Famous Like A Father Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Father and Son

by Stanley Kunitz
 Now in the suburbs and the falling light
I followed him, and now down sandy road
Whitter than bone-dust, through the sweet
Curdle of fields, where the plums
Dropped with their load of ripeness, one by one.
Mile after mile I followed, with skimming feet,
After the secret master of my blood,
Him, steeped in the odor of ponds, whose indomitable love
Kept me in chains. Strode...Read more of this...

Song To Be Sung by the Father of Infant Female Children

by Ogden Nash
 My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky;
Contrariwise, my blood runs cold
When little boys go by.
For little boys as little boys,
No special hate I carry,
But now and then they grow to men,
And when they do, they marry.
No matter how they tarry,
Eventually they marry.
And, swine among the pearls,
They marry little girls.

Oh, somewhere, somewhere, an infant plays,
With parents...Read more of this...

The Father Of Toads

by Russell Edson
 A man had just delivered a toad from his wife's armpit. He 
held it by its legs and spanked it. 

 Do you love it? said his wife. 

 It's our child, isn't it? 

 Does that mean you can't love it? she said. 

 It's hard enough to love a toad, but when it turns out to be...Read more of this...

The Child Is Father To The Man

by Gerard Manley Hopkins
 'The child is father to the man.' 
How can he be? The words are wild. 
Suck any sense from that who can: 
'The child is father to the man.' 
No; what the poet did write ran, 
'The man is father to the child.' 
'The child is father to the man!' 
How can he be? The words are wild....Read more of this...

Come up from the Fields Father

by Walt Whitman
 1
COME up from the fields, father, here’s a letter from our Pete; 
And come to the front door, mother—here’s a letter from thy dear son. 

2
Lo, ’tis autumn; 
Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder, 
Cool and sweeten Ohio’s villages, with leaves fluttering in the moderate wind;
Where apples ripe in the orchards hang, and grapes on the...Read more of this...

Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year

by Raymond Carver
 October. Here in this dank, unfamiliar kitchen 
I study my father's embarrassed young man's face. 
Sheepish grin, he holds in one hand a string 
of spiny yellow perch, in the other 
a bottle of Carlsbad Beer. 

In jeans and denim shirt, he leans 
against the front fender of a 1934 Ford. 
He would like to pose bluff and hearty...Read more of this...

Elegy For My Father

by Annie Finch
 HLF, August 8, 1918—August 22, 1997

“Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal’s wide spindrift gaze towards paradise.”
—Hart Crane, “Voyages”

“If a lion could talk, we couldn’t understand it”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein

Under the ocean that stretches out wordlessly
past the long edge of the last human shore,
there are deep windows the waves haven't opened,
where night is...Read more of this...

The Child Is Father To The Man

by Ted Hughes
 'The child is father to the man.' 
How can he be? The words are wild. 
Suck any sense from that who can: 
'The child is father to the man.' 
No; what the poet did write ran, 
'The man is father to the child.' 
'The child is father to the man!' 
How can he be? The words are wild....Read more of this...

Sonnet 37: As a decrepit father takes delight

by William Shakespeare
 As a decrepit father takes delight
To see his active child do deeds of youth,
So I, made lame by Fortune's dearest spite,
Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth.
For whether beauty, birth, or wealth, or wit,
Or any of these all, or all, or more,
Entitled in thy parts, do crownèd sit,
I make my love engrafted to this store.
So then I...Read more of this...

A Hymn to God the Father

by John Donne
WILT Thou forgive that sin where I begun  
Which was my sin though it were done before? 
Wilt Thou forgive that sin through which I run  
And do run still though still I do deplore? 
When Thou hast done Thou hast not done; 5 
For I have more. 

Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I have won 
Others...Read more of this...

Father Explains

by Czeslaw Milosz
 "There where that ray touches the plain
And the shadows escape as if they really ran,
Warsaw stands, open from all sides,
A city not very old but quite famous.

"Farther, where strings of rain hang from a little cloud,
Under the hills with an acacia grove
Is Prague. Above it, a marvelous castle
Shored against a slope in accordance with old rules.

"What divides this land...Read more of this...

To Her Father with Some Verses

by Anne Bradstreet
 Most truly honoured, and as truly dear, 
If worth in me or ought I do appear, 
Who can of right better demand the same 
Than may your worthy self from whom it came? 
The principal might yield a greater sum, 
Yet handled ill, amounts but to this crumb; 
My stock's so small I know not how to pay, 
My...Read more of this...

Another Acrostic ( In the style of Father William )

by Lewis Carroll
 "Are you deaf, Father William!" the young man said, 
"Did you hear what I told you just now? 
"Excuse me for shouting! Don't waggle your head 
"Like a blundering, sleepy old cow! 
"A little maid dwelling in Wallington Town, 
"Is my friend, so I beg to remark: 
"Do you think she'd be pleased if a book were sent down...Read more of this...

