Famous Dwarf Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Portraits From Memory

by Barry Tebb
 I

Through my bedroom window

The coal carts jolted over the cobbles

A slow heavy rhythm full,

Light and fast returning empty.



The coal office manager was a dwarf

With sixty year old skin

On a ten year old’s body and

Hornrims on a wizened wizard’s face.



The enormous shire horses neighed

In warning if you went near,

Their polished brasses gleaming,

Their worn blinkers waxed;

When they brought in lorries

A two...Read more of this...

Julian and Maddalo (excerpt)

by Percy Bysshe Shelley
 I rode one evening with Count Maddalo 
Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow
Of Adria towards Venice: a bare strand
Of hillocks, heap'd from ever-shifting sand,
Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds,
Such as from earth's embrace the salt ooze breeds,
Is this; an uninhabited sea-side,
Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried,
Abandons; and no other object breaks
The waste, but...Read more of this...

Snow Whites Acne

by Denise Duhamel
 At first she was sure it was just a bit of dried strawberry juice,
or a fleck of her mother's red nail polish that had flaked off
when she'd patted her daughter to sleep the night before.
But as she scrubbed, Snow felt a bump, something festering
under the surface, like a tapeworm curled up and living
in her left cheek.
 Doc the Dwarf...Read more of this...

The Big Top

by Joyce Kilmer
 The boom and blare of the big brass band is cheering 
to my heart
And I like the smell of the trampled grass and elephants and hay.
I take off my hat to the acrobat with his delicate, strong art,
And the motley mirth of the chalk-faced clown drives all my care 
away.
I wish I could feel as they must feel, these...Read more of this...

Gravelly Run

by A R Ammons
 I don't know somehow it seems sufficient
to see and hear whatever coming and going is,
losing the self to the victory
 of stones and trees,
of bending sandpit lakes, crescent
round groves of dwarf pine:

for it is not so much to know the self
as to know it as it is known
 by galaxy and cedar cone,
as if birth had never found it
and...Read more of this...

The Evening Of The Mind

by Donald Justice
 Now comes the evening of the mind.
Here are the fireflies twitching in the blood;
Here is the shadow moving down the page
Where you sit reading by the garden wall.
Now the dwarf peach trees, nailed to their trellises,
Shudder and droop. Your know their voices now,
Faintly the martyred peaches crying out
Your name, the name nobody knows but you.
It is the aura and...Read more of this...

Respondez!

by Walt Whitman
 RESPONDEZ! Respondez! 
(The war is completed—the price is paid—the title is settled beyond recall;) 
Let every one answer! let those who sleep be waked! let none evade! 
Must we still go on with our affectations and sneaking? 
Let me bring this to a close—I pronounce openly for a new distribution of roles;
Let that which stood in front go behind!...Read more of this...

The Suicide

by Edna St. Vincent Millay
 "Curse thee, Life, I will live with thee no more!
Thou hast mocked me, starved me, beat my body sore!
And all for a pledge that was not pledged by me,
I have kissed thy crust and eaten sparingly
That I might eat again, and met thy sneers
With deprecations, and thy blows with tears,—
Aye, from thy glutted lash, glad, crawled away,
As if spent...Read more of this...

Shake The Superflux!

by David Lehman
 I like walking on streets as black and wet as this one
now, at two in the solemnly musical morning, when everyone else
in this town emptied of Lestrygonians and Lotus-eaters
is asleep or trying or worrying why
they aren't asleep, while unknown to them Ulysses walks
into the shabby apartment I live in, humming and feeling
happy with the avant-garde weather we're having,
the winds...Read more of this...

The Lane

by Edward Thomas
 Some day, I think, there will be people enough
In Froxfield to pick all the blackberries
Out of the hedges of Green Lane, the straight
Broad lane where now September hides herself
In bracken and blackberry, harebell and dwarf gorse.
To-day, where yesterday a hundred sheep
Were nibbling, halcyon bells shake to the sway
Of waters that no vessel ever sailed ...
It is a kind of...Read more of this...

Enigma

by Thomas Moore
 Come riddle-me-ree, come riddle-me-ree,
And tell me, what my name may be.
I am nearly one hundred and thirty years old,
And therefore no chicken, as you may suppose; --
Though a dwarf in my youth (as my nurses have told),
I have, ev'ry year since, been outgrowing my clothes;
Till, at last, such a corpulent giant I stand,
That if folks were to furnish me...Read more of this...

The Outer -- from the Inner

by Emily Dickinson
 The Outer -- from the Inner
Derives its Magnitude --
'Tis Duke, or Dwarf, according
As is the Central Mood --

The fine -- unvarying Axis
That regulates the Wheel --
Though Spokes -- spin -- more conspicuous
And fling a dust -- the while.

The Inner -- paints the Outer --
The Brush without the Hand --
Its Picture publishes -- precise --
As is the inner Brand --

On...Read more of this...

