Famous Ducks Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The Old Australian Ways

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 The London lights are far abeam 
Behind a bank of cloud, 
Along the shore the gaslights gleam, 
The gale is piping loud; 
And down the Channel, groping blind, 
We drive her through the haze 
Towards the land we left behind -- 
The good old land of `never mind', 
And old Australian ways. 

The narrow ways of English folk 
Are...Read more of this...

There was an old person of Bray

by Edward Lear
There was an old person of Bray,Who sang through the whole of the dayTo his ducks and his pigs, whom he fed upon figs,That valuable person of Bray. ...Read more of this...

The Gardener LXXXIV: Over the Green

by Rabindranath Tagore
 Over the green and yellow rice-fields
sweep the shadows of the autumn
clouds followed by the swift-chasing
sun.
The bees forget to sip their honey;
drunken with light they foolishly hover
and hum.
The ducks in the islands of the river
clamour in joy for mere nothing.
Let none go back home, brothers,
this morning, let none go to work.
Let us take the blue sky by storm
and plunder space...Read more of this...

Psalm Concerning the Castle

by Denise Levertov
 Let me be at the place of the castle.
Let the castle be within me.
Let it rise foursquare from the moat's ring.
Let the moat's waters reflect green plumage of ducks, let the shells of swimming turtles break the surface or be seen through the rippling depths.
Let horsemen be stationed at the rim of it, and a dog,
always alert on the...Read more of this...

Jueju, No. 1 of 2 (In Late Sun, the River and Hills are Beautiful)

by Du Fu
 Late sun river hill beautiful Spring wind flower grass fragrant Mud thaw fly swallow Sand warm sleep mandarin duck In late sun, the river and hills are beautiful, The spring breeze bears the fragrance of flowers and grass. The mud has thawed, and swallows fly around, On the warm sand, mandarin ducks are sleeping....Read more of this...

Clover

by Sidney Lanier
 Inscribed to the Memory of John Keats.



Dear uplands, Chester's favorable fields,
My large unjealous Loves, many yet one --
A grave good-morrow to your Graces, all,
Fair tilth and fruitful seasons!
Lo, how still!
The midmorn empties you of men, save me;
Speak to your lover, meadows! None can hear.
I lie as lies yon placid Brandywine,
Holding the hills and heavens in my heart
For contemplation.
'Tis a...Read more of this...

An Evening Of Poetry

by Barry Tebb
 Arriving for a reading an hour too early:

Ruefully, the general manager stopped putting out the chairs.

“You don’t get any help these days. I have

To sort out everything from furniture to faxes.

Why not wander round the park? There are ducks

And benches where you can sit and watch.”



I realized it was going to be a hungry evening

With not even a packet...Read more of this...

Hiawathas Photographing

by Lewis Carroll
 From his shoulder Hiawatha
Took the camera of rosewood,
Made of sliding, folding rosewood;
Neatly put it all together.
In its case it lay compactly,
Folded into nearly nothing; 

But he opened out the hinges,
Pushed and pulled the joints and hinges,
Till it looked all squares and oblongs,
Like a complicated figure
In the Second Book of Euclid. 

This he perched upon a tripod -
Crouched beneath its...Read more of this...

The Winds Message

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 There came a whisper down the Bland between the dawn and dark, 
Above the tossing of the pines, above the river's flow; 
It stirred the boughs of giant gums and stalwart iron-bark; 
It drifted where the wild ducks played amid the swamps below; 
It brought a breath of mountain air from off the hills of pine, 
A scent of...Read more of this...

ducks and wisdom

by Rg Gregory
 [from a motif by Jean Dunand (1877-1942)]

seven lacqueur ducks on a silver pond
their rippling held in a moveless frieze
nothing now can help them swim beyond
the stoned edges (invent a new-age breeze)
eternity is water starved of trees
their fixture is our own - for all we fidget
history puts us down as one dead digit

silver-ponded we can't stop being stirred
to leap behind...Read more of this...

The Living Dead

by Robert William Service
 Since I have come to years sedate
I see with more and more acumen
The bitter irony of Fate,
The vanity of all things human.
Why, just to-day some fellow said,
As I surveyed Fame's outer portal:
"By gad! I thought that you were dead."
Poor me, who dreamed to be immortal!

But that's the way with many men
Whose name one fancied time-defying;
We thought that they were...Read more of this...

111. Address to Beelzebub

by Robert Burns
 LONG life, my Lord, an’ health be yours,
Unskaithed by hunger’d Highland boors;
Lord grant me nae duddie, desperate beggar,
Wi’ dirk, claymore, and rusty trigger,
May twin auld Scotland o’ a life
She likes—as butchers like a knife.


