Famous Cracks Me Up Poems by Famous Poets

These are examples of famous Cracks Me Up 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 me up poems. These examples illustrate what a famous cracks me up poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).

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Villages and Plains the Streams Flow Through

by Jonas Mekas
 You too return, along with days gone,
and flow again, my blue rivers,

to carry on the songs of washerwomen,
fishermen's nets and grey wooden bridges.
Clear blue nights, smelling warm,
streams of thin mist off the meadow drift in
with distinct hoof-stomps from a fettered horse.

To carry off rioting spring thaws,
willows torn loose and yellow lily cups,
with children's shrill riots.
The summer heat, its midday...Read more of this...

Marys Song

by Sylvia Plath
 The Sunday lamb cracks in its fat.
The fat
Sacrifices its opacity. . . .

A window, holy gold.
The fire makes it precious,
The same fire

Melting the tallow heretics,
Ousting the Jews.
Their thick palls float

Over the cicatrix of Poland, burnt-out
Germany.
They do not die.

Grey birds obsess my heart,
Mouth-ash, ash of eye.
They settle. On the high

Precipice
That emptied one man into space
The ovens glowed like heavens, incandescent.

It...Read more of this...

Hay for the Horses

by Gary Snyder
Hay for the Horses

He had driven half the night
 From far down San Joaquin
 Through Mariposa, up the
 Dangerous Mountain roads,
 And pulled in at eight a.m.
 With his big truckload of hay
             behind the barn.
 With winch and ropes and hooks
 We stacked the bales up clean
...Read more of this...

41. Epistle to John Rankine

by Robert Burns
 O ROUGH, rude, ready-witted Rankine,
The wale o’ cocks for fun an’ drinkin!
There’s mony godly folks are thinkin,
 Your dreams and tricks
Will send you, Korah-like, a-sinkin
 Straught to auld Nick’s.


Ye hae saw mony cracks an’ cants,
And in your wicked, drucken rants,
Ye mak a devil o’ the saunts,
 An’ fill them fou;
And then their failings, flaws, an’ wants,
 Are a’ seen...Read more of this...

From ‘Paracelsus'

by Robert Browning
 I

TRUTH is within ourselves; it takes no rise 
From outward things, whate’er you may believe. 
There is an inmost centre in us all, 
Where truth abides in fullness; and around, 
Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in, 
This perfect, clear perception—which is truth. 
A baffling and perverting carnal mesh 
Binds it, and makes all error: and, to...Read more of this...

Chicks

by Carl Sandburg
 THE CHICK in the egg picks at the shell, cracks open one oval world, and enters another oval world.

“Cheep … cheep … cheep” is the salutation of the newcomer, the emigrant, the casual at the gates of the new world.

“Cheep … cheep” … from oval to oval, sunset to sunset, star to star.

It is at the door of this...Read more of this...

The House Of Dust: Part 03: 08: Coffins: Interlude

by Conrad Aiken
 Wind blows. Snow falls. The great clock in its tower
Ticks with reverberant coil and tolls the hour:
At the deep sudden stroke the pigeons fly . . .
The fine snow flutes the cracks between the flagstones.
We close our coats, and hurry, and search the sky.

We are like music, each voice of it pursuing
A golden separate dream, remote, persistent,
Climbing to fire,...Read more of this...

What The Thunder Said

by T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
  After the frosty silence in the gardens
  After the agony in stony places
  The shouting and the crying
  Prison and palace and reverberation
  Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
  He who was living is now dead
  We who were living are now dying
  With...Read more of this...

Advice

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
W'en you full o' worry
'Bout yo' wo'k an' sich,
W'en you kind o' bothered
Case you can't get rich,
An' yo' neighboh p'ospah
Past his jest desu'ts,
An' de sneer of comerds
Stuhes yo' heaht an' hu'ts,
Des don' pet yo' worries,
Lay 'em on de she'f,
Tek a little trouble
Brothah, wid yo'se'f.
Ef a frien' comes mou'nin'
'Bout his awful case,
You know you don' grieve him
Wid a gloomy face,
But you...Read more of this...

South of my Days

by Judith Wright
 South of my days' circle, part of my blood's country, 
rises that tableland, high delicate outline 
of bony slopes wincing under the winter, 
low trees, blue-leaved and olive, outcropping granite- 
clean, lean, hungry country. The creek's leaf-silenced, 
willow choked, the slope a tangle of medlar and crabapple 
branching over and under, blotched with a green lichen; 
and the old...Read more of this...

The Man-Moth

by Elizabeth Bishop
 Man-Moth: Newspaper misprint for "mammoth."

 Here, above,
cracks in the buldings are filled with battered moonlight.
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,
and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.
He does not see the moon; he observes only her...Read more of this...

The Floor

by Russell Edson
 The floor is something we must fight against. 
Whilst seemingly mere platform for the human 
stance, it is that place that men fall to.
 I am not dizzy. I stand as a tower, a lighthouse; 
the pale ray of my sentiency flowing from my face.

 But should I go dizzy I crash down into the floor; 
my face into...Read more of this...

Orion

by Adrienne Rich
 Far back when I went zig-zagging
through tamarack pastures
you were my genius, you
my cast-iron Viking, my helmed
lion-heart king in prison.
Years later now you're young

my fierce half-brother, staring
down from that simplified west
your breast open, your belt dragged down
by an oldfashioned thing, a sword
the last bravado you won't give over
though it weighs you down as you stride

and the stars in it are...Read more of this...

