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Famous Customs Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Carroll, Jim
...of fortune swings

Your will could have sped it up...
But you left that in a plane
Because it wouldn't pass customs and immigration

4/
Here's synchronicity for you:

Your music's tape was inside my walkman
When my best friend from summer camp
Called with the news about you

I listened them...
It was all there!
Your music kept cutting deeper and deeper valleys of sound
Less and less light
Until you hit solid rock

The drill bit broke
and the valley bec...Read more of this...



by Bradstreet, Anne
...the Common-Weal.
166 So many obstacles comes in their way
167 As puts me to a stand what I should say.
168 Old customs, new Prerogatives stood on.
169 Had they not held law fast, all had been gone,
170 Which by their prudence stood them in such stead
171 They took high Strafford lower by the head,
172 And to their Laud be 't spoke they held 'n th' Tower
173 All England's metropolitan that hour.
174 This done, an Act they would have passed fain
175 No prelate ...Read more of this...

by Wilmot, John
...My pet to write what I would fain forget?
Or name that lost thing, love, without a tear,
Since so debauched by ill-bred customs here?
Love, the most generous passion of the mind,
The softest refuge innocence can find,
The safe director of unguided youth,
Fraught with kind wishes, and secured by truth;
That cordial drop heaven in our cup has thrown
To make the nauseous draught of life go down;
On which one only blessing; God might raise
In lands of atheists, subsidies of prais...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...u teach as the land and sea, the bodies of men,
 womanhood,
 amativeness, angers, teach?
Have you sped through fleeting customs, popularities? 
Can you hold your hand against all seductions, follies, whirls, fierce contentions? are
 you
 very strong? are you really of the whole people? 
Are you not of some coterie? some school or mere religion? 
Are you done with reviews and criticisms of life? animating now to life itself? 
Have you vivified yourself from the maternity of Th...Read more of this...

by Ginsberg, Allen
...all day
Supported by the CIA

The policeman's name was Mr. Phao
He peddled dope grand scale and how
Chief of border customs paid
By Central Intelligence's U.S. A.I.D.

The whole operation, Newspapers say
Supported by the CIA

He got so sloppy & peddled so loose
He busted himself & cooked his own goose
Took the reward for an opium load
Seizing his own haul which same he resold

Big time pusher for a decade turned grey
Working for the CIA

Touby Lyfong h...Read more of this...



by Hacker, Marilyn
...watch, pale
and less talkative. A border, passport control,
draw near: rubber stamp or interrogation?
You hope the customs officer lunched well;
reflect on the recurrent implication
of the dream's forfeit. One night in jail?...Read more of this...

by Rilke, Rainer Maria
...tly hinders their souls from proceeding onward.
Of course it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer
to give up customs one barely had time to learn
not to see roses and other promising Things
in terms of a human future; no longer to be
what one was in infinitely anxious hands; to leave
even one's own first name behind forgetting it
as easily as a child abandons a broken toy.
Strange to no longer desire one's desires. Strange
to see meanings that clung ...Read more of this...

by Jonson, Ben
...Nor that your beauty wanted not a dower, Do I reflect.   Some alderman has power, Or cozening farmer of the customs, soAnd raise not virtue ;  they may vice enhance. My mirror is more subtle, clear, refined, And.takes and gives the beauties of the mind ; Though it reject not those of fortune :  such As blood, and match.  Wherein, how more than much Are you engaged to your happy fate, For such a lot !  that mixt you with a state ...Read more of this...

by Bible, The
...May you never be conformed
To the world and all its ways
To be fashioned by its customs
And to do what others say
May you be so transformed
By the renewing of your mind
As you meditate on God's word,
In His presence you will find
That you will be renewed
And changed so you may prove
What is the perfect will of God
And that which is good for you
For God so longs for us
To become as Jesus Christ
To always walk in conformity
T...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...f the ability of the universe; 
When he or she appears, materials are overaw’d, 
The dispute on the Soul stops,
The old customs and phrases are confronted, turn’d back, or laid away. 

What is your money-making now? what can it do now? 
What is your respectability now? 
What are your theology, tuition, society, traditions, statute-books, now? 
Where are your jibes of being now?
Where are your cavils about the Soul now? 

7
A sterile landscape covers the ore—there is as go...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...r
 the
 skull-bones, 
Under the broadcloth and gloves, under the ribbons and artificial flowers, 
Keeping fair with the customs, speaking not a syllable of itself,
Speaking of anything else, but never of itself. 

