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Famous Crabs Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Doty, Mark
...Not, exactly, green:
closer to bronze
preserved in kind brine,

something retrieved
from a Greco-Roman wreck,
patinated and oddly

muscular. We cannot
know what his fantastic
legs were like--

though evidence
suggests eight
complexly folded

scuttling works
of armament, crowned
by the foreclaws'

gesture of menace
and power. A gull's
gobbled the ce...Read more of this...



by Allingham, William
...waves; 
To gather shells on sandy beach, and tempt the gloomy caves; 
To watch the flowing, ebbing tide, the boats, the crabs, The fish; 
Young men and maids to meet and smile, and form a tender wish; 
The sick and old in search of health, for all things have their turn 
And I must quit my native shore, and the winding banks of Erne! 

Farewell to every white cascade from the Harbour to Belleek
And every pool where fins may rest, and ivy-shaded creek; 
The sloping fields, the...Read more of this...

by Sandburg, Carl
...the tuxedoes.
Poets, lawyers, ad men, mason contractors, smartalecks discussing “educated jackasses,” here they put crabs into their balloon faces.
Here sit the heavy balloon face women lifting crimson lobsters into their crimson faces, lobsters out of Sargossa sea bottoms.
Here sits a man cross-examining a woman, “Where were you last night? What do you do with all your money? Who’s buying your shoes now, anyhow?”
So they sit eating whitefish, two balloon faces sw...Read more of this...

by Browning, Robert
...hows nor right nor wrong in Him, 
Nor kind, nor cruel: He is strong and Lord. 
'Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs 
That march now from the mountain to the sea; 
'Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first, 
Loving not, hating not, just choosing so. 
'Say, the first straggler that boasts purple spots 
Shall join the file, one pincer twisted off; 
'Say, this bruised fellow shall receive a worm, 
And two worms he whose nippers end in red; 
As it likes me each ti...Read more of this...

by Levine, Philip
...believed,
forms of sexual torture and
rejection undreamed of. Ahead
lay our fifteenth birthdays,
acne, deodorants, crabs, salves,
butch haircuts, draft registration,
the military and political victories
of Dwight Eisenhower, who brought us
Richard Nixon with wife and dog.
Any wonder we tried gin....Read more of this...



by Thomas, Dylan
...ed by the lovers' rub
That wipes away not crow's-foot nor the lock
Of sick old manhood on the fallen jaws,
Time and the crabs and the sweethearting crib
Would leave me cold as butter for the flies
The sea of scums could drown me as it broke
Dead on the sweethearts' toes.

This world is half the devil's and my own,
Daft with the drug that's smoking in a girl
And curling round the bud that forks her eye.
An old man's shank one-marrowed with my bone,
And all the herrings...Read more of this...

by Trumbull, John
...ring cockles from their base;
In pompous car the conq'ror bore
His captive scallops from the shore,
Ovations gain'd his crabs for fetching,
And mighty feats of oyster-catching:
'Gainst Yankies thus the war begun,
They tarr'd, and triumph'd over, one;
And fought and boasted through the season,
With force as great and equal reason.


"Yet thus though skill'd in vict'ry's toils,
They boast, not unexpert, in wiles.
For gain'd they not an equal fame in
The arts of secrecy ...Read more of this...

by Holmes, Oliver Wendell
...r, half-way to Nahant.

As for himself, he seems alert and thriving,--
Grubs up a living somehow-- what, who knows?
Crabs? mussels? weeds? Look quick! there's one just diving!
Flop! Splash! his white breast glistens-- down he goes!

And while he's under-- just about a minute--
I take advantage of the fact to say
His fishy carcase has no virtue in it
The gunning idiot's wortless hire to pay.

He knows you! "sportsmen" from suburban alleys,
Stretched under seaweed in th...Read more of this...

by Walcott, Derek
...keletons on the skin

and those roads that begin reciting their names at vespers

mention them and they will stop
those crabs that were willing to let an epoch pass
those herons like spinsters that doubted their reflections
inquiring, inquiring

those nettles that waited
those Sundays, those Sundays

those Sundays when the lights at the road's end were an occasion

those Sundays when my mother lay on her back
those Sundays when the sisters gathered like white moths
round thei...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...snow and icicled trees; 
Where the yellow-crown’d heron comes to the edge of the marsh at night and
 feeds upon small crabs; 
Where the splash of swimmers and divers cools the warm noon; 
Where the katy-did works her chromatic reed on the walnut-tree over the well; 
Through patches of citrons and cucumbers with silver-wired leaves;
Through the salt-lick or orange glade, or under conical firs; 
Through the gymnasium—through the curtain’d saloon—through the
 office or p...Read more of this...

by Pushkin, Alexander
...ir the water flowing,
Wide his eyes, unmoved the stare;
Numb the dreadful-looking body,
Arms were hanging feeble, thin;
Crabs and cancers, black and bloody,
Sucked into the swollen skin.

