Famous Its Business Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Salesmanship With Half A Dram Of Tears

by Brooks Haxton
 Gripping the lectern, rocking it, searching
the faces for the souls, for signs of heartfelt
mindfulness at work, I thought, as I recited
words I wrote in tears: instead of tears,
if I had understood my father's business,
I could be selling men's clothes. I could be
kneeling, complimenting someone at the bay
of mirrors, mumblingly, with pinpoints pressed
between my lips. That was the life I...Read more of this...

In the Neolithic Age

by Rudyard Kipling
 1895

I the Neolithic Age savage warfare did I wage
 For food and fame and woolly horses' pelt.
I was singer to my clan in that dim, red Dawn of Man,
 And I sang of all we fought and feared and felt.

Yea, I sang as now I sing, when the Prehistoric spring
 Made the piled Biscayan ice-pack split and shove;
And the...Read more of this...

What Kind Of A Person

by Yehuda Amichai
 "What kind of a person are you," I heard them say to me.
I'm a person with a complex plumbing of the soul,
Sophisticated instruments of feeling and a system
Of controlled memory at the end of the twentieth century,
But with an old body from ancient times
And with a God even older than my body.
I'm a person for the surface of the...Read more of this...

Hannah Armstrong

by Edgar Lee Masters
 I wrote him a letter asking him for old times' sake
To discharge my sick boy from the army;
But maybe he couldn't read it.
Then I went to town and had James Garber,
Who wrote beautifully, write him a letter.
But maybe that was lost in the mails.
So I traveled all the way to Washington.
I was more than an hour finding the White...Read more of this...

To Think of Time

by Walt Whitman
 1
TO think of time—of all that retrospection! 
To think of to-day, and the ages continued henceforward! 

Have you guess’d you yourself would not continue? 
Have you dreaded these earth-beetles? 
Have you fear’d the future would be nothing to you?

Is to-day nothing? Is the beginningless past nothing? 
If the future is nothing, they are just as surely nothing. 

To think...Read more of this...

The Wake

by Robert Herrick
 Come, Anthea, let us two
Go to feast, as others do:
Tarts and custards, creams and cakes,
Are the junkets still at wakes;
Unto which the tribes resort,
Where the business is the sport:
Morris-dancers thou shalt see,
Marian, too, in pageantry;
And a mimic to devise
Many grinning properties.
Players there will be, and those
Base in action as in clothes;
Yet with strutting they will please
The incurious villages.
Near the...Read more of this...

Mulligans Mare

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 Oh, Mulligan's bar was the deuce of a place 
To drink, and to fight, and to gamble and race; 
The height of choice spirits from near and from far 
Were all concentrated on Mulligan's bar. 

There was "Jerry the Swell", and the jockey-boy Ned, 
"Dog-bite-me" -- so called from the shape of his head -- 
And a man whom...Read more of this...

I Years had been from Home

by Emily Dickinson
 I Years had been from Home
And now before the Door
I dared not enter, lest a Face
I never saw before

Stare solid into mine
And ask my Business there --
"My Business but a Life I left
Was such remaining there?"

I leaned upon the Awe --
I lingered with Before --
The Second like an Ocean rolled
And broke against my ear --

I laughed a crumbling Laugh
That...Read more of this...

Wallace Stevens On His Way To Work

by David Wagoner
 He would leave early and walk slowly
 As if balancing books
 On the way to school, already expecting
To be tardy once again and heavy
 With numbers, the unfashionably rounded
 Toes of his shoes invisible beyond
The slope of his corporation. He would pause
 At his favorite fundamentally sound
 Park bench, which had been the birthplace
Of paeans and ruminations on other...Read more of this...

Sorry I Missed You

by Barry Tebb
 (or ‘Huddersfield the Second Poetry Capital of England Re-visited’)



What was it Janice Simmons said to me as James lay dying in Ireland?

“Phone Peter Pegnall in Leeds, an ex-pupil of Jimmy’s. He’s organising

A benefit reading, he’d love to hear from you and have your help.”



‘Like hell he would’ I thought but I phoned him all the same

At his converted farmhouse...Read more of this...

My Suicide

by Robert William Service
 I've often wondered why
Old chaps who choose to die
In evil passes,
Before themselves they slay,
Invariably they
Take off their glasses?

As I strolled by the Castle cliff
An oldish chap I set my eyes on,
Who stood so singularly stiff
And stark against the blue horizon;
A poet fashioning a sonnet,
I thought - how rapt he labours on it!

And then I blinked and stood astare,
And questioned...Read more of this...

Lambert Hutchins

by Edgar Lee Masters
 I have two monuments besides this granite obelisk:
One, the house I built on the hill,
With its spires, bay windows, and roof of slate;
The other, the lake-front in Chicago,
Where the railroad keeps a switching yard,
With whistling engines and crunching wheels,
And smoke and soot thrown over the city,
And the crash of cars along the boulevard, --
A blot like a hog-pen on...Read more of this...