Faith you and Applecross were right
To keep the Highland hounds in sight:
I doubt na! they wad bid nae better,
Than let them ance out owre the water,
Then...Read more of this...

Study In Orange And White

by Billy Collins
 I knew that James Whistler was part of the Paris scene,
but I was still surprised when I found the painting
of his mother at the Musée d'Orsay
among all the colored dots and mobile brushstrokes
of the French Impressionists.

And I was surprised to notice
after a few minutes of benign staring,
how that woman, stark in profile
and fixed forever in her chair,
began to resemble...Read more of this...

Ducks bobbing on the water

by Kobayashi Issa
 Ducks bobbing on the water--
are they also, tonight,
hoping to get lucky?...Read more of this...

Love Is A Parallax

by Sylvia Plath
 'Perspective betrays with its dichotomy:
train tracks always meet, not here, but only
 in the impossible mind's eye;
horizons beat a retreat as we embark
on sophist seas to overtake that mark
 where wave pretends to drench real sky.' 

'Well then, if we agree, it is not odd
that one man's devil is another's god
 or that the solar spectrum is
a multitude of...Read more of this...

New Years morning

by Kobayashi Issa
 New Year's morning:
the ducks on the pond
quack and quack....Read more of this...

Ducks And Drakes

by Mother Goose
  A duck and a drake,
  And a halfpenny cake,
With a penny to pay the old baker.
  A hop and a scotch
  Is another notch,
Slitherum, slatherum, take her....Read more of this...

A Ballad of Ducks

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 The railway rattled and roared and swung 
With jolting and bumping trucks. 
The sun, like a billiard red ball, hung 
In the Western sky: and the tireless tongue 
Of the wild-eyed man in the corner told 
This terrible tale of the days of old, 
And the party that ought to have kept the ducks. 
"Well, it ain't all joy...Read more of this...

Mating

by D. H. Lawrence
 Round clouds roll in the arms of the wind, 
The round earth rolls in a clasp of blue sky, 
And see, where the budding hazels are thinned,
The wild anemones lie 
In undulating shivers beneath the wind.

Over the blue of the waters ply 
White ducks, a living flotilla of cloud; 
And, look you, floating just thereby, 
The blue-gleamed drake stems...Read more of this...

The Capture

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Duck come switchin' 'cross de lot
Hi, oh, Miss Lady!
Hurry up an' hide de pot
Hi, oh, Miss Lady!
Duck's a mighty 'spicious fowl,
Slick as snake an' wise as owl;
Hol' dat dog, don't let him yowl!
Hi, oh, Miss Lady!
Th'ow dat co'n out kind o' slow
Hi, oh, Miss Lady!
Keep yo'se'f behin' de do'
Hi, oh, Miss Lady!
Lots o' food'll kill his feah,
Co'n is cheap but...Read more of this...

His Wife The Painter

by Charles Bukowski
 There are sketches on the walls of men and women and ducks,
and outside a large green bus swerves through traffic like
insanity sprung from a waving line; Turgenev, Turgenev,
says the radio, and Jane Austin, Jane Austin, too.
"I am going to do her portrait on the 28th, while you are
at work."
He is just this edge of fat and he walks constantly,...Read more of this...

There was an old man of Cashmere

by Edward Lear
There was an old man of Cashmere,Whose movements were scroobious and *****;Being slender and tall, he looked over a wall,And perceived two fat ducks of Cashmere. ...Read more of this...

A Ballad of Footmen

by Amy Lowell
 Now what in the name of the sun and the stars
Is the meaning of this most unholy of wars?
Do men find life so full of humour and joy
That for want of excitement they smash up the toy?
Fifteen millions of soldiers with popguns and horses
All bent upon killing, because their "of courses"
Are not quite the same. All these men by...Read more of this...

Memento

by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
 Like a reminder of this life 
of trams, sun, sparrows, 
and the flighty uncontrolledness 
of streams leaping like thermometers, 
and because ducks are quacking somewhere 
above the crackling of the last, paper-thin ice, 
and because children are crying bitterly 
(remember children's lives are so sweet!) 
and because in the drunken, shimmering starlight 
the new moon whoops it up, 
and...Read more of this...

My Aviary

by Oliver Wendell Holmes
 THROUGH my north window, in the wintry weather,--
My airy oriel on the river shore,--
I watch the sea-fowl as they flock together
Where late the boatman flashed his dripping oar.

The gull, high floating, like a sloop unladen,
Lets the loose water waft him as it will;
The duck, round-breasted as a rustic maiden,
Paddles and plunges, busy, busy still.

I see the solemn gulls in...Read more of this...

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