As the peasant slammed the shutter
(Recognized his visitant)
Horror-struck he could but mutter
"Blast you!" and began to pant.
He was shuddering, awful chaos
All night through stirred in his brain,
While the knocking shook the house
By the gates and at the pane.

People tell a dr...Read more of this...

by Roethke, Theodore
...es hanging from the elmtrees.
The slightly trembling water
Dropping a fine yellow silt where the sun stays;
And the crabs bask near the edge,
The weedy edge, alive with small snakes and bloodsuckers, -- 
I have come to a still, but not a deep center,
A point outside the glittering current;
My eyes stare at the bottom of a river,
At the irregular stones, iridescent sandgrains,
My mind moves in more than one place,
In a country half-land, half-water.

I am renewed by de...Read more of this...

by Moore, Marianne
...ge
 of iron throught the iron edge
 of the cliff; whereupon the stars,

pink
rice-grains, ink-
 bespattered jelly fish, crabs like green
 lilies, and submarine
 toadstools, slide each on the other.

All
external
 marks of abuse are present on this
 defiant edifice—
 all the physical features of

ac-
cident—lack
 of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and
 hatchet strokes, these things stand
 out on it; the chasm-side is

dead.
Repeated
 evidence ahs proved that it can l...Read more of this...

by Aiken, Conrad
...his wife and children starving.
Elaine was married and soon to have a child.
You dreamed last night of fiddler-crabs with fiddles;
They played a buzzing melody, and you smiled.

To-morrow—what? And what of yesterday?
Through soundless labyrinths of dream you pass,
Through many doors to the one door of all.
Soon as it's opened we shall hear a music:
Or see a skeleton fall . . .

We walk with you. Where is it that you lead us?
We climb the muffl...Read more of this...

by Aiken, Conrad
...his wife and children starving.
Elaine was married and soon to have a child.
You dreamed last night of fiddler-crabs with fiddles;
They played a buzzing melody, and you smiled.

To-morrow—what? And what of yesterday?
Through soundless labyrinths of dream you pass,
Through many doors to the one door of all.
Soon as it's opened we shall hear a music:
Or see a skeleton fall . . .

We walk with you. Where is it that you lead us?
We climb the muffl...Read more of this...

by Carroll, Lewis
...t for a copper halfpenny,
And that will purchase nine.

'I sometimes dig for buttered rolls,
Or set limed twigs for crabs:
I sometimes search the grassy knolls
For wheels of Hansom-cabs.
And that's the way' (he gave a wink)
'By which I get my wealth --
And very gladly will I drink
Your Honour's noble health.'

I heard him then, for I had just
Completed my design
To keep the Menai bridge from rust
By boiling it in wine.
I thanked him much for telling me
The way...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Robert
...to its hurt self, mutters and ebbs.
Waves wallow in their wash, go out and out,
Leave only the death-rattle of the crabs,
The beach increasing, its enormous snout
Sucking the ocean's side.
This is the end of running on the waves;
We are poured out like water. Who will dance
The mast-lashed master of Leviathans
Up from this field of Quakers in their unstoned graves? 

 V

When the whale's viscera go and the roll
Of its corruption overruns this world
Beyond tree-sw...Read more of this...

by Dickey, James
...rds beginning to sparkle like sand 
Pulling out the tarred poles we slept propped-up on leaning to sea 
As in land-wind crabs scuttling from under the floor as we took runs about 
Two more porch-pillars and looked out and saw something a fish-flash 
An almighty fin in trouble a moiling of secret forces a false start 
Of water a round wave growing in the whole of Cumberland Sound the one ripple. 
Payton took off without a word I could not hold him either 

But clung to the...Read more of this...

by de la Mare, Walter
...ughing drowns the parson's saw, 
And birds sit brooding in the snow, 
And Marian's nose looks red and raw 
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl, 
Then nightly sings the staring owl, 
Tu-who; 
Tu-whit, tu-who: a merry note, 
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot....Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...u please, But from elephant to fleas,
 You'll never put the lid on Love. 

 You can look where you choose, But from crabs to kangaroos,
 You'll never put the lid on Love. 

 You can look where you like, But from polywogs to pike,
 You'll never put the lid on Love. 

 You can look where you please, But from buffalo to bees,
 You'll never put the lid on Love....Read more of this...

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