Famous Gossip Poems by Famous Poets

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

See also:

65. Song—Rantin Rovin Robin

by Robert Burns
 THERE 1 was a lad was born in Kyle,
But whatna day o’ whatna style,
I doubt it’s hardly worth the while
 To be sae nice wi’ Robin.


Chor.—Robin was a rovin’ boy,
 Rantin’, rovin’, rantin’, rovin’,
Robin was a rovin’ boy,
 Rantin’, rovin’, Robin!


Our monarch’s hindmost year but ane
Was five-and-twenty days begun, 2
’Twas then a blast o’ Janwar’ win’
 Blew hansel in...Read more of this...

The Heatherblend Club Banquet

by William Topaz McGonagall
 'Twas on the 16th of October, in the year 1894,
I was invited to Inverness, not far from the sea shore,
To partake of a banquet prepared by the Heatherblend Club,
Gentlemen who honoured me without any hubbub. 

The banquet was held in the Gellion Hotel,
And the landlord, Mr Macpherson, treated me right well;
Also the servant maids were very kind to me,
Especially...Read more of this...

The Widening Spell Of Leaves

by Larry Levis
 --The Carpathian Frontier, October, 1968
 --for my brother

Once, in a foreign country, I was suddenly ill.
I was driving south toward a large city famous
For so little it had a replica, in concrete,
In two-thirds scale, of the Arc de Triomphe stuck
In the midst of traffic, & obstructing it.
But the city was hours away, beyond the hills
Shaped like the bodies of...Read more of this...

Forgotten Language

by Shel Silverstein
 Once I spoke the language of the flowers,
Once I understood each word the caterpillar said,
Once I smiled in secret at the gossip of the starlings,
And shared a conversation with the housefly
in my bed.
Once I heard and answered all the questions
of the crickets,
And joined the crying of each falling dying
flake of snow,
Once I spoke the language of the flowers. ....Read more of this...

An Attempt At Jealousy

by Craig Raine
 So how is life with your new bloke?
Simpler, I bet. Just one stroke
of his quivering oar and the skin
of the Thames goes into a spin,

eh? How is life with an oarsman? Better?
More in--out? Athletic? Wetter?
When you hear the moan of the rowlocks,
do you urge him on like a cox?

Tell me, is he bright enough to find
that memo-pad you call...Read more of this...

Delilah

by Rudyard Kipling
 We have another viceroy now, -- those days are dead and done
Of Delilah Aberyswith and depraved Ulysses Gunne.

Delilah Aberyswith was a lady -- not too young --
With a perfect taste in dresses and a badly-bitted tongue,
With a thirst for information, and a greater thirst for praise,
And a little house in Simla in the Prehistoric Days.

By reason of her marriage...Read more of this...

Put Off the Wedding Five Times and Nobody Comes to It

by Carl Sandburg
 (Handbook for Quarreling Lovers)I THOUGHT of offering you apothegms.
I might have said, “Dogs bark and the wind carries it away.”
I might have said, “He who would make a door of gold must knock a nail in every day.”
So easy, so easy it would have been to inaugurate a high impetuous moment for you to look on before the final...Read more of this...

War Profit Litany

by Allen Ginsberg
 To Ezra Pound

These are the names of the companies that have made
 money from this war
nineteenhundredsixtyeight Annodomini fourthousand
 eighty Hebraic
These are the Corporations who have profited by merchan-
 dising skinburning phosphorous or shells fragmented
 to thousands of fleshpiercing needles
and here listed money millions gained by each combine for
 manufacture
and here are gains numbered, index'd swelling a decade, set
 in...Read more of this...

Cinderella

by Randall Jarrell
 Her imaginary playmate was a grown-up 
In sea-coal satin. The flame-blue glances, 
The wings gauzy as the membrane that the ashes 
Draw over an old ember --as the mother 
In a jug of cider-- were a comfort to her. 
They sat by the fire and told each other stories. 

"What men want..." said the godmother softly-- 
How she went...Read more of this...

Whispers of Heavenly Death

by Walt Whitman
 WHISPERS of heavenly death, murmur’d I hear; 
Labial gossip of night—sibilant chorals; 
Footsteps gently ascending—mystical breezes, wafted soft and low; 
Ripples of unseen rivers—tides of a current, flowing, forever flowing; 
(Or is it the plashing of tears? the measureless waters of human tears?)

I see, just see, skyward, great cloud-masses; 
Mournfully, slowly they roll, silently swelling and mixing; 
With, at...Read more of this...

The Gladness of Nature

by William Cullen Bryant
 Is this a time to be cloudy and sad, 
When our mother Nature laughs around; 
When even the deep blue heavens look glad, 
And gladness breathes from the blossoming ground? 

There are notes of joy from the hang-bird and wren, 
And the gossip of swallows through all the sky; 
The ground-squirrel gaily chirps by his den, 
And the wilding...Read more of this...

Shuffle-Shoon and Amber-Locks

by Eugene Field
 Shuffle-Shoon and Amber-Locks
Sit together, building blocks;
Shuffle-Shoon is old and grey,
Amber-Locks a little child,
But together at their play
Age and Youth are reconciled,
And with sympathetic glee
Build their castles fair to see.
"When I grow to be a man"
(So the wee one's prattle ran),
"I shall build a castle so--
With a gateway broad and grand;
Here a pretty vine shall grow,
There a soldier guard shall...Read more of this...

To the Unknown Warrior

by G K Chesterton
 You whom the kings saluted; who refused not
The one great pleasure of ignoble days,
Fame without name and glory without gossip,
Whom no biographer befouls with praise.

