Famous Fisherman Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Fisherman poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous fisherman poems. These examples illustrate what a famous fisherman poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...h idols ranged along the sides, or at the
end—bonze,
brahmin, and lama;
The mandarin, farmer, merchant, mechanic, and fisherman;
The singing-girl and the dancing-girl—the ecstatic person—the secluded Emperors,
Confucius himself—the great poets and heroes—the warriors, the castes, all,
Trooping up, crowding from all directions—from the Altay mountains,
From Thibet—from the four winding and far-flowing rivers of China,
From the Southern peninsulas, and the demi-continenta...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...crew!
The first time that Peter denied his Lord
He had neither the Throne, nor the Keys nor the Sword--
A poor silly fisherman, what could he do,
When the cock crew--when the cock crew--
But weep for his wickedness when the cock crew?
. . . . . .
The next time that Peter denied his Lord
He was Fisher of Men, as foretold by the Word,
With the Crown on his brow and the Cross on his shoe,
When the cock crew--when the cock crew--
In Flanders and Picardy when the cock crew...Read more of this...
by
Kipling, Rudyard
...And my lute is bright with the mountain moon.
You ask me about good and evil fortune?....
Hark, on the lake there's a fisherman singing!...Read more of this...
by
Wei, Wang
...falls. Between the passes at the end of the sky only birds can travel, Rivers and lakes fill this land; there's one old fisherman....Read more of this...
by
Fu, Du
...a last look
At his thrashing hair and whale-blue eye;
The trodden town rang its cobbles for luck.
Then good-bye to the fishermanned
Boat with its anchor free and fast
As a bird hooking over the sea,
High and dry by the top of the mast,
Whispered the affectionate sand
And the bulwarks of the dazzled quay.
For my sake sail, and never look back,
Said the looking land.
Sails drank the wind, and white as milk
He sped into the drinking dark;
The sun shipwrecked west on a pearl
A...Read more of this...
by
Thomas, Dylan
...the uttermost,
To purchase his own boat, and make a home
For Annie: and so prosper'd that at last
A luckier or a bolder fisherman,
A carefuller in peril, did not breathe
For leagues along that breaker-beaten coast
Than Enoch. Likewise had he served a year
On board a merchantman, and made himself
Full sailor; and he thrice had pluck'd a life
From the dread sweep of the down-streaming seas:
And all me look'd upon him favorably:
And ere he touch'd his one-and-twentieth May
He pu...Read more of this...
by
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...and disappears
Near lakes that cannot be, while I must choose
To go or stay: bring blanket, blade, and gun,
Or stand a fisherman....Read more of this...
by
Emanuel, James A
...e love that broods o'er every living thing.
He watched the shepherd bring
His flock at sundown to the welcome fold,
The fisherman at daybreak fling
His net across the waters gray and cold,
And all day long the patient reaper swing
His curving sickle through the harvest-gold.
So through the world the foot-path way he trod,
Drawing the air of heaven in every breath;
And in the evening sacrifice of death
Beneath the open sky he gave his soul to God.
Him will I trust, and for my ...Read more of this...
by
Dyke, Henry Van
...d.
I can't see. I'm blind.
The sea collapses.
The sun is a bone.
Hi-ho the derry-o,
we all fall down.
If I were a fisherman I could comprehend.
They fish right through the door
and pull eyes from the fire.
They rock upon the daybreak
and amputate the waters.
They are beating the sea,
they are hurting it,
delving down into the inscrutable salt.
*
When mother left the room
and left me in the big black
and sent away my kitty
to be fried in the camps
and took...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...lack
nor white but verticle
and a questioning innocence
dressed in night and snow:
The mother smiles at the sailor,
the fisherman at the astronaunt,
but the child child does not smile
when he looks at the bird child,
and from the disorderly ocean
the immaculate passenger
emerges in snowy mourning.
I was without doubt the child bird
there in the cold archipelagoes
when it looked at me with its eyes,
with its ancient ocean eyes:
it had neither arms nor wings
but hard little oa...Read more of this...
by
Neruda, Pablo
...of death for a trout to die
by having a drink of port wine.
It is all right for a trout to have its neck broken by a fisherman
and then to be tossed into the creel or for a trout to die from
a fungus that crawls like sugar-colored ants over its body
until the trout is in death's sugarbowl.
