Famous Eaten Poems by Famous Poets

These are examples of famous Eaten poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous eaten poems. These examples illustrate what a famous eaten 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...

Robin Hoods Flight

by James Henry Leigh Hunt
 Robin Hood's mother, these twelve years now,
Has been gone from her earthly home;
And Robin has paid, he scarce knew how,
A sum for a noble tomb.

The church-yard lies on a woody hill,
But open to sun and air:
It seems as if the heaven still
Were looking and smiling there.

Often when Robin looked that way,
He looked through a sweet thin tear;
But he looked...Read more of this...

Passer-By These Are Words

by Yves Bonnefoy
 Passer-by, these are words. But instead of reading
 I want you to listen: to this frail
 Voice like that of letters eaten by grass.

Lend an ear, hear first of all the happy bee
Foraging in our almost rubbed-out names.
 It flits between two sprays of leaves,
Carrying the sound of branches that are real
 To those that filigree the still unseen.

Then...Read more of this...

An Ode in Time of Hesitation

by William Vaughn Moody
 After seeing at Boston the statue of Robert Gould Shaw, killed while storming Fort Wagner, July 18, 1863, at the head of the first enlisted ***** regiment, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts.


I 

Before the solemn bronze Saint Gaudens made 
To thrill the heedless passer's heart with awe, 
And set here in the city's talk and trade 
To the good memory of...Read more of this...

The Village

by R S Thomas
 Scarcely a street, too few houses
To merit the title; just a way between
The one tavern and the one shop
That leads nowhere and fails at the top
Of the short hill, eaten away
By long erosion of the green tide
Of grass creeping perpetually nearer 
This last outpost of time past.

So little happens; the black dog
Cracking his fleas in the hot sun
Is history....Read more of this...

With the Cattle

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 The drought is down on field and flock, 
The river-bed is dry; 
And we must shift the starving stock 
Before the cattle die. 
We muster up with weary hearts 
At breaking of the day, 
And turn our heads to foreign parts, 
To take the stock away. 
And it’s hunt ‘em up and dog ‘em, 
And it’s get the whip...Read more of this...

Dream Song 19: Here whence

by John Berryman
 Here, whence
all have departed orwill do, here airless, where
that witchy ball
wanted, fought toward, dreamed of, all a green living
drops limply into one's hands
without pleasure or interest

Figurez-vous, a time swarms when the word
'happy' sheds its whole meaning, like to come and
like for memory too
That morning arrived to Henry as well a great cheque
eaten out already by the Government & State...Read more of this...

The Dream Of Wearing Shorts Forever

by Les Murray
 To go home and wear shorts forever
in the enormous paddocks, in that warm climate,
adding a sweater when winter soaks the grass, 

to camp out along the river bends
for good, wearing shorts, with a pocketknife,
a fishing line and matches, 

or there where the hills are all down, below the plain,
to sit around in shorts at evening
on the plank verandah -...Read more of this...

Xerox Candy Bar

by Richard Brautigan
 Ah,
you're just a copy
of all the candy bars
I've ever eaten....Read more of this...

The City In the Sea

by Edgar Allan Poe
Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West 
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around by lifting winds forgot 
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.

No rays from...Read more of this...

The Cow In Apple-Time

by Robert Frost
 Something inspires the only cow of late
To make no more of a wall than an open gate,
And think no more of wall-builders than fools.
Her face is flecked with pomace and she drools
A cider syrup. Having tasted fruit,
She scorns a pasture withering to the root.
She runs from tree to tree where lie and sweeten.
The windfalls spiked with stubble and worm-eaten.
She...Read more of this...

Wont And Done

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 I HAVE loved; for the first time with passion I rave!
I then was the servant, but now am the slave;

I then was the servant of 
all:
By this creature so charming I now am fast bound,
To love and love's guerdon she turns all around,

And her my sole mistress 
I call.

l've had faith; for the first time my faith is now...Read more of this...

Now

by Dylan Thomas
 I sit here on the 2nd floor
hunched over in yellow
pajamas
still pretending to be
a writer.
some damned gall,
at 71,
my brain cells eaten
away by
life.
rows of books
behind me,
I scratch my thinning
hair
and search for the
word. 
for decades now
I have infuriated the
ladies,
the critics,
the university
suck-toads. 
they all will soon have
their time to
celebrate. 
"terribly overrated..." 
"gross..." 
"an aberration..." 
my hands sink into the
keyboard
of my
Macintosh,
it's the same old
con
that...Read more of this...

