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Famous Laboratory Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Nash, Ogden
...arm within my portals 
Such as were ne'er conceived by mortals, 
But bred by scientists wise and hoary 
In some Olympic laboratory; 
Bacteria as large as mice, 
With feet of fire and heads of ice 
Who never interrupt for slumber 
Their stamping elephantine rumba. 

A common cold, gadzooks, forsooth! 
Ah, yes. And Lincoln was jostled by Booth; 
Don Juan was a budding gallant, 
And Shakespeare's plays show signs of talent; 
The Arctic winter is fairly coolish, 
And your...Read more of this...



by Plath, Sylvia
...y
I watched settle, line by line, in my mirror—
Old sock-face, sagged on a darning egg.
They've trapped her in some laboratory jar.
Let her die there, or wither incessantly for the next fifty years,
Nodding and rocking and fingering her thin hair.
Mother to myself, I wake swaddled in gauze,
Pink and smooth as a baby....Read more of this...

by Hikmet, Nazim
...uch so and to such a degree
 that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
 your back to the wall,
 or else in a laboratory
 in your white coat and safety glasses,
 you can die for people--
 even for people whose faces you've never seen,
 even though you know living
 is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
 I mean, you must take living so seriously
 that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees--
 and not for your children, either,
 but because al...Read more of this...

by Koch, Kenneth
...incredibly complex, as in the prose of Gertrude Stein
One sentence hides another and is another as well. And in the laboratory
One invention may hide another invention,
One evening may hide another, one shadow, a nest of shadows.
One dark red, or one blue, or one purple—this is a painting
By someone after Matisse. One waits at the tracks until they pass,
These hidden doubles or, sometimes, likenesses. One identical twin
May hide the other. And there may be...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Amy
...the floor. The life that was his choosing, 
lonely, urgent,
goaded by a hope, all gone. A weary man in a ruined laboratory,
that is his story. Boom! Gloom and ignorance, 
and the jig of drunken brutes.
Diseases like snakes crawling over the earth, leaving trails of 
slime.
Wails from people burying their dead. Through the window, 
he can see
the rocking steeple. A ball of fire falls on the lead 
of the roof,
and the sky tears apart on a spike of fl...Read more of this...



by Field, Edward
...to mate the monster,
to breed him perhaps,
in the interests of pure science, his only god.

So he goes up into his laboratory
which he has built in the tower of the castle
to be as near the interplanetary forces as possible,
and puts together the prettiest monster-woman you ever saw
with a body like a pin-up girl
and hardly any stitching at all
where he sewed on the head of a raped and murdered beauty queen.

He sets his liquids burping, and coils blinking and buzzin...Read more of this...

by Browning, Robert
...ANCIEN REGIME

I

Now that I, tying thy glass mask tightly,
May gaze through these faint smokes curling whitely,
As thou pliest thy trade in this devil's-smithy— 
Which is the poison to poison her, prithee?

II

He is with her; and they know that I know
Where they are, what they do: they believe my tears flow
While they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to th...Read more of this...

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