Famous Milk Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A New Years Giftsent To Sir Simeon Steward

by Robert Herrick
 No news of navies burnt at seas;
No noise of late spawn'd tittyries;
No closet plot or open vent,
That frights men with a Parliament:
No new device or late-found trick,
To read by th' stars the kingdom's sick;
No gin to catch the State, or wring
The free-born nostril of the King,
We send to you; but here a jolly
Verse crown'd with ivy and with holly;
That...Read more of this...

Come Into The Garden Maud

by Alfred Lord Tennyson
 Come into the garden, Maud, 
 For the black bat, Night, has flown, 
Come into the garden, Maud, 
 I am here at the gate alone; 
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad, 
 And the musk of the roses blown. 

For a breeze of morning moves, 
 And the planet of Love is on high, 
Beginning to faint...Read more of this...

Eating and Drinking chapter VI

by Kahlil Gibran
 Then an old man, a keeper of an inn, said, "Speak to us of Eating and Drinking." 

And he said: 

Would that you could live on the fragrance of the earth, and like an air plant be sustained by the light. 

But since you must kill to eat, and rob the young of its mother's milk to quench your...Read more of this...

The Pencil Seller

by Robert William Service
 A pencil, sir; a penny -- won't you buy?
I'm cold and wet and tired, a sorry plight;
Don't turn your back, sir; take one just to try;
I haven't made a single sale to-night.
Oh, thank you, sir; but take the pencil too;
I'm not a beggar, I'm a business man.
Pencils I deal in, red and black and blue;
It's hard, but still I...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...

Song For The Rainy Season

by Elizabeth Bishop
 Hidden, oh hidden 
in the high fog 
the house we live in, 
beneath the magnetic rock, 
rain-, rainbow-ridden, 
where blood-black 
bromelias, lichens, 
owls, and the lint 
of the waterfalls cling, 
familiar, unbidden. 

In a dim age 
of water 
the brook sings loud 
from a rib cage 
of giant fern; vapor 
climbs up the thick growth 
effortlessly, turns back, 
holding...Read more of this...

Ode To Maize

by Pablo Neruda
 America, from a grain
of maize you grew
to crown
with spacious lands
the ocean foam.
A grain of maize was your geography.
From the grain
a green lance rose,
was covered with gold,
to grace the heights
of Peru with its yellow tassels.

But, poet, let
history rest in its shroud;
praise with your lyre
the grain in its granaries:
sing to the simple maize in the kitchen.

First, a fine beard
fluttered in the...Read more of this...

Black Bonnet

by Henry Lawson
 A day of seeming innocence, 
A glorious sun and sky, 
And, just above my picket fence, 
Black Bonnet passing by. 
In knitted gloves and quaint old dress, 
Without a spot or smirch, 
Her worn face lit with peacefulness, 
Old Granny goes to church. 

Her hair is richly white, like milk, 
That long ago was fair -- 
And glossy still...Read more of this...

Nature that Washed Her Hands in Milk

by Sir Walter Raleigh
 Nature, that washed her hands in milk, 
And had forgot to dry them, 
Instead of earth took snow and silk, 
At love's request to try them, 
If she a mistress could compose 
To please love's fancy out of those.

Her eyes he would should be of light, 
A violet breath, and lips of jelly; 
Her hair not black, nor overbright,...Read more of this...

The Book of Thel

by William Blake
 THEL'S MOTTO 

1 Does the Eagle know what is in the pit? 
2 Or wilt thou go ask the Mole?
3 Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod?
4 Or Love in a golden bowl? 

I 

1.1 The daughters of the Seraphim led round their sunny flocks, 
1.2 All but the youngest: she in paleness sought the secret air,
1.3 To...Read more of this...

Home Fires

by Carl Sandburg
 IN a Yiddish eating place on Rivington Street … faces … coffee spots … children kicking at the night stars with bare toes from bare buttocks.
They know it is September on Rivington when the red tomaytoes cram the pushcarts,
Here the children snozzle at milk bottles, children who have never seen a cow.
Here the stranger wonders how so many people...Read more of this...

Milk For The Duck

by Richard Brautigan
 ZAP!
unlaid / 20 days

my sexual image
isn't worth a ****.

If I were dead
I couldn't attract
a female fly....Read more of this...

Spilt Milk

by William Butler Yeats
 We that have done and thought,
That have thought and done,
Must ramble, and thin out
Like milk spilt on a stone....Read more of this...

Kubla Khan

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic...Read more of this...

