Famous Cracks Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Cracks poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous cracks poems. These examples illustrate what a famous cracks poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Burns, Robert
...seen that night.
But Merran sat behint their backs,
Her thoughts on Andrew Bell:
She lea’es them gashin at their cracks,
An’ slips out-by hersel’;
She thro’ the yard the nearest taks,
An’ for the kiln she goes then,
An’ darklins grapit for the bauks,
And in the blue-clue 9 throws then,
Right fear’t that night.
An’ ay she win’t, an’ ay she swat—
I wat she made nae jaukin;
Till something held within the pat,
Good L—d! but she was quaukin!
But whether ’twas th...Read more of this...
by
Mayakovsky, Vladimir
...ainst my ribs.
I¡¯ll leap out! Out! Out!
They¡¯ve collapsed.
You can¡¯t leap out of a heart!
From the cracks of the lips
upon a smouldering face
a cinder of a kiss rises to leap.
Mamma!
I cannot sing.
In the heart¡¯s chapel the choir loft catches fire!
The scorched figurines of words and numbers
scurry from the skull
like children from a flaming building.
Thus fear,
in its effort to grasp at the sky,
lifted high
the fl...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Robert
...l)
--To Abib, all-sagacious in our art,
Breeder in me of what poor skill I boast,
Like me inquisitive how pricks and cracks
Befall the flesh through too much stress and strain,
Whereby the wily vapour fain would slip
Back and rejoin its source before the term,--
And aptest in contrivance (under God)
To baffle it by deftly stopping such:--
The vagrant Scholar to his Sage at home
Sends greeting (health and knowledge, fame with peace)
Three samples of true snakestone-...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...eal estate
and makes a pile.
From homogenized to martinis at lunch.
Or the charwoman
who is on the bus when it cracks up
and collects enough from the insurance.
From mops to Bonwit Teller.
That story.
Once
the wife of a rich man was on her deathbed
and she said to her daughter Cinderella:
Be devout. Be good. Then I will smile
down from heaven in the seam of a cloud.
The man took another wife who had
two daughters, pretty enough
but with heart...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...one—red, white, black, are all deific;
In each house is the ovum—it comes forth after a thousand years.
Spots or cracks at the windows do not disturb me;
Tall and sufficient stand behind, and make signs to me;
I read the promise, and patiently wait.
This is a full-grown lily’s face,
She speaks to the limber-hipp’d man near the garden pickets,
Come here, she blushingly cries—Come nigh to me, limber-hipp’d
man,
Stand at my side till I lean as high as I can upon...Read more of this...
by
Hikmet, Nazim
...s terrible!
In this palace that imprisons the past
I am placed under such a heavy sentence
that as the paint on my face cracks out of boredom
I'm forced to keep grinning without letting up.
Because
I am the Gioconda from Florence
whose smile is more famous than Florence.
I am bored with the Louvre Museum.
And since you get sick soon enough
of conversing with the past,
I decided
from now on
to keep a diary.
Writing of today may be of some help
in forgett...Read more of this...
by
Chesterton, G K
...ests curl,
Splashed with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the pearl;
They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of the ground,--
They gather and they wonder and give worship to Mahound.
And he saith, "Break up the mountains where the hermit-folk can hide,
And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint abide,
And chase the Giaours flying night and day, not giving rest,
For that which was our trouble comes again out of the west.
We have set th...Read more of this...
by
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...t or bird or fish, or opulent flower.
But till this cosmic order everywhere
Shatter'd into one earthquake m one day
Cracks all to pieces, -- and that hour perhaps
Is not so far when momentary man
Shall seem no more a something to himself,
But he, his hopes and hates, his homes and fanes
And even his bones long laid within the grave,
The very sides of the grave itself shall pass,
Vanishing, atom and void, atom and void,
Into the unseen for ever, -- till that hour,
My golde...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...er’s wife singing;
I hear in the distance the sounds of children, and of animals early in the day;
I hear quick rifle-cracks from the riflemen of East Tennessee and Kentucky, hunting on
hills;
I hear emulous shouts of Australians, pursuing the wild horse;
I hear the Spanish dance, with castanets, in the chestnut shade, to the rebeck and guitar;
I hear continual echoes from the Thames;
I hear fierce French liberty songs;
I hear of the Italian boat-sculler the musical re...Read more of this...
by
Wilbur, Richard
...ession of ostentatious meanness,
And it must be said of the citizens (muttering by
In their ratty sheepskins, shying at cracks in the sidewalk)
That they lack the peace of mind of the truly humble.
