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Famous Crate Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Landor, Walter Savage
...s freckled leaves; and weary oxen blinkt
Between the trodden corn and twisted vine,
Under whose bunches stood the empty crate,
To creak ere long beneath them carried home.
This was the season when twelve months before,
O gentle Hamadryad, true to love!
Thy mansion, thy dim mansion in the wood
Was blasted and laid desolate: but none
Dared violate its precincts, none dared pluck
The moss beneath it, which alone remain'd
Of what was thine.

Old Thallinos sat mute
In soli...Read more of this...



by Heaney, Seamus
...the sights of the sun.

They've taken the skeleton
Of the Great Irish Elk
Out of the peat, set it up
An astounding crate full of air.

Butter sunk under
More than a hundred years
Was recovered salty and white.
The ground itself is kind, black butter

Melting and opening underfoot,
Missing its last definition
By millions of years.
They'll never dig coal here,

Only the waterlogged trunks
Of great firs, soft as pulp.
Our pioneers keep striking
Inwards and d...Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...ooked up last
At my face swinging over the human bed,
And somewhere you cried, let me go let me go.

You lay in the crate of your last death,
But were not you, not finally you.
They have stuffed her cheeks, I said;
This clay hand, this mask of Elizabeth
Are not true. From within the satin
And the suede of this inhuman bed,
Something cried, let me go let me go.

2.

They gave me your ash and bony shells,
Rattling like gourds in the cardboard urn,
Rattling l...Read more of this...

by Kunitz, Stanley
..., I carry on my back
embedded in my flesh, two rows
of little white cocoons,
so neatly stacked
they look like eggs in a crate.
And I am eaten half away.

If I can gather strength enough
I'll try to burrow under a stone
and spin myself a purse
in which to sleep away the cold;
though when the sun kisses the earth
again, I know I won't be there.
Instead, out of my chrysalis
will break, like robbers from a tomb,
a swarm of parasitic flies,
leaving my wasted husk behin...Read more of this...

by Collins, Billy
...Aston Martin DB4
with cracked green leather seats.

No, it's all here,
the clear ovals of a glass of water,
a small crate of oranges, a book on Stalin,
not to mention the odd snarling fish
in a frame on the wall,
and the way these three candles--
each a different height--
are singing in perfect harmony.

So forgive me
if I lower my head now and listen
to the short bass candle as he takes a solo
while my heart
thrums under my shirt--
frog at the edge of a pond--
and my...Read more of this...



by Kipling, Rudyard
...with the Peter at the fore,
 And the fenders grind and heave,
And the derricks clack and grate, as the tackle hooks the crate,
 And the fall-rope whines through the sheave;
 It's "Gang-plank up and in," dear lass,
 It's "Hawsers warp her through!"
 And it's "All clear aft" on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,
 We're backing down on the Long Trail -- the trail that is always new.

O the mutter overside, when the port-fog holds us tied,
 And the sirens hoot their...Read more of this...

by Sandburg, Carl
...crackers
Between sun showers in a place called White Pigeon
Nestling with a blacksmith shop, a post-office,
And a berry-crate factory, where four roads cross.

On the Pecatonica River near Freeport
I have seen boys run barefoot in the leaves
Throwing clubs at the walnut trees
In the yellow-and-gold of autumn,
And there was a brown mash dry on the inside of their hands.
On the Cedar Fork Creek of Knox County
I know how the fingers of late October
Loosen the hazel nuts....Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...I am in a crate, the crate that was ours,
full of white shirts and salad greens,
the icebox knocking at our delectable knocks,
and I wore movies in my eyes,
and you wore eggs in your tunnel,
and we played sheets, sheets, sheets
all day, even in the bathtub like lunatics.
But today I set the bed afire
and smoke is filling the room,
it is getting hot enough for the ...Read more of this...

by Neruda, Pablo
...s
in the soup-greens,
artichoke field marshals,
close-order conclaves,
commands, detonations,
and voices,
a crashing of crate staves.

And
Maria
come
down
with her hamper
to
make trial
of an artichoke:
she reflects, she examines,
she candles them up to the light like an egg,
never flinching;
she bargains,
she tumbles her prize
in a market bag
among shoes and a
cabbage head,
a bottle
of vinegar; is back
in her kitchen.
The artichoke drowns in a pot.

So you have it...Read more of this...

by Brautigan, Richard
...ing in Ameri

ca Shorty one afternoon. We decided the best thing to do witl:

him was to pack him in a big shipping crate with a couple of

cases of sweet wine and send him to Nelson Algren.

 Nelson Algren is always writing about Railroad Shorty, a

hero of the Neon Wilderness (the reason for "The Face on

the Barroom Floor") and the destroyer of Dove Linkhorn in

A Walk on the Wild Side.

 We thought that Nelson Algren would make the perfect

custodian for Trout...Read more of this...

by Wilde, Oscar
...ife down along the shore,
And where their horned master sits in state
Bring strawberries and bloomy plums upon a wicker crate!

Sing on! and soon with passion-wearied face
Through the cool leaves Apollo's lad will come,
The Tyrian prince his bristled boar will chase
Adown the chestnut-copses all a-bloom,
And ivory-limbed, grey-eyed, with look of pride,
After yon velvet-coated deer the virgin maid will ride.

Sing on! and I the dying boy will see
Stain with his purple bloo...Read more of this...

by Frost, Robert
...st shining.

I put it shining anywhere I please.
By walking slowly on some evening later,
I've pulled it from a crate of crooked trees,
And brought it over glossy water, greater,
And dropped it in, and seen the image wallow,
The color run, all sorts of wonder follow....Read more of this...

by Ginsberg, Allen
...ull of bones wheaten hair falling out
enraged and reddening eye as he lay aching huge hairy head on his paws
by the egg-crate bookcase filled up with thin volumes of Plato, & Buddha.

Sat by his side every night averting my eyes from his hungry motheaten
 face
stopped eating myself he got weaker and roared at night while I had 
 nightmares
Eaten by lion in bookstore on Cosmic Campus, a lion myself starved by
 Professor Kandisky, dying in a lion's flophouse circus,
I woke ...Read more of this...

by Kipling, Rudyard
...with the Peter at the fore,
 And the fenders grind and heave,
And the derricks clack and grate, as the tackle hooks the crate,
 And the fall-rope whines through the sheave;
 It's "Gang-plank up and in," dear lass,
 It's "Hawsers warp her through!"
 And it's "All clear aft" on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,
 We're backing down on the Long Trail -- the trail that is always new.

O the mutter overside, when the port-fog holds us tied,
 And the sirens hoot their...Read more of this...

by Clark, Badger
...ay to back away_
      _And call a man a liar._
    _Their house has locks on every door;_
      _Their land is in a crate._
    _These ain't the plains of God no more,_
      _They're only real estate._

  There's land where yet no ditchers dig
    Nor cranks experiment;
  It's only lovely, free and big
    And isn't worth a cent.
  I pray that them who come to spoil
    May wait till I am dead
  Before they foul that blessed soil
    With fence and cabbage hea...Read more of this...

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