Famous Factory Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Factory poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous factory poems. These examples illustrate what a famous factory poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Philip Levine
The day comes slowly in the railyard
behind the ice factory. It broods on
one cinder after another until each
glows like lead or the eye of a dog
possessed of no inner fire, the brown
and greasy pointer who raises his muzzle
a moment and sighing lets it thud
down on the loading dock. In no time
the...Read more of this...
by
Maya Angelou
Some clichty folks
don't know the facts,
posin' and preenin'
and puttin' on acts,
stretchin' their backs.
They move into condos
up over the ranks,
pawn their souls
to the local banks.
Buying big cars
they can't afford,
ridin' around town
actin' bored.
If they want to learn how to live life right
they ought to study me on Saturday night.
My job at the plant
ain't the biggest bet,
but I pay my bills
and stay...Read more of this...
by
Vachel Lindsay
WRITTEN FOR LORADO TAFT'S STATUE OF BLACK HAWK AT OREGON, ILLINOIS
To be given in the manner of the Indian Oration and the Indian War-Cry.
Hawk of the Rocks,
Yours is our cause to-day.
Watching your foes
Here in our war array,
Young men we stand,
Wolves of the West at bay.
Power, power for war
Comes from these trees divine;
Power from the boughs,
Boughs...Read more of this...
by
Philip Levine
A man roams the streets with a basket
of freestone peaches hollering, "Peaches,
peaches, yellow freestone peaches for sale."
My grandfather in his prime could outshout
the Tigers of Wrath or the factory whistles
along the river. Hamtramck hungered
for yellow freestone peaches, downriver
wakened from a dream of work, Zug Island danced
into the bright day glad to be alive.
Full-figured women in their negligees
streamed into the...Read more of this...
by
Seamus Heaney
There, in the corner, staring at his drink.
The cap juts like a gantry's crossbeam,
Cowling plated forehead and sledgehead jaw.
Speech is clamped in the lips' vice.
That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic-
Oh yes, that kind of thing could start again;
The only Roman collar he tolerates
Smiles all round his sleek pint of...Read more of this...
by
Anthony Hecht
In Italy, where this sort of thing can occur,
I had a vision once - though you understand
It was nothing at all like Dante's, or the visions of saints,
And perhaps not a vision at all. I was with some friends,
Picking my way through a warm sunlit piazza
In the early morning. A clear fretwork of shadows
From huge umbrellas littered the pavement...Read more of this...
by
David Lehman
His first infidelity was a mistake, but not as big
As her false pregnancy. Later, the boy found out
He was born three months earlier than the date
On his birth certificate, which had turned into
A marriage license in his hands. Had he been trapped
In a net, like a moth mistaken for a butterfly?
And why did she--what was in it for her?
It...Read more of this...
by
Friedrich von Schiller
A gentle was Fridolin,
And he his mistress dear,
Savern's fair Countess, honored in
All truth and godly fear.
She was so meek, and, ah! so good!
Yet each wish of her wayward mood,
He would have studied to fulfil,
To please his God, with earnest will.
From the first hour when daylight shone
Till rang the vesper-chime,
He lived but for her will alone,
And deemed e'en that scarce...Read more of this...
by
Charles Bukowski
we have everything and we have nothing
and some men do it in churches
and some men do it by tearing butterflies
in half
and some men do it in Palm Springs
laying it into butterblondes
with Cadillac souls
Cadillacs and butterflies
nothing and everything,
the face melting down to the last puff
in a cellar in Corpus Christi.
there's something for the touts, the nuns,
the grocery clerks and you...Read more of this...
by
Allen Ginsberg
railroad yard in San Jose
I wandered desolate
in front of a tank factory
and sat on a bench
near the switchman's shack.
A flower lay on the hay on
the asphalt highway
--the dread hay flower
I thought--It had a
brittle black stem and
corolla of yellowish dirty
spikes like Jesus' inchlong
...Read more of this...
by
Sylvia Plath
It was not a heart, beating.
That muted boom, that clangor
Far off, not blood in the ears
Drumming up and fever
To impose on the evening.
The noise came from outside:
A metal detonating
Native, evidently, to
These stilled suburbs nobody
Startled at it, though the sound
Shook the ground with its pounding.
It took a root at...Read more of this...
by
Taja Kramberger
My dear students,
little pigeons from the Forja factory in Buenos Aires.
The institution we built together has become
a hangar for hanging pieces of discounted meat.