The tenor of life is careful, even in the stiff
Unsmiling carelessness of the border-guards
And douaniers, who admit, whenever they can,
Not merely the usual carloads of deodorant
But gypsies, g-strings, hasheesh, and contraband pigments.
Their complete negligence is reserv...Read more of this...
by
Plath, Sylvia
...n, repeats our name
but scrupulously reflects the usual terror.
Just how guilty are we when the ceiling
reveals no cracks that can be decoded? when washbowl
maintains it has no more holy calling
than physical ablution, and the towel
dryly disclaims that fierce troll faces lurk
in its explicit folds? or when the window,
blind with steam, will not admit the dark
which shrouds our prospects in ambiguous shadow?
Twenty years ago, the familiar tub
bred an ample batch of omen...Read more of this...
by
Atwood, Margaret
...
coil; even the too-fixed stare of the wide windows
give momentary access to
the landscape behind or under
the future cracks in the plaster
when the houses, capsized, will slide
obliquely into the clay seas, gradual as glaciers
that right now nobody notices.
That is where the City Planners
with the insane faces of political conspirators
are scattered over unsurveyed
territories, concealed from each other,
each in his own private blizzard;
guessing directions, they...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...y at a dash.
From other shops, the noise of striking blows:
Pounds, thumps, and whacks;
Wooden sounds: splinters -- cracks.
Paris is full of the galloping of horses and the knocking of hammers.
"Hullo! Friend Martin, is business slack
That you are in the street this morning? Don't turn your
back
And scuttle into your shop like a rabbit to its hole.
I've just been taking a stroll.
The stinking Cossacks are bivouacked all up and down the Champs
Elysees.Read more of this...
by
Aiken, Conrad
...the walls;
Blowing the water that gleams in the street;
Blowing the rain, the sleet.
In the dark alley, an old tree cracks and falls,
Oak-boughs moan in the haunted air;
Lamps blow down with a crash and tinkle of glass . . .
Darkness whistles . . . Wild hours pass . . .
And those whom sleep eludes lie wide-eyed, hearing
Above their heads a goblin night go by;
Children are waked, and cry,
The young girl hears the roar in her sleep, and ...Read more of this...
by
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...ofs and sucking up the drains,
And shadowing down the champaign till it strikes
On a wood, and takes, and breaks, and cracks, and splits,
And twists the grain with such a roar that Earth
Reels, and the herdsmen cry; for everything
Game way before him: only Florian, he
That loved me closer than his own right eye,
Thrust in between; but Arac rode him down:
And Cyril seeing it, pushed against the Prince,
With Psyche's colour round his helmet, tough,
Strong, supple, sin...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...lowly from his play
And walk round the room, feeling his way
From table to chair, from chair to door,
Stepping over the cracks in the floor,
Till reaching the table again, her face
Would bring recollection, and no solace
Could balm his hurt till unconsciousness
Stifled him and his great distress.
One morning he threw the street door wide
On coming in, and his vigorous stride
Made the tools on his table rattle and jump.
In his hands he carried a new-burst clump
Of lau...Read more of this...
by
Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...ng
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
T...Read more of this...
by
Plath, Sylvia
...feel no lack. I feel a lack.
I hold my fingers up, ten white pickets.
See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks.
I cannot contain it. I cannot contain my life.
I shall be a heroine of the peripheral.
I shall not be accused by isolate buttons,
Holes in the heels of socks, the white mute faces
Of unanswered letters, coffined in a letter case.
I shall not be accused, I shall not be accused.
The clock shall not find me wanting, nor these st...Read more of this...
by
Shakur, Tupac
...g, believing that this world is a prison
It's like a ghetto we can never leave
A broken rose giving bloom through the cracks of the concrete
So many things for us to see
Things to be
Our history so full of tragedy and misery
To all the homies who never made it home
The dead peers I shed tattooed tears for when I'm alone
Picture us inside a ghetto heaven
A place to rest finding peace through this land of stress
In my chest I feel pain come in sudden storms
A life fu...Read more of this...
by
Neruda, Pablo
...to hospitals where the bones fly out the window,
into shoeshops that smell like vinegar,
and certain streets hideous as cracks in the skin.
There are sulphur-colored birds, and hideous intestines
hanging over the doors of houses that I hate,
and there are false teeth forgotten in a coffeepot,
there are mirrors
that ought to have wept from shame and terror,
there are umbrellas everywhere, and venoms, and umbilical
cords.
I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my sho...Read more of this...
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