Famous Driftwood Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Driftwood poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous driftwood poems. These examples illustrate what a famous driftwood poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...nced,
goes on shuffling its millenniums
of quartz, granite, and basalt.
It behaves
toward the permutations of novelty—
driftwood and shipwreck, last night's
beer cans, spilt oil, the coughed-up
residue of plastic—with random
impartiality, playing catch or tag
ot touch-last like a terrier,
turning the same thing over and over,
over and over. For the ocean, nothing
is beneath consideration.
The houses
of so many mussels and periwinkles
have been abandoned here, it's hopeless
...Read more of this...
by
Clampitt, Amy
...prayer-worn floor,
By worshippers innumerous thronged of yore,
A few brown crones, familiars of the tomb,
The stranded driftwood of Faith's ebbing sea--
For these alone the finials fret the skies,
The topmost bosses shake their blossoms free,
While from the triple portals, with grave eyes,
Tranquil, and fixed upon eternity,
The cloud of witnesses still testifies.
II
The crimson panes like blood-drops stigmatise
The western floor. The aisles are mute and cold.
A rigid f...Read more of this...
by
Wharton, Edith
...ng my tea
Without sugar-
No difference.
The sparrow shits
upside down
--ah! my brain & eggs
Mayan head in a
Pacific driftwood bole
--Someday I'll live in N.Y.
Looking over my shoulder
my behind was covered
with cherry blossoms.
Winter Haiku
I didn't know the names
of the flowers--now
my garden is gone.
I slapped the mosquito
and missed.
What made me do that?
Reading haiku
I am unhappy,
longing for the Nameless.
A frog floating
in the drugstore jar:
summer rain on ...Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
...nly friend.
And I tried to sing some rollicky thing, but my song broke off in a prayer,
And I'd drowse and dream by the driftwood gleam; I'd dream of a polar bear;
I'd dream of a cloudlike polar bear that blotted the stars on high,
With ravenous jaws and flenzing claws, and the flames of hell in his eye.
And I'd trap around on the frozen ground, as a proper hunter ought,
And beasts I'd find of every kind, but never the one I sought.
Never a track in the white ice-pack that hu...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...day more and more like people lost from each other.
"Every wave on the Atlantic was like a dead seagull dragging
its driftwood artillery from horizon to horizon.
"When the ship bumped up against America, you departed
without saying anything and never saw each other again. The
last I heard of you, you were still living in Philadelphia. "
"That's what you think happened up there?" I said.
"Partly, " he said. "Yes, that's part of it. "
He took out his pipe and filled ...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...stilts high among beaks
And palavers of birds
This sandgrain day in the bent bay's grave
He celebrates and spurns
His driftwood thirty-fifth wind turned age;
Herons spire and spear.
Under and round him go
Flounders, gulls, on their cold, dying trails,
Doing what they are told,
Curlews aloud in the congered waves
Work at their ways to death,
And the rhymer in the long tongued room,
Who tolls his birthday bell,
Toils towards the ambush of his wounds;
Herons, steeple st...Read more of this...
by
Thomas, Dylan
...arge of the Iowa cavalry
Rushes on!
Can you stop the sea
When the storm waves break on the sandy shore
Driving the driftwood awrack? No more
Can the rebel resist the terrible charge
As we ride right up to their army’s marge -
They waver - the fifteen thousand men,
Waver and rally, and waver, and then
Our work is done.
Paine’s men had crossed
The swamp while our little band was lost
In the smoke and dust of the eager ride,
And are safe at last on the other side.
...Read more of this...
by
Butler, Ellis Parker
...boundary, or make
a melancholy or romantic scene of it...
"But that ***** sea looks made of wood,
half-shining, like a driftwood, sea.
And the sky looks wooden, grained with cloud.
It's like a stage-set; it is all so flat!
Those clouds are full of glistening splinters!
What is that?"
It is the monument.
"It's piled-up boxes,
outlined with shoddy fret-work, half-fallen off,
cracked and unpainted. It looks old."
--The strong sunlight, the wind from the sea,
all the conditions...Read more of this...
by
Bishop, Elizabeth
...;
But the signs showed what it had done in spring;
Good grass-land gullied out, and in the grass
Ridges of sand, and driftwood stripped of bark.
I crossed the river and swung round the mountain.
And there I met a man who moved so slow
With white-faced oxen in a heavy cart,
It seemed no hand to stop him altogether.
"What town is this?" I asked.
"This? Lunenburg."
Then I was wrong: the town of my sojourn,
Beyond the bridge, was not that of the mountain,
But only fel...Read more of this...
by
Frost, Robert
...ing,
Bunched sticks that burst their string and wrapping
And fall like jackstraws; green and blue
The evil flames of driftwood too,
And heavy, sullen lumps of coke
With still, fierce heat and ugly smoke. . . .
. . . And then the vision of his face,
And theirs, all theirs, came like a sword,
Thrice, to the heart -- and as I fell
I thought I saw a light before.
I woke. My hands were blue and sore,
Torn on the ice. I scarcely felt
The frozen sleet begin to melt
Upo...Read more of this...
by
Benet, Stephen Vincent
...s of the past
this was the thing but now he too is past.
Shall we go sit beside the Mississippi
and watch the riffraft driftwood floating by?...Read more of this...
by
Francis, Robert
...(Lines on reading "Driftwood.")
Driftwood gathered here and there
Along the beach of time;
Now and then a chip of truth
'Mid boards and boughs of rhyme;
Driftwood gathered day by day,—
The cypress and the oak,—
Twigs that in some former time
From sturdy home trees broke.
Did this wood come floating thick
All along down "Injin Crik?"
Or did kind tides bring it thee
...Read more of this...
by
Laurence Dunbar, Paul
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