Famous Eating Poems by Famous Poets

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

See also:

There was an old man of Three Bridges

by Edward Lear
There was an old man of Three Bridges,Whose mind was distracted by midges,He sate on a wheel, eating underdone veal,Which relieved that old man of Three Bridges. ...Read more of this...

Blackberry Eating

by Galway Kinnell
I love to go out in late September 
among the fat, overripe, icy black blackberries 
to eat blackberries for breakfast, 
the stalks are very prickly, a penalty 
they earn for knowing the black art 
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them 
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries 
fall almost unbidden to my tongue, 
as words sometimes...Read more of this...

Four Quartets 2: East Coker

by T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
 I

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and...Read more of this...

The Maoris Wool

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 The Maoris are a mighty race -- the finest ever known; 
Before the missionaries came they worshipped wood and stone; 
They went to war and fought like fiends, and when the war was done 
They pacified their conquered foes by eating every one. 
But now-a-days about the pahs in idleness they lurk, 
Prepared to smoke or drink or talk...Read more of this...

Eating Poetry

by Mark Strand
 Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian...Read more of this...

Eating Alone

by Li-Young Lee
 I've pulled the last of the year's young onions. 
The garden is bare now. The ground is cold, 
brown and old. What is left of the day flames 
in the maples at the corner of my 
eye. I turn, a cardinal vanishes. 
By the cellar door, I wash the onions, 
then drink from the icy metal spigot. 

Once, years...Read more of this...

The Song Of The Soldier-Born

by Robert William Service
 Give me the scorn of the stars and a peak defiant;
Wail of the pines and a wind with the shout of a giant;
Night and a trail unknown and a heart reliant.

Give me to live and love in the old, bold fashion;
A soldier's billet at night and a soldier's ration;
A heart that leaps to the fight with a soldier's passion.

For...Read more of this...

Fiesta Melons

by Sylvia Plath
 In Benidorm there are melons,
Whole donkey-carts full

Of innumerable melons,
Ovals and balls,

Bright green and thumpable
Laced over with stripes

Of turtle-dark green.
Chooose an egg-shape, a world-shape,

Bowl one homeward to taste
In the whitehot noon :

Cream-smooth honeydews,
Pink-pulped whoppers,

Bump-rinded cantaloupes
With orange cores.

Each wedge wears a studding
Of blanched seeds or black seeds

To strew like confetti
Under the feet of

This market of melon-eating
Fiesta-goers....Read more of this...

Dynamiter

by Carl Sandburg
 I SAT with a dynamiter at supper in a German saloon
eating steak and onions.
And he laughed and told stories of his wife and children
and the cause of labor and the working class.
It was laughter of an unshakable man knowing life to be
a rich and red-blooded thing.
Yes, his laugh rang like the call of gray birds filled with
a glory of...Read more of this...

Whenever I Go There

by W S Merwin
 Whenever I go there everything is changed

The stamps on the bandages the titles
Of the professors of water

The portrait of Glare the reasons for
The white mourning

In new rocks new insects are sitting
With the lights off
And once more I remember that the beginning

Is broken

No wonder the addresses are torn

To which I make my way eating the silence of animals
Offering snow to...Read more of this...

Once

by Philip Levine
 Hungry and cold, I stood in a doorway
on Delancey Street in 1946
as the rain came down. The worst part is this
is not from a bad movie. I'd read Dos Passos'
USA and thought, "Before the night ends
my life will change." A stranger would stop
to ask for my help, a single stranger
more needy than I, if such a woman
were possible. I...Read more of this...

Eating and Drinking chapter VI

by Kahlil Gibran
 Then an old man, a keeper of an inn, said, "Speak to us of Eating and Drinking." 

And he said: 

Would that you could live on the fragrance of the earth, and like an air plant be sustained by the light. 

But since you must kill to eat, and rob the young of its mother's milk to quench your...Read more of this...

Little Sleeps-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight

by Galway Kinnell
1

You scream, waking from a nightmare.

When I sleepwalk
into your room, and pick you up,
and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me
hard,
as if clinging could save us. I think
you think
I will never die, I think I exude
to you the permanence of smoke or stars,
even as
my broken arms heal themselves around you.