It is all right for a trout to be trapped in a pool that dries
up in the late summer or to be caught in the talons of a bird
or the claws of an animal.
Yes, it is even all right...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...I fish for words
to say what I fish for,
half-catch sometimes.
I have caught little pan fish flashing sunlight
(yellow perch, crappies, blue-gills),
lighthearted reeled them in,
filed them on stringers on the shore.
A nice mess, we called them,
and ate with our fingers, laughing.
Once, dreaming of fish in far-off waters,
I hooked a two-foot carp in Michi...Read more of this...
by
Emanuel, James A
...it I interchange so suddenly with strangers?
What with some driver, as I ride on the seat by his side?
What with some fisherman, drawing his seine by the shore, as I walk by, and pause?
What gives me to be free to a woman’s or man’s good-will? What gives them to be free to
mine?
8
The efflux of the Soul is happiness—here is happiness;
I think it pervades the open air, waiting at all times;
Now it flows unto us—we are rightly charged.
Here rises the fluid and attachin...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...THE waters rush'd, the waters rose,
A fisherman sat by,
While on his line in calm repose
He cast his patient eye.
And as he sat, and hearken'd there,
The flood was cleft in twain,
And, lo! a dripping mermaid fair
Sprang from the troubled main.
She sang to him, and spake the while:
"Why lurest thou my brood,
With human wit and human guile
From out their native flood?
Oh, couldst thou know h...Read more of this...
by
von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang
...th heaped-up hills.
Oaks and beeches whisper in rings about it.
Above the trees are towers where dread bells beat.
The fisherman draws his streaming net from the sea
And sails toward the far-off city, that seems
Like one vague tower.
The dark bow plunges to foam on blue-black waves,
And shrill rain seethes like a ghostly music about him
In a quiet shower.
Rain with a shrill sings on the lapsing waves;
Rain thrills over the roofs again;
Like a shadow of shifting silver it cr...Read more of this...
by
Aiken, Conrad
...e sign, he named the place,
And, pressing forward like the wind,
Left clamor and surprise behind.
The fisherman forsook the strand,
The swarthy smith took dirk and brand;
With changed cheer, the mower blithe
Left in the half-cut swath his scythe;
The herds without a keeper strayed,
The plough was in mid-furrow staved,
The falconer tossed his hawk away,
The hunter left the stag at hay;
Prompt at the signal of al...Read more of this...
by
Scott, Sir Walter
...or kings to strive with such as me;
"Yet if the King commands it, I obey.
"But one condition of the strife I pray:
"The fisherman who brings the least to land
"Shall do whate'er the other may command."
Loud laughed the King: "A foolish fisher thou!
"For I shall win and rule thee then as now."
So to Prince John, a sober soul, sedate
And slow, King Martin left the helm of state,
While to the novel game with eager zest
He all his time and all his powers addrest.
Sure such a si...Read more of this...
by
Dyke, Henry Van
...namque levavit honore.
221. This may not appear as exact as Sappho's lines, but I had in
mind
the "longshore" or "dory" fisherman, who returns at
nightfall.
253. V. Goldsmith, the song in The Vicar of Wakefield.
257. V. The Tempest, as above.
264. The interior of St. Magnus Martyr is to my mind one of
the finest among Wren's interiors. See The Proposed Demolition
of Nineteen City Churches (P. S. King & Son, Ltd.).
266. The Song of the (three) Thames-daughters begins here.
Fro...Read more of this...
by
Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...l!
Come back then, children! come to me,
If you wish not that I should be
As lonely now that you're afar
As fisherman of Etrétat,
Who listless on his elbow leans
Through all the weary winter scenes,
As tired of thought—as on Time flies—
And watching only rainy skies!
MRS. NEWTON CROSLAND.
...Read more of this...
by
Hugo, Victor
...simple. No one would stop and pick me up
even though I was carrying fishing tackle. People usually
stop and pick up a fisherman. I had to wait three hours for a
ride.
The sun was like a huge fifty-cent piece that someone had
poured kerosene on and then had lit with a match and said,
"Here, hold this while I go get a newspaper, " and put the
coin in my hand, but never came back.
I had walked for miles and miles until I came to the rock
under the tree and sat down. ...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
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