Famous Dolls Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

by Anne Sexton
 No matter what life you lead
the virgin is a lovely number:
cheeks as fragile as cigarette paper,
arms and legs made of Limoges,
lips like Vin Du Rhône,
rolling her china-blue doll eyes
open and shut.
Open to say, 
Good Day Mama,
and shut for the thrust
of the unicorn.
She is unsoiled.
She is as white as a bonefish.

Once there was a lovely virgin
called Snow White.
Say she was...Read more of this...

The Black Virgin

by G K Chesterton
 One in thy thousand statues we salute thee 
On all thy thousand thrones acclaim and claim 
Who walk in forest of thy forms and faces 
Walk in a forest calling on one name 
And, most of all, how this thing may be so 
Who know thee not are mystified to know
That one cries "Here she stands" and one cries...Read more of this...

To Lady Jane

by Vachel Lindsay
 Romance was always young.
You come today
Just eight years old
With marvellous dark hair.
Younger than Dante found you
When you turned
His heart into the way
That found the heavenly stair.

Perhaps we must be strangers.
I confess
My soul this hour is Dante's,
And your care
Should be for dolls
Whose painted hands caress
Your marvellous dark hair.

Romance, with moonflower face
And morning eyes,
And lips whose thread of scarlet prophesies
The canticles...Read more of this...

The Beginning

by Rabindranath Tagore
 "Where have I come from, where did you pick me up?" the baby asked
its mother.
She answered, half crying, half laughing, and clasping the
baby to her breast-
"You were hidden in my heart as its desire, my darling.
You were in the dolls of my childhood's games; and when with
clay I made the image of my god every morning, I made the...Read more of this...

Three Palinodias

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 I.

"Incense is hut a tribute for the gods,--
To mortals 'tis but poison."

THE smoke that from thine altar blows,

Can it the gods offend?
For I observe thou hold'st thy nose--

Pray what does this portend?
Mankind deem incense to excel

Each other earthly thing,
So he that cannot bear its smell,

No incense e'er should bring.

With unmoved face by thee at least

To dolls is homage given;
If...Read more of this...

A Sunset of the City

by Gwendolyn Brooks
 Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.
My daughters and sons have put me away with marbles and dolls,
Are gone from the house.
My husband and lovers are pleasant or somewhat polite
And night is night.

It is a real chill out,
The genuine thing.
I am not deceived, I do not think it is still summer
Because sun stays and birds...Read more of this...

The Errand

by Anne Sexton
 I've been going right on, page by page,
since we last kissed, two long dolls in a cage,
two hunger-mongers throwing a myth in and out,
double-crossing out lives with doubt,
leaving us separate now, fogy with rage.

But then I've told my readers what I think
and scrubbed out the remainder with my shrink,
have placed my bones in a jar as if possessed,
have pasted...Read more of this...

The Break

by Anne Sexton
 It was also my violent heart that broke,
falling down the front hall stairs.
It was also a message I never spoke,
calling, riser after riser, who cares

about you, who cares, splintering up
the hip that was merely made of crystal,
the post of it and also the cup.
I exploded in the hallway like a pistol.

So I fell apart. So I came all undone.
Yes....Read more of this...

The dolls wooing

by Eugene Field
 The little French doll was a dear little doll
Tricked out in the sweetest of dresses;
Her eyes were of hue
A most delicate blue
And dark as the night were her tresses;
Her dear little mouth was fluted and red,
And this little French doll was so very well bred
That whenever accosted her little mouth said
"Mamma! mamma!"

The stockinet doll, with one arm and one...Read more of this...

Cigarettes And Whiskey And Wild Wild Women

by Anne Sexton
 (from a song)

Perhaps I was born kneeling,
born coughing on the long winter,
born expecting the kiss of mercy,
born with a passion for quickness
and yet, as things progressed,
I learned early about the stockade
or taken out, the fume of the enema.
By two or three I learned not to kneel,
not to expect, to plant my fires underground
where none but the dolls, perfect and...Read more of this...

Kinky

by Denise Duhamel
 They decide to exchange heads.
Barbie squeezes the small opening under her chin 
over Ken's bulging neck socket. His wide jaw line jostles
atop his girlfriend's body, loosely,
like one of those novelty dogs
destined to gaze from the back windows of cars.
The two dolls chase each other around the orange Country Camper 
unsure what they'll do when they're within touching distance. 
Ken...Read more of this...

Ragetty Doll

by Robert William Service
 Rosemary has of dolls a dozen,
 Yet she disdains them all;
While Marie Rose, her pauper cousin
 Has just an old rag doll.
But you should see her mother it,
 And with her kisses smother it.

A twist of twill, a hank of hair,
 Fit for the rubbish bin;
How Rosemary with scorn would stare
 At its pathetic grin!
Yet Marie Rose can lover...Read more of this...

A Hedge Of Rubber Trees

by Amy Clampitt
 The West Village by then was changing; before long
the rundown brownstones at its farthest edge
would have slipped into trendier hands. She lived,
impervious to trends, behind a potted hedge of
rubber trees, with three cats, a canary—refuse 
from whose cage kept sifting down and then 
germinating, a yearning seedling choir, around
the saucers on the windowsill—and an inexorable
cohort of roaches she was...Read more of this...

