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Famous Dropping Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Whitman, Walt
...s on
 shore
 work’d by horses—the clearing, curing, and packing-houses; 
Deep in the forest, in piney woods, turpentine dropping from the incisions in the
 trees—There
 are the turpentine works,
There are the ******* at work, in good health—the ground in all directions is
 cover’d
 with
 pine straw: 
—In Tennessee and Kentucky, slaves busy in the coalings, at the forge, by the
 furnace-blaze, or
 at the corn-shucking; 
In Virginia, the planter’s son returning after a long abs...Read more of this...



by Milton, John
...hile, welcome joy and feast,
Midnight shout and revelry,
Tipsy dance and jollity.
Braid your locks with rosy twine,
Dropping odours, dropping wine.
Rigour now is gone to bed;
And Advice with scrupulous head,
Strict Age, and sour Severity,
With their grave saws, in slumber lie.
We, that are of purer fire,
Imitate the starry quire,
Who, in their nightly watchful spheres,
Lead in swift round the months and years.
The sounds and seas, with all their finny drove,
N...Read more of this...

by Keats, John
...focate true blessings in a curse.
Half-happy, by comparison of bliss,
Is miserable. 'Twas even so with this
Dew-dropping melody, in the Carian's ear;
First heaven, then hell, and then forgotten clear,
Vanish'd in elemental passion.

 And down some swart abysm he had gone,
Had not a heavenly guide benignant led
To where thick myrtle branches, 'gainst his head
Brushing, awakened: then the sounds again
Went noiseless as a passing noontide rain
Over a bower, where lit...Read more of this...

by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...,
Clangs
The bell.


II

Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing,
The silent withering of autumn flowers
Dropping their petals and remaining motionless;
Where is there and end to the drifting wreckage,
The prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable
Prayer at the calamitous annunciation?

There is no end, but addition: the trailing
Consequence of further days and hours,
While emotion takes to itself the emotionless
Years of living among the breakage
Of what...Read more of this...

by Keats, John
...ach gush of sounds,
Each family of rapturous hurried notes,
That fell, one after one, yet all at once,
Like pearl beads dropping sudden from their string:
And then another, then another strain,
Each like a dove leaving its olive perch,
With music wing'd instead of silent plumes,
To hover round my head, and make me sick
Of joy and grief at once. Grief overcame,
And I was stopping up my frantic ears,
When, past all hindrance of my trembling hands,
A voice came sweeter, swee...Read more of this...



by Thoreau, Henry David
...t or the hunter's moon
Turn my midnight into mid-noon?
I am all sere and yellow,
And to my core mellow.
The mast is dropping within my woods,
The winter is lurking within my moods,
And the rustling of the withered leaf
Is the constant music of my grief.......Read more of this...

by Plath, Sylvia
...ows that lacerate the sky, while knowing
the secret of their ecstasy's in going;
 some day, moving, one will drop,
and, dropping, die, to trace a wound that heals
only to reopen as flesh congeals:
 cycling phoenix never stops. 

So we shall walk barefoot on walnut shells
of withered worlds, and stamp out puny hells
 and heavens till the spirits squeak
surrender: to build our bed as high as jack's
bold beanstalk; lie and love till sharp scythe hacks
 away our rationed days...Read more of this...

by Milton, John
...mock our scant manuring, and require 
More hands than ours to lop their wanton growth: 
Those blossoms also, and those dropping gums, 
That lie bestrown, unsightly and unsmooth, 
Ask riddance, if we mean to tread with ease; 
Mean while, as Nature wills, night bids us rest. 
To whom thus Eve, with perfect beauty adorned 
My Author and Disposer, what thou bidst 
Unargued I obey: So God ordains; 
God is thy law, thou mine: To know no more 
Is woman's happiest knowledge, and...Read more of this...

by Milton, John
...odour blown, 
Grateful to appetite, more pleased my sense 
Than smell of sweetest fennel, or the teats 
Of ewe or goat dropping with milk at even, 
Unsucked of lamb or kid, that tend their play. 
To satisfy the sharp desire I had 
Of tasting those fair apples, I resolved 
Not to defer; hunger and thirst at once, 
Powerful persuaders, quickened at the scent 
Of that alluring fruit, urged me so keen. 
About the mossy trunk I wound me soon; 
For, high from ground, the b...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...ments! full of grain and trees. 

O for the voices of animals! O for the swiftness and balance of fishes!
O for the dropping of rain-drops in a poem! 
O for the sunshine, and motion of waves in a poem. 

O the joy of my spirit! it is uncaged! it darts like lightning! 
It is not enough to have this globe, or a certain time—I will have thousands of
 globes,
 and all time. 

2
O the engineer’s joys!
To go with a locomotive! 
To hear the hiss of steam—the merry shriek...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...as divinely as any is here. 

