Famous Diminutive Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Cows

by Paul Muldoon
 Even as we speak, there's a smoker's cough
from behind the whitethorn hedge: we stop dead in our tracks;
a distant tingle of water into a trough.

In the past half-hour—since a cattle truck
all but sent us shuffling off this mortal coil—
we've consoled ourselves with the dregs

of a bottle of Redbreast. Had Hawthorne been a Gael,
I insist, the scarlet A on Hester...Read more of this...

Schoolroom On A Wet Afternoon

by Vernon Scannell
 The unrelated paragraphs of morning
Are forgotten now; the severed heads of kings
Rot by the misty Thames; the roses of York
And Lancaster are pressed between the leaves
Of history; ******* sleep in Africa.
The complexities of simple interest lurk
In inkwells and the brittle sticks of chalk:
Afternoon is come and English Grammar.

Rain falls as though the sky has been bereaved,
Stutters its inarticulate grief...Read more of this...

Modern Love XXXI: This Golden Head

by George Meredith
 This golden head has wit in it. I live 
Again, and a far higher life, near her. 
Some women like a young philosopher; 
Perchance because he is diminutive. 
For woman's manly god must not exceed 
Proportions of the natural nursing size. 
Great poets and great sages draw no prize 
With women: but the little lap-dog breed, 
Who can be...Read more of this...

Wedding Song

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 THE tale of the Count our glad song shall record

Who had in this castle his dwelling,
Where now ye are feasting the new-married lord,

His grandson of whom we are telling.
The Count as Crusader had blazon'd his fame,
Through many a triumph exalted his name,
And when on his steed to his dwelling he came,

His castle still rear'd its proud head,
But servants and...Read more of this...

Sonnet 104 - A spot of poontang on a five-foot piece

by John Berryman
 A spot of poontang on a five-foot piece,
Diminutive, but room enough . . like clay
To finger eager on some torrid day . .
Who'd throw her black hair back, and hang, and tease.
Never, not once in all one's horny lease
To'have had a demi-lay, a pretty, gay,
Snug, slim and supple-breasted girl for play . .
She bats her big, warm eyes, and...Read more of this...

Ode To a Lemon

by Pablo Neruda
 Out of lemon flowers
loosed
on the moonlight, love's
lashed and insatiable
essences,
sodden with fragrance,
the lemon tree's yellow
emerges,
the lemons
move down
from the tree's planetarium

Delicate merchandise!
The harbors are big with it-
bazaars
for the light and the
barbarous gold.
We open
the halves
of a miracle,
and a clotting of acids
brims
into the starry
divisions:
creation's
original juices,
irreducible, changeless,
alive:
so the freshness lives on
in a lemon,
in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,
the proportions, arcane and acerb.

Cutting the...Read more of this...

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