16
Allons! through struggles and wars! 
The goal that was named cannot be countermanded. 

Have the past struggles succeeded? 
What has succeeded? yourself? your nation? nature?
Now understand me well—It is provided in the essence of things, that from any fr...Read more of this...

by Lanier, Sidney
...all cast my church a bell,'
Loud cried the Future from the farthest hills:
`Ye groaning forces, crack me every shell
Of customs, old constraints, and narrow ills;
Thou, lithe Invention, wake and pry and guess,
Till thy deft mind invents me Happiness.'

"And I beheld high scaffoldings of creeds
Crumbling from round Religion's perfect Fane:
And a vast noise of rights, wrongs, powers, needs,
-- Cries of new Faiths that called `This Way is plain,'
-- Grindings of upper agains...Read more of this...

by Jeffers, Robinson
...e Gods are little troubled toward men, at the end of each period
A sign is declared in heaven
Indicating new times, new customs, a changed people; the Romans
Rule, and Etruria is finished;
A wise mariner will trim the sails to the wind."

 I heard yesterday
So shrill and mournful a trumpet-blast,
It was hard to be wise.... You must eat change and endure; not be much troubled
For the people; they will have their happiness.
When the republic grows too he...Read more of this...

by Chesterton, G K
..., and it is feared that he may have been devoured by the natives, as there has been a considerable revival of religious customs among the Polynesians.--A real paragraph from a real Paper; only the names altered.

It was Isaiah Bunter
Who sailed to the world's end,
And spread religion in a way
That he did not intend.

He gave, if not the gospel-feast,
At least a ritual meal;
And in a highly painful sense
He was devoured with zeal.

And who are we (as Henson say...Read more of this...

by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...top 
Blood-red, and in the sleeping mere below 
Blood-red. And in the strength of this I rode, 
Shattering all evil customs everywhere, 
And past through Pagan realms, and made them mine, 
And clashed with Pagan hordes, and bore them down, 
And broke through all, and in the strength of this 
Come victor. But my time is hard at hand, 
And hence I go; and one will crown me king 
Far in the spiritual city; and come thou, too, 
For thou shalt see the vision when I go....Read more of this...

by Dryden, John
...e buyer is their prey; 
The knack of trades is living on the spoil; 
They boast e'en when each other they beguile. 
Customs to steal is such a trivial thing 
That 'tis their charter to defraud their King. 
All hands unite of every jarring sect; 
They cheat the country first, and then infect. 
They for God's cause their monarchs dare dethrone, 
And they'll be sure to make His cause their own. 
Whether the plotting Jesuit laid the plan 
Of murdering kings, or th...Read more of this...

by Miller, Alice Duer
...Americans study English history.

I saw the picture of every son—
Percy, the eldest, and John; and Bill
In Chinese Customs, and the youngest one
Peter, the sailor, at Osborne still;
And the daughter, Enid, married, alas,
To a civil servant in far Madras.

A little thing happened, just before
We left— the evening papers came;
John, flicking them over to find a score,
Spoke for the first time a certain name—
The name of a town in a distant land
Etched on our hearts by ...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...epublics—what pastoral tribes and nomads; 
What histories, rulers, heroes, perhaps transcending all others; 
What laws, customs, wealth, arts, traditions;
What sort of marriage—what costumes—what physiology and phrenology; 
What of liberty and slavery among them—what they thought of death and the soul; 
Who were witty and wise—who beautiful and poetic—who brutish and
 undevelop’d; 
Not a mark, not a record remains—And yet all remains. 

O I know that those men and women w...Read more of this...

by Duhamel, Denise
...According to Culture Shock:
A Guide to Customs and Etiquette 
of Filipinos, when my husband says yes,
he could also mean one of the following:
a.) I don't know.
b.) If you say so.
c.) If it will please you.
d.) I hope I have said yes unenthusiastically enough
for you to realize I mean no.
You can imagine the confusion 
surrounding our movie dates, the laundry,
who ...Read more of this...

by Gibran, Kahlil
...bird, soaring freely here and there in the fields. Today I am a slave to fickle wealth, society's rules, and city's customs, and purchased friends, pleasing the people by conforming to the strange and narrow laws of man. I was born to be free and enjoy the bounty of life, but I find myself like a beast of burden so heavily laden with gold that his back is breaking. 

"Where are the spacious plains, the singing brooks, the pure breeze, the closeness of Nature? Wher...Read more of this...

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