Famous Franklin Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The Ballad Of The Children Of The Czar

by Delmore Schwartz
 1

The children of the Czar
Played with a bouncing ball

In the May morning, in the Czar's garden,
Tossing it back and forth.

It fell among the flowerbeds
Or fled to the north gate.

A daylight moon hung up
In the Western sky, bald white.

Like Papa's face, said Sister,
Hurling the white ball forth.

 2

While I ate a baked potato
Six thousand miles apart,

In Brooklyn, in 1916,
Aged two,...Read more of this...

On The Death Of Dr. Benjamin Franklin

by Philip Freneau
 Thus, some tall tree that long hath stood 
The glory of its native wood, 
By storms destroyed, or length of years, 
Demands the tribute of our tears. 

The pile, that took long time to raise, 
To dust returns by slow decays: 
But, when its destined years are o'er, 
We must regret the loss the more. 

So long accustomed to...Read more of this...

Epistle to Neruda

by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
 Superb,
 Like a seasoned lion,
Neruda buys bread in the shop.
He asks for it to be wrapped in paper
And solemly puts it under his arm:
"Let someone at least think
that at some time
 I bought a book…"
Waving his hand in farewell,
like a Roman
 rather dreamily royal, 
in the air scented with mollusks, 
 oysters,
 rice, 
he walks with the bread through...Read more of this...

Tom Paine

by Robert William Service
 An Englishman was Thomas Paine
 Who bled for liberty;
But while his fight was far from vain
 He died in poverty:
Though some are of the sober thinking
 'Twas due to drinking.

Yet this is what appeals to me:
 Cobbet, a friend, loved him so well
He sailed across the surly sea
 To raw and rigid New Rochelle:
With none to say: 'Take him...Read more of this...

Benjamin Franklin

by Robert William Service
 Franklin fathered bastards fourteen,
 (So I read in the New Yorker);
If it's true, in terms of courtin'
 Benny must have been a corker.
To be prudent I've aspired,
 And my passions I have mastered;
So that I have never sired
 A single bastard.

One of course can never know;
 But I think that if I had
It would give me quite a glow
...Read more of this...

111. Address to Beelzebub

by Robert Burns
 LONG life, my Lord, an’ health be yours,
Unskaithed by hunger’d Highland boors;
Lord grant me nae duddie, desperate beggar,
Wi’ dirk, claymore, and rusty trigger,
May twin auld Scotland o’ a life
She likes—as butchers like a knife.


Faith you and Applecross were right
To keep the Highland hounds in sight:
I doubt na! they wad bid nae better,
Than let them ance out owre the water,
Then...Read more of this...

Franklin Jones

by Edgar Lee Masters
 If I could have lived another year
I could have finished my flying machine,
And become rich and famous.
Hence it is fitting the workman
Who tried to chisel a dove for me
Made it look more like a chicken.
For what is it all but being hatched,
And running about the yard,
To the day of the block?
Save that a man has an angel's brain,
And sees...Read more of this...

Memento

by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
 Like a reminder of this life 
of trams, sun, sparrows, 
and the flighty uncontrolledness 
of streams leaping like thermometers, 
and because ducks are quacking somewhere 
above the crackling of the last, paper-thin ice, 
and because children are crying bitterly 
(remember children's lives are so sweet!) 
and because in the drunken, shimmering starlight 
the new moon whoops it up, 
and...Read more of this...

Ballad of women i love

by Eugene Field
 Prudence Mears hath an old blue plate
Hid away in an oaken chest,
And a Franklin platter of ancient date
Beareth Amandy Baker's crest;
What times soever I've been their guest,
Says I to myself in an undertone:
"Of womenfolk, it must be confessed,
These do I love, and these alone."

Well, again, in the Nutmeg State,
Dorothy Pratt is richly blest
With a relic of art and a...Read more of this...

Icicles Round A Tree In Dumfriesshire

by Ruth Padel
 We're talking different kinds of vulnerability here.

These icicles aren't going to last for ever 

Suspended in the ultra violet rays of a Dumfries sun.

But here they hang, a frozen whirligig of lightning,

And the famous American sculptor 

Who scrambles the world with his tripod

For strangeness au naturel, got sunset to fill them. 

It's not comfortable, a double helix of opalescent...Read more of this...

Franklin Hyde

by Hilaire Belloc
 Who caroused in the Dirt and was corrected by His Uncle.

His Uncle came upon Franklin Hyde
Carousing in the Dirt.
He Shook him hard from Side to Side
And Hit him till it Hurt,

Exclaiming, with a Final Thud,
"Take that! Abandoned boy!
For Playing with Disgusting Mud
As though it were a Toy!"

Moral:
From Franklin Hyde's adventure, learn
To pass your Leisure Time
In Cleanly Merriment, and turn
From...Read more of this...

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