The Quarrel

by Katherine Mansfield
 Our quarrel seemed a giant thing,
It made the room feel mean and small,
The books, the lamp, the furniture,
The very pictures on the wall--

Crowded upon us as we sat
Pale and terrified, face to face.
"Why do you stay?" she said, "my room
Can never be your resting place."

"Katinka, ere we part for life,
I pray you walk once more with me."
So down the...Read more of this...

The Star-Apple Kingdom

by Derek Walcott
 There were still shards of an ancient pastoral 
in those shires of the island where the cattle drank 
their pools of shadow from an older sky, 
surviving from when the landscape copied such objects as 
"Herefords at Sunset in the valley of the Wye." 
The mountain water that fell white from the mill wheel 
sprinkling like petals from the...Read more of this...

Toys And Tragedy

by Victor Hugo
 ("Enfants, on vous dira plus tard.") 
 
 {January, 1871.} 


 In later years, they'll tell you grandpapa 
 Adored his little darlings; for them did 
 His utmost just to pleasure them and mar 
 No moments with a frown or growl amid 
 Their rosy rompings; that he loved them so 
 (Though men have called him...Read more of this...

At The Smithville Methodist Church

by Stephen Dunn
 It was supposed to be Arts & Crafts for a week, 
but when she came home 
with the "Jesus Saves" button, we knew what art 
was up, what ancient craft. 

She liked her little friends. She liked the songs 
they sang when they weren't 
twisting and folding paper into dolls. 
What could be so bad? 

Jesus had been a...Read more of this...

Epitaphs For Two Players

by Vachel Lindsay
 I. EDWIN BOOTH

An old actor at the Player's Club told me that Edwin Booth first impersonated Hamlet when a barnstormer in California. There were few theatres, but the hotels were provided with crude assembly rooms for strolling players.


The youth played in the blear hotel.
The rafters gleamed with glories strange.
And winds of mourning Elsinore
Howling at chance and fate and change;
Voices...Read more of this...

The Dolls

by William Butler Yeats
 A doll in the doll-maker's house
Looks at the cradle and bawls:
'That is an insult to us.'
But the oldest of all the dolls,
Who had seen, being kept for show,
Generations of his sort,
Out-screams the whole shelf: 'Although
There's not a man can report
Evil of this place,
The man and the woman bring
Hither, to our disgrace,
A noisy and filthy thing.'
Hearing him groan and stretch
The...Read more of this...

Almswomen

by Edmund Blunden
    At Quincey's moat the squandering village ends,
    And there in the almshouse dwell the dearest friends
    Of all the village, two old dames that cling
    As close as any trueloves in the spring.
    Long, long ago they passed threescore-and-ten,
    And in...Read more of this...

In Modern Dress

by Craig Raine
 A pair of blackbirds
warring in the roses,
one or two poppies

losing their heads,
the trampled lawn
a battlefield of dolls.

Branch by pruned branch,
a child has climbed
the family tree

to queen it over us:
we groundlings search
the flowering cherry

till we find her face,
its pale prerogative
to rule our hearts.

Sir Walter Raleigh
trails his comforter
about the muddy garden,

a full-length Hilliard
in miniature hose
and padded pants.

How rakishly upturned
his fine moustache
of...Read more of this...

Upon A Dying Lady

by William Butler Yeats
 I

Her Courtesy

With the old kindness, the old distinguished grace,
She lies, her lovely piteous head amid dull red hair
propped upon pillows, rouge on the pallor of her face.
She would not have us sad because she is lying there,
And when she meets our gaze her eyes are laughter-lit,
Her speech a wicked tale that we may vie with her,
Matching our broken-hearted wit...Read more of this...

De Amicitiis

by Eugene Field
 Though care and strife
Elsewhere be rife,
Upon my word I do not heed 'em;
In bed I lie
With books hard by,
And with increasing zest I read 'em.

Propped up in bed,
So much I've read
Of musty tomes that I've a headful
Of tales and rhymes
Of ancient times,
Which, wife declares, are "simply dreadful!"

They give me joy
Without alloy;
And isn't that what books are made for?
And yet--and...Read more of this...

My Library

by Robert William Service
 Like prim Professor of a College
I primed my shelves with books of knowledge;
And now I stand before them dumb,
Just like a child that sucks its thumb,
And stares forlorn and turns away,
With dolls or painted bricks to play.

They glour at me, my tomes of learning.
"You dolt!" they jibe; "you undiscerning
Moronic oaf, you make a fuss,
With highbrow swank selecting us;
Saying: "I'll...Read more of this...

Celebrity

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 [A satire on his own Sorrows of Werther.]

ON bridges small and bridges great
Stands Nepomucks in ev'ry state,
Of bronze, wood, painted, or of stone,
Some small as dolls, some giants grown;
Each passer must worship before Nepomuck,
Who to die on a bridge chanced to have the ill luck,
When once a man with head and ears
A saint in people's eyes appears,
Or has been...Read more of this...

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