Go out into the world with bright faces –
leave the twilight of ignorance and dullness, you have experienced all
that is necessary to understand the meaning
and responsibility of the creative person in the world.
Göttingen 1937, Tlatelolco 1968, Koper...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Lee Masters
Did you ever hear of Editor Whedon
Giving to the public treasury any of the money he received
For supporting candidated for office?
Or for writing up the canning factory
To get people to invest?
Or for suppressing the facts about the bank,
When it was rotten and ready to break?
Did you ever hear of the Circuit Judge
Helping anyone except the "Q" railroad,
Or the bankers?...Read more of this...
by
Wystan Hugh (W H) Auden
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to beOne against whom there was no official complaint,And all the reports on his conduct agreeThat, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was asaint,For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.Except for the War till the day he retiredHe worked in a factory and never got fired,But...Read more of this...
by
Elizabeth Bishop
In memory of Marjorie Carr Stevens
Each day with so much ceremony
begins, with birds, with bells,
with whistles from a factory;
such white-gold skies our eyes
first open on, such brilliant walls
that for a moment we wonder
"Where is the music coming from, the energy?
The day was meant for what ineffable creature
we must have missed?" Oh promptly he
appears and takes his earthly nature
instantly,...Read more of this...
by
Delmore Schwartz
At last the air fragrant, the bird's bubbling whistle
Succinct in the unknown unsettled trees:
O little Charles, beside the Georgian colleges
And milltown New England; at last the wind soft,
The sky unmoving, and the dead look
Of factory windows separate, at last,
From windows gray and wet:
for now the sunlight
Thrashes its wet shellac on brickwalk and gutter,
White splinters streak midmorning and doorstep,
Winter...Read more of this...
by
Denise Duhamel
is what we called her. The story was
that her father had thrown Drano at her
which was probably true, given the way she slouched
through fifth grade, afraid of the world, recess
especially. She had acne scars
before she had acne—poxs and dips
and bright red patches.
I don't remember
any report in the papers. I don't remember
my father telling me her father had gone...Read more of this...
by
Philip Levine
I walk among the rows of bowed heads--
the children are sleeping through fourth grade
so as to be ready for what is ahead,
the monumental boredom of junior high
and the rush forward tearing their wings
loose and turning their eyes forever inward.
These are the children of Flint, their fathers
work at the spark plug factory or truck
bottled water in 5 gallon sea-blue jugs
to...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
NEW-MOWN hay smell and wind of the plain made her
a woman whose ribs had the power of the hills in
them and her hands were tough for work and there
was passion for life in her womb.
She and her man crossed the ocean and the years that
marked their faces saw them haggling with landlords
and grocers while six children played on the...Read more of this...
by
Les Murray
It was built of things that must not mix:
paint, cream, and water, fire and dusty oil.
You heard the water dreaming in its large
kneed pipes, up from the weir. And the cordwood
our fathers cut for the furnace stood in walls
like the sleeper-stacks of a continental railway.
The cream arrived in lorried tides; its procession
crossed a platform of workers' stagecraft: Come here
Friday-Legs!...Read more of this...
by
Warsan Shire
No one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark.
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well.
your neighbours running faster than you, the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory is
holding a gun bigger than his body,
you only leave home when home won't let you stay.
no...Read more of this...
by
Philip Levine
The gates are chained, the barbed-wire fencing stands,
An iron authority against the snow,
And this grey monument to common sense
Resists the weather. Fears of idle hands,
Of protest, men in league, and of the slow
Corrosion of their minds, still charge this fence.
Beyond, through broken windows one can see
Where the great presses paused between their...Read more of this...
by
Vachel Lindsay
FACTORY windows are always broken.
Somebody's always throwing bricks,
Somebody's always heaving cinders,
Playing ugly Yahoo tricks.
Factory windows are always broken.
Other windows are let alone.
No one throws through the chapel-window
The bitter, snarling, derisive stone.
Factory windows are always broken.
Something or other is going wrong.
Something is rotten--I think, in Denmark.
End of factory-window song....Read more of this...
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...
by
Carl Sandburg
COME you, cartoonists,
Hang on a strap with me here
At seven o'clock in the morning
On a Halsted street car.
Take your pencils
And draw these faces.
Try with your pencils for these crooked faces,
That pig-sticker in one corner--his mouth--
That overall factory girl--her loose cheeks.
Find for your pencils
A way to mark your memory
Of tired empty faces.
After their night's sleep,
In the moist dawn
And cool daybreak,
Faces
Tired...Read more of this...
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