The Consecrating Mother

by Anne Sexton
 I stand before the sea
and it rolls and rolls in its green blood
saying, "Do not give up one god
for I have a handful."
The trade winds blew
in their twelve-fingered reversal
and I simply stood on the beach
while the ocean made a cross of salt
and hung up its drowned
and they cried Deo Deo.
The ocean offered them up in the vein of its...Read more of this...

Writing To Onegin

by Ruth Padel
 (After Pushkin) 
Look at the bare wood hand-waxed floor and long 
White dressing-gown, the good child's writing-desk 
And passionate cold feet
Summoning music of the night - tumbrils, gongs
And gamelans - with one neat pen, one candle
Puttering its life out hour by hour. 
Is "Tell Him I love him" never a good idea? You can't wish this
Unlived - this world...Read more of this...

Winter Milk

by Carl Sandburg
 THE MILK drops on your chin, Helga,
Must not interfere with the cranberry red of your cheeks
Nor the sky winter blue of your eyes.
Let your mammy keep hands off the chin.
This is a high holy spatter of white on the reds and blues.

Before the bottle was taken away,
Before you so proudly began today
Drinking your milk from the rim of a...Read more of this...

Idea LIII: To the River Ancor

by Michael Drayton
 Clear Ancor, on whose silver-sanded shore
My soul-shrin'd saint, my fair Idea lies,
O blessed brook, whose milk-white swans adore
Thy crystal stream, refined by her eyes,
Where sweet myrrh-breathing Zephyr in the spring
Gently distills his nectar-dropping showers,
Where nightingales in Arden sit and sing
Amongst the dainty dew-impearled flowers;
Say thus, fair brook, when thou shalt see thy queen:
Lo, here thy shepherd spent his wand'ring...Read more of this...

Evarra And His Gods

by Rudyard Kipling
 Read here:
This is the story of Evarra -- man --
Maker of Gods in lands beyond the sea.
 Because the city gave him of her gold,
 Because the caravans brought turquoises,
 Because his life was sheltered by the King,
 So that no man should maim him, none should steal,
 Or break his rest with babble in the streets
 When he...Read more of this...

Leftovers

by Barry Tebb
 Empty chocolate boxes, a pillowcase with an orange at the bottom,

Nuts and tinsel with its idiosyncratic rustle and brilliant sheen

And the reflection in it of paper-chains hand-made and stuck with

Flour-paste stretching from the light-bowl to every corner of the room.

Father Christmas himself was plastic and his vast stomach painted red

With a bulging sack behind his back and he was...Read more of this...

A Bucolic Betwixt Two;lacon And Thyrsis

by Robert Herrick
 LACON. For a kiss or two, confess,
What doth cause this pensiveness,
Thou most lovely neat-herdess?
Why so lonely on the hill?
Why thy pipe by thee so still,
That erewhile was heard so shrill?
Tell me, do thy kine now fail
To fulfil the milking-pail?
Say, what is't that thou dost ail?

THYR. None of these; but out, alas!
A mischance is come to pass,
And I'll tell thee...Read more of this...

in search of milk and paradise

by Rg Gregory
 heeley (sheffield) autumn 1988

dodging the broken bottles
dog-**** the pavement spew
i wheel my young son matthew
through the heeley streets
shop to shop this early
morning (short of milk)
unsettled day - the sun
comes through the clouds in
ragged strips where windy
rain has had the night
to puff and piddle

puddles idle in
the dips of surfaces
neglected for decades

another place where caring's
lost a public vision
only detritus of hope
dares...Read more of this...

Mother and Poet

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
 I.

Dead ! One of them shot by the sea in the east,
And one of them shot in the west by the sea.
Dead ! both my boys ! When you sit at the feast
And are wanting a great song for Italy free,
Let none look at me !

II.
Yet I was a poetess only last year,
And good at my art, for a...Read more of this...

The Song of Los

by William Blake
 AFRICA 

I will sing you a song of Los. the Eternal Prophet: 
He sung it to four harps at the tables of Eternity. 
In heart-formed Africa. 
Urizen faded! Ariston shudderd! 
And thus the Song began 

Adam stood in the garden of Eden: 
And Noah on the mountains of Ararat; 
They saw Urizen give his Laws to the Nations 
By...Read more of this...

Little Maid

by Mother Goose
"Little maid, pretty maid, whither goest thou?"
"Down in the forest to milk my cow."
"Shall I go with thee?" "No, not now;
When I send for thee, then come thou."...Read more of this...

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