38. Epitaph on my Ever Honoured Father

by Robert Burns
 O YE whose cheek the tear of pity stains,
 Draw near with pious rev’rence, and attend!
Here lie the loving husband’s dear remains,
 The tender father, and the gen’rous friend;
The pitying heart that felt for human woe,
 The dauntless heart that fear’d no human pride;
The friend of man-to vice alone a foe;
 For “ev’n his failings lean’d to virtue’s side.”...Read more of this...

To Father* Kronos

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 [written in a post-chaise.]

 (* In the original, Schwager, which has the 
twofold meaning of brother-in-law and postilion.)

HASTEN thee, Kronos!
On with clattering trot
Downhill goeth thy path;
Loathsome dizziness ever,
When thou delayest, assails me.
Quick, rattle along,
Over stock and stone let thy trot
Into life straightway lead

Now once more
Up the toilsome ascent
Hasten, panting for breath!
Up, then, nor idle be,--
Striving and hoping, up, up!

Wide,...Read more of this...

25. My Father was a Farmer: A Ballad

by Robert Burns
 MY father was a farmer upon the Carrick border, O,
And carefully he bred me in decency and order, O;
He bade me act a manly part, though I had ne’er a farthing, O;
For without an honest manly heart, no man was worth regarding, O.


Then out into the world my course I did determine, O;
Tho’ to be rich was not my...Read more of this...

Father

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
 He never made a fortune, or a noise
In the world where men are seeking after fame; 
But he had a healthy brood of girls and boys
Who loved the very ground on which he trod.
They thought him just little short of God; 
Oh you should have heard the way they said his name –
‘Father.’

There seemed to be a loving little...Read more of this...

Letter Of Recommendation From My Father To My Future Wife

by Richard Jones
 During the war, I was in China.
Every night we blew the world to hell.
The sky was purple and yellow
like his favorite shirt.

I was in India once
on the Ganges in a tourist boat.
There were soldiers,
some women with parasols.
A dead body floated by
going in the opposite direction.
My son likes this story
and requests it each year at Thanksgiving.

When he was twelve,
there was...Read more of this...

Boy and Father

by Carl Sandburg
 THE BOY Alexander understands his father to be a famous lawyer.
The leather law books of Alexander’s father fill a room like hay in a barn.
Alexander has asked his father to let him build a house like bricklayers build, a house with walls and roofs made of big leather law books.

 The rain beats on the windows
 And the raindrops...Read more of this...

To His Father

by Robinson Jeffers
Christ was your lord and captain all your life,
He fails the world but you he did not fail,
He led you through all forms of grief and strife
Intact, a man full-armed, he let prevail
Nor outward malice nor the worse-fanged snake
That coils in one's own brain against your calm,
That great rich jewel well guarded for his sake
With coronal age and death like...Read more of this...

For My Father, Karachi 1947

by Meena Alexander
Mid-May, centipedes looped over netting at the well's mouth.
Girls grew frisky in summer frocks, lilies spotted with blood.

You were bound to meteorology,
Science of fickle clouds, ferocious winds.

The day you turned twenty-six fighter planes cut a storm,
Fissured air baring the heart's intricate meshwork

Of want and need—
Springs of cirrus out of which sap and shoot you raised me.

Crossing Chand Bibi Road,
Named after...Read more of this...

Father Gerard Hopkins S. J

by Joyce Kilmer
 Why didst thou carve thy speech laboriously,
And match and blend thy words with curious art?
For Song, one saith, is but a human heart
Speaking aloud, undisciplined and free.
Nay, God be praised, Who fixed thy task for thee!
Austere, ecstatic craftsman, set apart
From all who traffic in Apollo's mart,
On thy phrased paten shall the Splendour be!
Now, carelessly we throw a rhyme to...Read more of this...

Father And Child

by William Butler Yeats
 She hears me strike the board and say
That she is under ban
Of all good men and women,
Being mentioned with a man
That has the worst of all bad names;
And thereupon replies
That his hair is beautiful,
Cold as the March wind his eyes....Read more of this...

Father

by Edgar Albert Guest
 The long lines of diesels 
groan toward evening 
carrying off the breath 
of the living. 
The face of your house 
is black, 
it is your face, black 
and fire bombed 
in the first street wars, 
a black tooth planted in the earth 
of Michigan 
and bearing nothing, 
and the earth is black, 
sick on used oils. 

Did you look...Read more of this...

Your Heavenly Father Feedeth Them

by Anonymous
God loves His lit-tle birds; for all
  His ten-der care He shows;
A sin-gle spar-row can-not fall
  But its Cre-a-tor knows.

They do not sow, nor reap the corn,
  Gar-ner nor barn have they;
God gives them break-fast every morn,
  And feeds them through the day.

And this we know; for in His Word,
  Where all His ways we...Read more of this...

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