Walter Simmons

by Edgar Lee Masters
 My parents thought that I would be
As great as Edison or greater:
For as a boy I made balloons
And wondrous kites and toys with clocks
And little engines with tracks to run on
And telephones of cans and thread.
I played the cornet and painted pictures,
Modeled in clay and took the part
Of the villain in the "Octoroon."
But then at twenty-one I married
And had...Read more of this...

Since all man's business in this world of woe

by Omar Khayyam
Since all man's business in this world of woe
Is sorrow's pangs to feel, and grief to know,
Happy are they that never come at all,
And they that, having come, the soonest go!...Read more of this...

The Singing School

by Barry Tebb
 The Poetry School, The Poetry Book Society, The Poetry Business:

So much poetry about you’d think I’d want to shout, “Hurray, hurray,

Every day’s Poetry Day!” but I don’t and you don’t either-

You know its flim-flam on the ether, grants for Jack-the-lads

Of both sexes, poets who’ve never been seen in a little magazine

Then gone on to win the Oopla Prize and...Read more of this...

The Dream

by George (Lord) Byron
 I

Our life is twofold; Sleep hath its own world,
A boundary between the things misnamed
Death and existence: Sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality,
And dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy;
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,
They take a weight from off waking toils,
They do divide our being;...Read more of this...

I got so I could take his name

by Emily Dickinson
 I got so I could take his name --
Without -- Tremendous gain --
That Stop-sensation -- on my Soul --
And Thunder -- in the Room --

I got so I could walk across
That Angle in the floor,
Where he turned so, and I turned -- how --
And all our Sinew tore --

I got so I could stir the Box --
In which his...Read more of this...

The Spider

by Jane Taylor
 "Oh, look at that great ugly spider!" said Ann; 
And screaming, she brush'd it away with her fan; 
"'Tis a frightful black creature as ever can be, 
I wish that it would not come crawling on me. " 

"Indeed," said her mother, "I'll venture to say,
The poor thing will try to keep out of your way; 
For after the...Read more of this...

Richard Coeur de Lion

by Marriott Edgar
 Richard the First, Coeur-de-Lion, 
Is a name that we speak of with pride, 
Though he only lived six months in England
From his birth to the day that he died. 

He spent all his time fighting battles, 
Dressed up in most rigid attire, 
For he had his suits made by the Blacksmith, 
And his underwear knitted of wire. 

He married...Read more of this...

from Jubilate Agno Fragment B lines 695-768

by Christopher Smart
 For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For is this done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which...Read more of this...

Johnny Boer

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 Men fight all shapes and sizes as the racing horses run, 
And no man knows his courage till he stands before a gun. 
At mixed-up fighting, hand to hand, and clawing men about 
They reckon Fuzzy-Wuzzy is the hottest fighter out. 
But Fuzzy gives himself away -- his style is out of date, 
He charges like a driven grouse...Read more of this...

Business Girls

by John Betjeman
 From the geyser ventilators
Autumn winds are blowing down
On a thousand business women
Having baths in Camden Town

Waste pipes chuckle into runnels,
Steam's escaping here and there,
Morning trains through Camden cutting
Shake the Crescent and the Square.

Early nip of changeful autumn,
Dahlias glimpsed through garden doors,
At the back precarious bathrooms
Jutting out from upper floors;

And behind their frail partitions
Business women lie and soak,
Seeing through the...Read more of this...

Inheritance—His

by Audre Lorde
 I. 
My face resembles your face
less and less each day. When I was young
no one mistook whose child I was.
Features build coloring
alone among my creamy fine-boned sisters
marked me Byron's daughter.

No sun set when you died, but a door
opened onto my mother. After you left
she grieved her crumpled world aloft
an iron fist sweated with business symbols
a printed blotter dwell in...Read more of this...

The Poet Of Ignorance

by Anne Sexton
 Perhaps the earth is floating,
I do not know.
Perhaps the stars are little paper cutups
made by some giant scissors,
I do not know.
Perhaps the moon is a frozen tear,
I do not know.
Perhaps God is only a deep voice
heard by the deaf,
I do not know.

Perhaps I am no one.
True, I have a body
and I cannot escape from it.
I would like to fly...Read more of this...

248. Pegasus at Wanlockhead

by Robert Burns
 WITH Pegasus upon a day,
 Apollo, weary flying,
Through frosty hills the journey lay,
 On foot the way was plying.


Poor slipshod giddy Pegasus
 Was but a sorry walker;
To Vulcan then Apollo goes,
 To get a frosty caulker.


Obliging Vulcan fell to work,
 Threw by his coat and bonnet,
And did Sol’s business in a crack;
 Sol paid him with a sonnet.


Ye Vulcan’s...Read more of this...

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