For M.W

by Jean Toomer
 There is no transcience of twilight in
 The beauty of your soft dusk-dimpled face,
 No flicker of a slender flame in space,
In crucibles, fragility crystalline.
There is no fragrance of the jessamine
 About you, no pathos of some old place
 At dusk, that crumbles like moth-eaten lace
Beneath the touch. Nor has there ever been.

Your love is like the folk-song's flaming...Read more of this...

The Lion

by Hilaire Belloc
 Oh, weep for Mr. and Mrs. Bryan!
He was eaten by a lion;
Following which, the lion's lioness
Up and swallowed Bryan's Bryaness....Read more of this...

cherries and birds

by Rg Gregory
 cherries are so vulnerable
blinking their way from green
to polished red in trees
guileless to stave off birds

a murmur does its rounds
and when the bright day comes
and ripeness throws its coyness
in the air a seething mesh

of wings and whetted beaks 
(knowing its cherry-right)
falls upon the fleshy fruit
and rips it to the stone

then birds become the foe
of people leaden in their legs
who...Read more of this...

If I have eaten during the days of Ramazan, do not

by Omar Khayyam
If I have eaten during the days of Ramazan, do not
believe I did it through inadvertence. The fatiguing
hardships of the fast have so turned about my days and
nights [the one for the other] that I have always believed
in eating the morning repast....Read more of this...

Sunshine through a Cobwebbed Window

by Amy Lowell
 What charm is yours, you faded old-world tapestries,
Of outworn, childish mysteries,
Vague pageants woven on a web of dream!
And we, pushing and fighting in the turbid stream
Of modern life, find solace in your tarnished broideries.
Old lichened halls, sun-shaded by huge cedar-trees,
The layered branches horizontal stretched, like Japanese
Dark-banded prints. Carven cathedrals, on a sky
Of faintest colour, where the gothic spires fly
And...Read more of this...

Crow Goes Hunting

by Ted Hughes
Crow
Decided to try words. 

He imagined some words for the job, a lovely pack-
Clear-eyed, resounding, well-trained, 
With strong teeth. 
You could not find a better bred lot. 

He pointed out the hare and away went the words
Resounding. 
Crow was Crow without fail, but what is a hare? 

It converted itself to a concrete bunker. 
The words circled protesting, resounding. 

Crow...Read more of this...

309. Verses on Captain Grose

by Robert Burns
 KEN ye aught o’ Captain Grose?—Igo, and ago,
If he’s amang his friends or foes?—Iram, coram, dago.


Is he to Abra’m’s bosom gane?—Igo, and ago,
Or haudin Sarah by the wame?—Iram, coram dago.


Is he south or is he north?—Igo, and ago,
Or drowned in the river Forth?—Iram, coram dago.


Is he slain by Hielan’ bodies?—Igo, and ago,
And eaten like a wether haggis?—Iram, coram, dago.


Where’er...Read more of this...

The Grizzly Bear

by A E Housman
 The Grizzly Bear is huge and wild
It has devoured the little child.
The little child is unaware
It has been eaten by the bear....Read more of this...

Toledo

by Robert William Service
 Three widows of the Middle West
We're grimly chewing gum;
The Lido chef a quail had dressed
With garlic and with rum,
And they were painfully oppressed
For they had eaten some.

Said One: "This famed El Greco guy
Gives me the blessed pip;
Them Saints look like they want to die -
Let's give our guide the slip,
And in some bodega close by
A glass of vino sip."

Said...Read more of this...

Let us both sit down on the old worm-eaten bench

by Emile Verhaeren
Let us both sit down on the old worm-eaten bench near the path; and let my hand remain a long while within your two steadfast hands.
With my hand that remains a long while given up to the sweet consciousness of being on your knees, my heart also, my earnest, gentle heart, seems to rest between your two kind hands.
And we...Read more of this...

Jonah and the Grampus

by Marriott Edgar
 I'll tell you the story of Jonah,
A really remarkable tale;
A peaceful and humdrum existence he had
Until one day he went for a sail. 

The weather were grand when they started,
But later at turn of the tide
The wind started blowing, the water got rough,
And Jonah felt funny inside.

When the ship started pitching and tossing
He tried hard his feelings to smother,
At...Read more of this...

Parnells Funeral

by William Butler Yeats
 I

Under the Great Comedian's tomb the crowd.
A bundle of tempestuous cloud is blown
About the sky; where that is clear of cloud
Brightness remains; a brighter star shoots down;
What shudders run through all that animal blood?
What is this sacrifice? Can someone there
Recall the Cretan barb that pierced a star?

Rich foliage that the starlight glittered through,
A frenzied crowd, and where the branches...Read more of this...

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