'mid golden broom
 To gently...Read more of this...

There was a Child went Forth

by Walt Whitman
 THERE was a child went forth every day; 
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became; 
And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of the day, or for many
 years, or
 stretching cycles of years. 

The early lilacs became part of this child, 
And grass, and white and red...Read more of this...

Baseball and Writing

by Marianne Moore
 Fanaticism?No.Writing is exciting
and baseball is like writing.
You can never tell with either
how it will go
or what you will do;
generating excitement--
a fever in the victim--
pitcher, catcher, fielder, batter.
Victim in what category?
Owlman watching from the press box?
To whom does it apply?
Who is excited?Might it be I?

It's a pitcher's battle all the way--a duel--
a catcher's, as, with cruel
puma paw, Elston Howard lumbers...Read more of this...

Cows

by Paul Muldoon
 Even as we speak, there's a smoker's cough
from behind the whitethorn hedge: we stop dead in our tracks;
a distant tingle of water into a trough.

In the past half-hour—since a cattle truck
all but sent us shuffling off this mortal coil—
we've consoled ourselves with the dregs

of a bottle of Redbreast. Had Hawthorne been a Gael,
I insist, the scarlet A on Hester...Read more of this...

Lilacs

by Amy Lowell
Lilacs,
False blue,
White,
Purple,
Color of lilac,
Your great puffs of flowers
Are everywhere in this my New England.
Among your heart-shaped leaves
Orange orioles hop like music-box birds and sing
Their little weak soft songs;
In the crooks of your branches
The bright eyes of song sparrows sitting on spotted eggs
Peer restlessly through the light and shadow
Of all Springs.
Lilacs in dooryards
Holding quiet conversations with an early moon;
Lilacs watching a...Read more of this...

City That Does Not Sleep

by Federico García Lorca
 In the sky there is nobody asleep. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is asleep.
The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their cabins.
The living iguanas will come and bite the men who do not dream,
and the man who rushes out with his spirit broken will meet on the street corner
the unbelievable alligator quiet beneath the tender protest of the
stars.

Nobody is asleep...Read more of this...

A Spring Wooing

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Come on walkin' wid me, Lucy; 't ain't no time to mope erroun'
Wen de sunshine 's shoutin' glory in de sky,
An' de little Johnny-Jump-Ups 's jes' a-springin' f'om de groun',
Den a-lookin' roun' to ax each othah w'y.
Don' you hyeah dem cows a-mooin'? Dat 's dey howdy to de spring;
Ain' dey lookin' most oncommon satisfied?
Hit 's enough to mek a body...Read more of this...

Who dares to take this life from me Knows no better

by T Wignesan
for Eric Mottram

"Nur wenn das Herz erschlossen,

Dann ist die Erde schön."

Goethe.

I

An important thing in living
Is to know when to go;
He who does not know this
Has not far to go,
Though death may come and go
When you do not know.


Come, give me your hand,
Together shoulder and cheek to shoulder
We'll go, sour kana in cheeks
And in the mornings cherry sticks
To gum: the infectious...Read more of this...

Cows

by Robert William Service
 I love to watch my seven cows
In meads of buttercups abrowse,
 With guilded knees;
But even more I love to see
Them chew the cud so tranquilly
 In twilight ease.

Each is the image of content
From fragrant hours in clover spent,
 'Mid leaf and bud;
As up and down without a pause
Mechanically move their jaws
 To chew the cud.

Friend, there's a hope for...Read more of this...

Cain and Abel

by Rudyard Kipling
 Cain and Abel were brothers born.
 (Koop-la! Come along, cows!)
One raised cattle and one raised corn.
 (Koop-la! Come along! Co-hoe!)

And Cain he farmed by the river-side,
So he did not care how much it dried.

For he banked, and he sluiced, and he ditched and he led
 (And the Corn don't care for the Horn)--
A-half Euphrates out of her bed
 To...Read more of this...

Keeping Going

by Seamus Heaney
 The piper coming from far away is you
With a whitewash brush for a sporran
Wobbling round you, a kitchen chair
Upside down on your shoulder, your right arm
Pretending to tuck the bag beneath your elbow,
Your pop-eyes and big cheeks nearly bursting
With laughter, but keeping the drone going on
Interminably, between catches of breath.

*

The whitewash brush. An old blanched skirted thing
On the back...Read more of this...

Cows In Art Class

by Charles Bukowski
 good weather
is like
good women-
it doesn't always happen
and when it does
it doesn't
always last.
man is
more stable:
if he's bad
there's more chance
he'll stay that way,
or if he's good
he might hang
on,
but a woman
is changed
by
children
age
diet
conversation
sex
the moon
the absence or
presence of sun
or good times.
a woman must be nursed
into subsistence
by love
where a man can become
stronger
by being hated. 
I am drinking tonight in Spangler's Bar
and I remember the cows
I...Read more of this...

From Snow-Bound 11:1-40 116-154

by John Greenleaf Whittier
 The sun that brief December day
Rose cheerless over hills of gray,
And, darkly circled, gave at noon
A sadder light than waning moon.
Slow tracing down the thickening sky
Its mute and ominous prophecy,
A portent seeming less than threat,
It sank from sight before it set.
A chill no coat, however stout,
Of homespun stuff could quite shut out,
A hard, dull bitterness of cold,
That checked, mid-vein,...Read more of this...

Mount Bukaroo

by Henry Lawson
 Only one old post is standing -- 
Solid yet, but only one -- 
Where the milking, and the branding, 
And the slaughtering were done. 
Later years have brought dejection, 
Care, and sorrow; but we knew 
Happy days on that selection 
Underneath old Bukaroo. 

Then the light of day commencing 
Found us at the gully's head, 
Splitting timber for the...Read more of this...

Carmel Point

by Robinson Jeffers
 The extraordinary patience of things! 
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of surburban houses-
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads-
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all...Read more of this...

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