On a Bust

by Edgar Lee Masters
 A giant as we hoped, in truth, a dwarf;
A barrel of slop that shines on Lethe's wharf',
Which at first seemed a vessel with sweet wine
For thirsty lips. So down the swift decline
You went through sloven spirit, craven heart
And cynic indolence. And here the art
Of molding clay has caught you for the nonce
And made your shame our shame-- Your head...Read more of this...

Live

by Anne Sexton
 Live or die, but don't poison everything...

Well, death's been here
for a long time --
it has a hell of a lot
to do with hell
and suspicion of the eye
and the religious objects
and how I mourned them
when they were made obscene
by my dwarf-heart's doodle.
The chief ingredient
is mutilation.
And mud, day after day,
mud like a ritual,
and the baby on the platter,
cooked but still human,
cooked...Read more of this...

The Sacrifice of Er-Heb

by Rudyard Kipling
 Er-Heb beyond the Hills of Ao-Safai
Bears witness to the truth, and Ao-Safai
Hath told the men of Gorukh. Thence the tale
Comes westward o'er the peaks to India.

The story of Bisesa, Armod's child, --
A maiden plighted to the Chief in War,
The Man of Sixty Spears, who held the Pass
That leads to Thibet, but to-day is gone
To seek his comfort of the...Read more of this...

The Height of Land

by Duncan Campbell Scott
 Here is the height of land:
The watershed on either hand
Goes down to Hudson Bay
Or Lake Superior;
The stars are up, and far away
The wind sounds in the wood, wearier
Than the long Ojibwa cadence
In which Potàn the Wise
Declares the ills of life
And Chees-que-ne-ne makes a mournful sound
Of acquiescence. The fires burn low
With just sufficient glow
To light the flakes of ash that...Read more of this...

The Furies

by Weldon Kees
 Not a third that walks beside me,
But five or six or more.
Whether at dusk or daybreak
Or at blinding noon, a retinue
Of shadows that no door
Excludes.--One like a kind of scrawl,
Hands scrawled trembling and blue,
A harelipped and hunchbacked dwarf
With a smile like a grapefruit rind,
Who jabbers the way I do
When the brain is empty and tired
And the guests no longer...Read more of this...

Rumpelstiltskin

by Anne Sexton
 Inside many of us
is a small old man
who wants to get out.
No bigger than a two-year-old
whom you'd call lamb chop
yet this one is old and malformed.
His head is okay
but the rest of him wasn't Sanforized?
He is a monster of despair.
He is all decay.
He speaks up as tiny as an earphone
with Truman's asexual voice:
I am your dwarf.
I am the enemy...Read more of this...

Kallundborg Church ( From The Tent on the Beach)

by John Greenleaf Whittier
 "Tie stille, barn min!
Imorgen kommer Fin,
Fa'er din, 
Og gi'er dich Esbern Snares öine og hjerte at lege med!"
Zealand Rhyme.


"BUILD at Kallundborg by the sea
A church as stately as church may be,
And there shalt thou wed my daughter fair,"
Said the Lord of Nesvek to Esbern Snare.

And the Baron laughed. But Esbern said,
"Though I lose my soul, I will Helva wed!"
And...Read more of this...

The Djinns

by Victor Hugo
 ("Murs, ville et port.") 
 
 {XXVIII., Aug. 28, 1828.} 


 Town, tower, 
 Shore, deep, 
 Where lower 
 Cliff's steep; 
 Waves gray, 
 Where play 
 Winds gay, 
 All sleep. 
 
 Hark! a sound, 
 Far and slight, 
 Breathes around 
 On the night 
 High and higher, 
 Nigh and nigher, 
...Read more of this...

Mr. Brain

by Russell Edson
 Mr Brain was a hermit dwarf who liked to eat shellfish off 
the moon. He liked to go into a tree then because there is a 
little height to see a little further, which may reveal now the 
stone, a pebble--it is a twig, it is nothing under the moon that 
you can make sure of.
 So Mr Brain...Read more of this...

A Work Of Artifice

by Marge Piercy
 The bonsai tree
in the attractive pot
could have grown eighty feet tall
on the side of a mountain
till split by lightning.
But a gardener
carefully pruned it.
It is nine inches high.
Every day as he
whittles back the branches
the gardener croons,
It is your nature
to be small and cozy,
domestic and weak;
how lucky, little tree,
to have a pot to grow in.
With living creatures
one must begin very early
to...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...

One Ring

by J R R Tolkien
 Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul,
Ash nazg thrakutulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne,
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring...Read more of this...

The White Peacock

by Stephen Vincent Benet
 (France -- Ancient Regime.) 

I.

Go away! 
Go away; I will not confess to you! 
His black biretta clings like a hangman's cap; under his twitching fingers the beads shiver and click, 
As he mumbles in his corner, the shadow deepens upon him; 
I will not confess! . . . 

Is he there or is it intenser shadow? 
Dark huddled...Read more of this...

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