Who said of you "Defeated"? In the darkness
The dug-out where the limelight never comes,
Nor the big drum of Barnum's show can shatter
That vibrant stillness after all the drums.

Though the time comes when every Yankee circus
Can...Read more of this...

I Now O Friend Whom Noiselessly The Snows

by Robert Louis Stevenson
 I NOW, O friend, whom noiselessly the snows
Settle around, and whose small chamber grows
Dusk as the sloping window takes its load:

* * * * *

The kindly hill, as to complete our hap,
Has ta'en us in the shelter of her lap;
Well sheltered in our slender grove of trees
And ring of walls, we sit between her knees;
A disused quarry, paved with...Read more of this...

Winter Complaint

by Ogden Nash
 Now when I have a cold
I am careful with my cold, 
I consult a physician 
And I do as I am told. 
I muffle up my torso 
In woolly woolly garb, 
And I quaff great flagons 
Of sodium bicarb. 
I munch on aspirin, 
I lunch on water, 
And I wouldn’t dream of osculating
Anybody’s daughter, 
And to anybody’s son 
I...Read more of this...

Delicatessen

by Joyce Kilmer
 Why is that wanton gossip Fame
So dumb about this man's affairs?
Why do we titter at his name
Who come to buy his curious wares?
Here is a shop of wonderment.
From every land has come a prize;
Rich spices from the Orient,
And fruit that knew Italian skies,
And figs that ripened by the sea
In Smyrna, nuts from hot Brazil,
Strange pungent meats from Germany,
And currants...Read more of this...

So Does Everybody Else Only Not So Much

by Ogden Nash
 O all ye exorcizers come and exorcize now, and ye clergymen draw nigh and clerge, For I wish to be purged of an urge. It is an irksome urge, compounded of nettles and glue, And it is turning all my friends back into acquaintances, and all my acquaintances into people who look the other way when I heave into...Read more of this...

The Wind Is Without There And Howls In The Trees

by Robert Louis Stevenson
 THE wind is without there and howls in the trees,
And the rain-flurries drum on the glass:
Alone by the fireside with elbows on knees
I can number the hours as they pass.
Yet now, when to cheer me the crickets begin,
And my pipe is just happily lit,
Believe me, my friend, tho' the evening draws in,
That not all uncontested I sit.

Alone, did I...Read more of this...

Fidelity

by Robert William Service
 Being a shorty, as you see,
 A bare five footer,
The why my wife is true to me
 Is my six-shooter.
For every time a guy goes by
 Who looks like a lover,
I polish it to catch his eye,
 And spin it over.

He notes its notches as I say:
 'Believe me, Brother,
If Junie ever goes astray,
 They'll be another.'
A husband has...Read more of this...

My World Is Pyramid

by Dylan Thomas
 I

Half of the fellow father as he doubles
His sea-sucked Adam in the hollow hulk,
Half of the fellow mother as she dabbles
To-morrow's diver in her horny milk,
Bisected shadows on the thunder's bone
Bolt for the salt unborn.

The fellow half was frozen as it bubbled
Corrosive spring out of the iceberg's crop,
The fellow seed and shadow as it babbled
The swing of milk was...Read more of this...

Death and Fame

by Allen Ginsberg
 When I die
I don't care what happens to my body
throw ashes in the air, scatter 'em in East River
bury an urn in Elizabeth New Jersey, B'nai Israel Cemetery
But l want a big funeral
St. Patrick's Cathedral, St. Mark's Church, the largest synagogue in 
 Manhattan
First, there's family, brother, nephews, spry aged Edith stepmother 
 96, Aunt Honey from old Newark,
Doctor...Read more of this...

A Florida Sunday

by Sidney Lanier
 From cold Norse caves or buccaneer Southern seas
Oft come repenting tempests here to die;
Bewailing old-time wrecks and robberies,
They shrive to priestly pines with many a sigh,
Breathe salutary balms through lank-lock'd hair
Of sick men's heads, and soon -- this world outworn --
Sink into saintly heavens of stirless air,
Clean from confessional. One died, this morn,
And willed the world to wise Queen...Read more of this...

The Grandmother

by Alfred Lord Tennyson
 I.
And Willy, my eldest-born, is gone, you say, little Anne?
Ruddy and white, and strong on his legs, he looks like a man.
And Willy's wife has written: she never was over-wise,
Never the wife for Willy: he would n't take my advice. 

II.
For, Annie, you see, her father was not the man to save,
Had n't a head to manage, and drank...Read more of this...

two crocodiles gossip by the banks of the thames at abingdon

by Rg Gregory
 two old lazy crocodiles are basking by the water
they get round to talk about the macdonalds' daughter

gemini gemini
have you ever set eyes on young stephanie

jiminy jiminy
who lives here in abingdon - the one who is two

gemini gemini
everyone knows she's a smart one that stephanie

jiminy jiminy
oh ever so smart - there's just nothing she can't do

gemini gemini
so smart - she...Read more of this...

Owl Against Robin

by Sidney Lanier
 Frowning, the owl in the oak complained him
Sore, that the song of the robin restrained him
Wrongly of slumber, rudely of rest.
"From the north, from the east, from the south and the west,
Woodland, wheat-field, corn-field, clover,
Over and over and over and over,
Five o'clock, ten o'clock, twelve, or seven,
Nothing but robin-songs heard under heaven:
How can we sleep?

`Peep!' you whistle, and `cheep!...Read more of this...

Dont forget to view our wonderful member Gossip 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