2

I have heard you tell
the sun, don't go...Read more of this...

The Traveller-Heart

by Vachel Lindsay
 (To a Man who maintained that the Mausoleum is the Stateliest Possible Manner of Interment)


I would be one with the dark, dark earth:--
Follow the plough with a yokel tread.
I would be part of the Indian corn,
Walking the rows with the plumes o'erhead. 

I would be one with the lavish earth, 
Eating the bee-stung apples red: 
Walking where lambs walk...Read more of this...

On The Eating Of Mice

by Russell Edson
 A woman prepared a mouse for her husband's dinner,
roasting it with a blueberry in its mouth. 

 At table he uses a dentist's pick and a surgeon's scalpel,
bending over the tiny roastling with a jeweler's loupe . . . 

 Twenty years of this: curried mouse, garlic and butter
mouse, mouse sauteed in its own fur, Salisbury mouse,
mouse-in-the-trap, baked in...Read more of this...

Twenty-Four Years

by Dylan Thomas
 Twenty-four years remind the tears of my eyes.
(Bury the dead for fear that they walk to the grave in labour.)
In the groin of the natural doorway I crouched like a tailor
Sewing a shroud for a journey
By the light of the meat-eating sun.
Dressed to die, the sensual strut begun,
With my red veins full of money,
In the final direction of the...Read more of this...

The Bush Girl

by Henry Lawson
 So you rode from the range where your brothers “select,” 

Through the ghostly grey bush in the dawn--- 

You rode slowly at first, lest her heart should suspect 

That you were glad to be gone; 

You had scarcely the courage to glance back at her 

By the homestead receding from view, 

And you breathed with relief as you rounded...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...

They Feed They Lion

by Philip Levine
 Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow. 

 Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride, 
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
Mothers hardening...Read more of this...

Morgans Dog

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 Morgan the drover explained, 
As he drank from his battered quart-pot, 
Many a **** I have trained; 
This is the best of the lot. 
Crossing these stringybark hills, 
Hungry and rocky and steep 
This is the country that kills 
Weakly and sore-footed sheep. 

Those that are healthy and strong 
Battle away in the lead, 
Carting the others along, 
Eating...Read more of this...

O regret! that life should be passed in pure loss! How

by Omar Khayyam
O regret! that life should be passed in pure loss! How
lawless all our eating and how defiled our bodies! I
have the blame, O God! of not having done what Thou
hast commanded. What will come to me for having done
what Thou hast not commanded?...Read more of this...

A Meeting

by Wendell Berry
 In a dream I meet
my dead friend. He has,
I know, gone long and far,
and yet he is the same
for the dead are changeless.
They grow no older.
It is I who have changed,
grown strange to what I was.
Yet I, the changed one,
ask: "How you been?"
He grins and looks at me.
"I been eating peaches
off some mighty fine trees."...Read more of this...

Soup

by Carl Sandburg
 I SAW a famous man eating soup.
I say he was lifting a fat broth
Into his mouth with a spoon.
His name was in the newspapers that day
Spelled out in tall black headlines
And thousands of people were talking about him.

 When I saw him,
He sat bending his head over a plate
Putting soup in his mouth with a spoon....Read more of this...

Cooney Potter

by Edgar Lee Masters
 I inherited forty acres from my Father
And, by working my wife, my two sons and two daughters
From dawn to dusk, I acquired
A thousand acres. But not content,
Wishing to own two thousand acres,
I bustled through the years with axe and plow,
Toiling, denying myself, my wife, my sons, my daughters.
Squire Higbee wrongs me to say
That I died from smoking Red Eagle...Read more of this...

The Bee Meeting

by Sylvia Plath
 Who are these people at the bridge to meet me? They are the villagers----
The rector, the midwife, the sexton, the agent for bees.
In my sleeveless summery dress I have no protection,
And they are all gloved and covered, why did nobody tell me?
They are smiling and taking out veils tacked to ancient hats.

I am nude as a chicken neck, does...Read more of this...

Dont forget to view our wonderful member Eating poems.

Get a Premium Membership
Turn off ads, get more exposure for your poetry, and get more features with a Premium Membership.
Book: Diverse Voices: The Poetry of Human Rights and the Pursuit of Peace