Famous Dawdling Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Casualty

...of his lane
To the respectable
Purring of the hearse...
They move in equal pace
With the habitual
Slow consolation
Of a dawdling engine,
The line lifted, hand
Over fist, cold sunshine
On the water, the land
Banked under fog: that morning
I was taken in his boat,
The screw purling, turning
Indolent fathoms white,
I tasted freedom with him.
To get out early, haul
Steadily off the bottom,
Dispraise the catch, and smile
As you find a rhythm
Working you, slow mile by mile,
Into yo...Read more of this...
by Heaney, Seamus


Death Wants More Death

...k stranded to straw;
I shake the killer loose
and he walks lame and peeved
towards some dark corner
but I intercept his dawdling
his crawling like some broken hero,
and the straws smash his legs
now waving
above his head
and looking
looking for the enemy 
and somewhat valiant,
dying without apparent pain
simply crawling backward
piece by piece
leaving nothing there
until at last the red gut sack
splashes
its secrets,
and I run child-like
with God's anger a step behind,
back t...Read more of this...
by Bukowski, Charles

Heaven

...Fish (fly-replete, in depth of June,
Dawdling away their wat'ry noon)
Ponder deep wisdom, dark or clear,
Each secret fishy hope or fear.
Fish say, they have their Stream and Pond;
But is there anything Beyond?
This life cannot be All, they swear,
For how unpleasant, if it were!
One may not doubt that, somehow, Good
Shall come of Water and of Mud;
And, sure, the reverent eye must see
A Purpose i...Read more of this...
by Brooke, Rupert

Memories of West Street and Lepke

...al tuck,"
and pointed out the T-shirted back
of Murder Incorporated's Czar Lepke,
there piling towels on a rack,
or dawdling off to his little segregated cell full
of things forbidden to the common man:
a portable radio, a dresser, two toy American
flags tied together with a ribbon of Easter palm.
Flabby, bald, lobotomized,
he drifted in a sheepish calm,
where no agonizing reappraisal
jarred his concentration on the electric chair
hanging like an oasis in his air
...Read more of this...
by Lowell, Robert

The Testing-Tree

...g myself down
that on the given course
I was the world’s fastest human. 

2

Around the bend
that tried to loop me home
dawdling came natural
across a nettled field
riddled with rabbit-life
where the bees sank sugar-wells
in the trunks of the maples
and a stringy old lilac
more than two stories tall
blazing with mildew
remembered a door in the 
long teeth of the woods.
All of it happened slow:
brushing the stickseed off,
wading through jewelweed
strangled by angel’s hair,
spo...Read more of this...
by Kunitz, Stanley


When I'm among a Blaze of Lights

...When I’m among a blaze of lights, 
With tawdry music and cigars 
And women dawdling through delights, 
And officers in cocktail bars, 
Sometimes I think of garden nights
And elm trees nodding at the stars. 

I dream of a small firelit room 
With yellow candles burning straight, 
And glowing pictures in the gloom, 
And kindly books that hold me late.
Of things like these I choose to think 
When I can never be alone: 
Then someone sa...Read more of this...
by Sassoon, Siegfried

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