To His Orphan Grandchildren

by Victor Hugo
 ("O Charles, je te sens près de moi.") 
 
 {July, 1871.} 


 I feel thy presence, Charles. Sweet martyr! down 
 In earth, where men decay, 
 I search, and see from cracks which rend thy tomb, 
 Burst out pale morning's ray. 
 
 Close linked are bier and cradle: here the dead, 
 To charm us,...Read more of this...

July Fourth By The Ocean

by Robinson Jeffers
 The continent's a tamed ox, with all its mountains,
Powerful and servile; here is for plowland, here is
 for park and playground, this helpless
Cataract for power; it lies behind us at heel
All docile between this ocean and the other. If
 flood troubles the lowlands, or earthquake
Cracks walls, it is only a slave's blunder or the
 natural
Shudder of a new made...Read more of this...

The Battle of Alma

by William Topaz McGonagall
 'Twas on the heights of Alma the battle began.
But the Russians turned and fled every man;
Because Sir Colin Campbell's Highland Brigade put them to flight,
At the charge of the bayonet, which soon ended the fight. 

Sir Colin Campbell he did loudly cry,
Let the Highlanders go forward, they will win or die,
We'll hae nane but Hieland bonnets here,
So forward, my...Read more of this...

A Peasant

by R S Thomas
 Iago Prytherch his name, though, be it allowed,
Just an ordinary man of the bald Welsh hills,
Who pens a few sheep in a gap of cloud.
Docking mangels, chipping the green skin
From the yellow bones with a half-witted grin
Of satisfaction, or churning the crude earth
To a stiff sea of clods that glint in the wind—
So are his days spent, his spittled...Read more of this...

The Basket

by Amy Lowell
 I
The inkstand is full of ink, and the paper lies 
white and unspotted,
in the round of light thrown by a candle. Puffs of darkness 
sweep into
the corners, and keep rolling through the room behind his chair. The 
air
is silver and pearl, for the night is liquid with moonlight.
See how the roof glitters, like ice!
Over there, a slice of yellow...Read more of this...

Covering Two Years

by Weldon Kees
 This nothingness that feeds upon itself:
Pencils that turn to water in the hand,
Parts of a sentence, hanging in the air,
Thoughts breaking in the mind like glass,
Blank sheets of paper that reflect the world
Whitened the world that I was silenced by.

There were two years of that. Slowly,
Whatever splits, dissevers, cuts, cracks, ravels, or divides
To bring me to that diet of...Read more of this...

The Man From Snowy River

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 There was movement at the station, for the word has passed around
That the colt from old Regret had got away,
And had joined the wild bush horses—he was worth a thousand pound,
So all the cracks had gathered to the fray.
All the tried and noted riders from the stations near and far
Had mustered at the homestead overnight,
For the bushmen love hard...Read more of this...

An Ancient To Ancients

by Thomas Hardy
 Where once we danced, where once we sang, 
Gentlemen, 
The floors are sunken, cobwebs hang, 
And cracks creep; worms have fed upon 
The doors. Yea, sprightlier times were then 
Than now, with harps and tabrets gone, 
Gentlemen! 

Where once we rowed, where once we sailed, 
Gentlemen, 
And damsels took the tiller, veiled 
Against too strong a stare (God wot...Read more of this...

Quickstep

by A S J Tessimond
 Acknowledge the drum's whisper.
Yield to its velvet
Nudge. Cut a slow air-
Curve. Then dip (hip to hip):
Sway, swing, pedantically
Poise. Now recover,
Converting the coda
To prelude of sway-swing-
Recover.
 Acknowledge
The drum-crack's alacrity - 
Acrid exactitude -
Catch it, then slacken,
Then catch as cat catches
Rat. Trace your graph:
Loop, ellipse. Skirt an air-wall
To bend it and break it -
Thus - so - 
As the drum speaks!...Read more of this...

The Call

by Rupert Brooke
 Out of the nothingness of sleep,
The slow dreams of Eternity,
There was a thunder on the deep:
I came, because you called to me.

I broke the Night's primeval bars,
I dared the old abysmal curse,
And flashed through ranks of frightened stars
Suddenly on the universe!

The eternal silences were broken;
Hell became Heaven as I passed. --
What shall I give you as a token,
A sign...Read more of this...

Monolog From A Mattress

by Louis Untermeyer
Can that be you, la mouche? Wait till I lift
This palsied eye-lid and make sure... Ah, true.
Come in, dear fly, and pardon my delay
In thus existing; I can promise you
Next time you come you'll find no dying poet—
Without sufficient spleen to see me through,
The joke becomes too tedious a jest.
I am afraid my mind is dull to-day;
I have that—something—heavier on...Read more of this...

The Distant Winter

by Philip Levine
 from an officer's diary during the last war

I 

The sour daylight cracks through my sleep-caked lids. 
"Stephan! Stephan!" The rattling orderly 
Comes on a trot, the cold tray in his hands: 
Toast whitening with oleo, brown tea, 

Yesterday's napkins, and an opened letter. 
"Your asthma's bad, old man." He doesn't answer, 
And turns to the grey windows and the...Read more of this...

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