12
You Hottentot with clicking palate! You woolly-hair’d hordes! 
You own’d persons, dropping sweat-drops or blood-drops! 
You human forms with the fathomless ever-impressive countenances of brutes! 
I dare not refuse you—the scope of the world, and of time and space, are upon me.

You poor koboo whom the meanest of the rest look down upon, for all your glimmering
 language
 and
 spirituality! 
You low expiring aborigines of the hills of...Read more of this...

by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...nd snakelike slimed his victim ere he gorged;
And oft at Bible meetings, o'er the rest
Arising, did his holy oily best,
Dropping the too rough H in Hell and Heaven,
To spread the Word by which himself had thriven."
How like you this old satire?' 

`Nay,' she said
`I loathe it: he had never kindly heart,
Nor ever cared to better his own kind,
Who first wrote satire, with no pity in it.
But will you hear MY dream, for I had one
That altogether went to music? Still
It aw...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...on, but a little while alighting,
Curious envelop’d messages delivering, 
Sparkles hot, seed ethereal, down in the dirt dropping, 
Myself unknowing, my commission obeying, to question it never daring, 
To ages, and ages yet, the growth of the seed leaving, 
To troops out of me, out of the army, the war arising—they the tasks I have set
 promulging,
To women certain whispers of myself bequeathing—their affection me more clearly
 explaining, 
To young men my problems offering—n...Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...mous

Better, 
despite the worms talking to 
the mare's hoof in the field; 
better, 
despite the season of young girls 
dropping their blood; 
better somehow 
to drop myself quickly 
into an old room. 
Better (someone said) 
not to be born 
and far better 
not to be born twice 
at thirteen 
where the boardinghouse, 
each year a bedroom, 
caught fire. 

Dear friend, 
I will have to sink with hundreds of others 
on a dumbwaiter into hell. 
I will be a light thing.Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...he pond
and know that beauty has walked over my head,
into this bedroom and out,
flowing out through the window screen,
dropping deep into the water
to hide.

I will observe the daisies
fade and dry up
wuntil they become flour,
snowing themselves onto the table
beside the drone of the refrigerator,
beside the radio playing Frankie
(as often as FM will allow)
snowing lightly, a tremor sinking from the ceiling--
as twenty-five years split from my side
like a growth that I s...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Amy
...the reaches of the river,
The tapping goes on like heart-beats in a fever.
The church-bells chime
Hours and hours,
Dropping days in showers.
Bang! Rap! Tap!
Go the hammers all the time.
They have planked up her timbers
And the nails are driven to the head;
They have decked her over,
And again, and again.
The shoring-up beams shudder at the strain.
Black and blue breeches,
Pigtails bound and shining:
Like ants crawling about,
The hull swarms with carpenter...Read more of this...

by Warton, Thomas
...tals of the saffron east
She sheds fresh roses, and ambrosial dews.
Yet not ungrateful is the morn's approach,
When dropping wet she comes, and clad in clouds,
While through the damp air scowls the lowering south,
Blackening the landscape's face, that grove and hill
In formless vapours undistinguish'd swim:
Th' afflicted of the sadden'd groves
Hail not the sullen gloom; the waving elms
That, hoar through time, and ranged in thick array,
Enclose with stately row some rural...Read more of this...

by Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
...weet sound,
Then darted to the Sun;
Slowly the sounds came back again,
Now mixed, now one by one.

Sometimes a-dropping from the sky
I heard the sky-lark sing;
Sometimes all little birds that are,
How they seemed to fill the sea and air
With their sweet jargoning!

And now 'twas like all instruments,
Now like a lonely flute;
And now it is an angel's song,
That makes the heavens be mute.

It ceased; yet still the sails made on
A pleasant noise till noo...Read more of this...

by Chaucer, Geoffrey
...lde thunder dint* and fiery leven** * stroke **lightning
Mote* thy wicked necke be to-broke. *may
Thou say'st, that dropping houses, and eke smoke,
And chiding wives, make men to flee
Out of their owne house; ah! ben'dicite,
What aileth such an old man for to chide?
Thou say'st, we wives will our vices hide,
Till we be fast,* and then we will them shew. *wedded
Well may that be a proverb of a shrew.* *ill-tempered wretch
Thou say'st, that oxen, asses, horses, houn...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...all its horrors, serves, 
And how now, or at any time, each serves the exquisite transition of death. 

2
OF seeds dropping into the ground—of birth,
Of the steady concentration of America, inland, upward, to impregnable and swarming
 places, 
Of what Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio and the rest, are to be, 
Of what a few years will show there in Nebraska, Colorado, Nevada, and the rest; 
(Or afar, mounting the Northern Pacific to Sitka or Aliaska;) 
Of what the feuillage of Ame...Read more of this...

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