Famous Fossil Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Farewell to Agassiz

...g,
The lava-torches burning,
The rivers bend to meet him,
The forests bow to greet him,
It thrills the spinal column
Of fossil fishes solemn,
And glaciers crawl the faster
To the feet of their old master!
Heaven keep him well and hearty,
Both him and all his party!
From the sun that broils and smites,
From the centipede that bites,
From the hail-storm and the thunder,
From the vampire and the condor,
From the gust upon the river,
From the sudden earthquake shiver,
From the tr...Read more of this...
by Holmes, Oliver Wendell


A list of some observation

...on an elbow the body bulks
like a glacier's debris a moraine of sorts.
A millennium hence they'll no doubt expose
a fossil bivalve propped behind this gauze
cloth with the print of lips under the print of fringe 
mumbling "Good night" to a window hinge....Read more of this...
by Brodsky, Joseph

A list of some observation..

...on an elbow, the body bulks
like a glacier's debris, a moraine of sorts.
A millennium hence, they'll no doubt expose
a fossil bivalve propped behind this gauze
cloth, with the print of lips under the print of fringe, mumbling "Good night" to a window hinge....Read more of this...
by Brodsky, Joseph

Ballad Of The Long-Legged Bait

...urn a size of a man
Out of the room the weight of his trouble
Out of the house that holds a town
In the continent of a fossil

One by one in dust and shawl,
Dry as echoes and insect-faced,
His fathers cling to the hand of the girl
And the dead hand leads the past,

Leads them as children and as air
On to the blindly tossing tops;
The centuries throw back their hair
And the old men sing from newborn lips:

Time is bearing another son.
Kill Time! She turns in her pain!
The oak...Read more of this...
by Thomas, Dylan

Common Cold

...ter handkerchief; 
This cold you wave away as naught 
Is the damnedest cold man ever caught! 

Give ear, you scientific fossil! 
Here is the genuine Cold Colossal; 
The Cold of which researchers dream, 
The Perfect Cold, the Cold Supreme. 
This honored system humbly holds 
The Super-cold to end all colds; 
The Cold Crusading for Democracy; 
The Führer of the Streptococcracy. 

Bacilli swarm within my portals 
Such as were ne'er conceived by mortals, 
But bred by scientists wi...Read more of this...
by Nash, Ogden


Crows Nerve Fails

...Crow, feeling his brain slip, 
Finds his every feather the fossil of a murder. 

Who murdered all these? 
These living dead, that root in his nerves and his blood 
Till he is visibly black? 

How can he fly from his feathers? 
And why have they homed on him? 

Is he the archive of their accusations? 
Or their ghostly purpose, their pining vengeance? 
Or their unforgiven prisoner? 

He cannot be forgiven. 

His priso...Read more of this...
by Hughes, Ted

reflections of caernarvon

...all leaps downhill
the wind is a mountain
the sun becomes gold ore
timelessness deflates me

look mother
i have found a fossil
here are the marks
of its hands and feet
it must be millions of years old

my eyes are caves down to the sea...Read more of this...
by Gregory, Rg

The Towers of Time

...image in our sight.
The lines that sprang up taut and bold
Sag like primordial monsters old,
Sink in the bas-reliers of fossil
And the slow earth swallows them, fold on fold,
But light are the feet on the hills of the morning
Of the lambs that leap up to the Bride of the Sun,
And swift are the birds as the butterflies flashing
And sudden as laughter the rivulets run
And sudden for ever as summer lightning
the light is bright on the world begun.

Thou wilt not break as we have...Read more of this...
by Chesterton, G K

Two Campers In Cloud Country

...e conceiving a dynasty of perfect cold.
In a month we'll wonder what plates and forks are for.
I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.

The Pilgrims and Indians might never have happened.
Planets pulse in the lake like bright amoebas;
The pines blot our voices up in their lightest sighs.

Around our tent the old simplicities sough
Sleepily as Lethe, trying to get in.
We'll wake blank-brained as water in the dawn....Read more of this...
by Plath, Sylvia

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