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Famous Minnows Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Dickinson, Emily
...ronts my shoe --
What else have Bogs -- to do --
The only Trade they know --
The splashing Men!
Ah, pity -- then!

'Tis Minnows can despise!
The Elephant's -- calm eyes
Look further on!...Read more of this...



by Laurence Dunbar, Paul
...t.
The sky gives back a blue divine,
And all the world's wide wealth is mine.
A pickerel leaps, a bow of light,
The minnows shine from side to side.
The first faint breeze comes up the tide—
I pause with half uplifted oar,
While night drifts down to claim the shore.[Pg 250]
...Read more of this...

by Kilmer, Joyce
...There's a brook on the side of Greylock that used 
to be full of trout,
But there's nothing there now but minnows; they say it is all fished 
out.
I fished there many a Summer day some twenty years ago,
And I never quit without getting a mess of a dozen or so.
There was a man, Dave Lilly, who lived on the North 
Adams road,
And he spent all his time fishing, while his neighbors reaped and 
sowed.
He was the luckiest fisherman in the Berkshire hills, ...Read more of this...

by Doty, Mark
...e, summers,
inside me and out-

how can I say what it is?
Sea lavender shivers
over the tidewater steel.

A million minnows ally
with their million shadows
(lucky we'll never need

to know whose is whose).
The bud of storm loosens:
watered paint poured

dark blue onto the edge
of the page. Haloed grasses,
gilt shadow-edged body of dune…

I could go on like this.
I love the language
of the day's ten thousand aspects,

the creases and flecks 
in the map, these 
...Read more of this...

by Doty, Mark
...waterlilies'
bronzy stems,
wisteria or trout scales;

surfaces burnished
like a tidal stream
on which an excitation

of minnows boils
and blooms, artifice
made to show us

the lavish wardrobe
of things, the world's
glaze of appearances

worked into the thin
and gleaming stuff
of craft. A story:

at the puppet opera
--where one man animated
the entire cast

while another ghosted
the voices, basso
to coloratura -- Jimmy wept

at the world of tiny gestures,
forgot, he said,
...Read more of this...



by Emanuel, James A
...Till, tired, he drew his silver rubber blade
And poked the winding fins that tugged our string,
Or sprayed the dimpling minnows with his plastic gun,
Or, rainstruck, squirmed to my armpit in the poncho.

Then years uncurled him, thinned him hard.
Now, far he cast his line into the wrinkled blue
And easy toes a rock, reel on his thigh
Till bone and crank cry out the strike
He takes with manchild chuckles, cunning
In his play of zigzag line and plunging silver.

Now...Read more of this...

by Trethewey, Natasha
...,
and I rolled down my white knee socks
letting my thin legs dangle,
circling them just above water
and silver backs of minnows
flitting here then there between
the sun spots and the shadows.
This is how you hold the pole
to cast the line out straight.
Now put that worm on your hook,
throw it out and wait.
She sat spitting tobacco juice
into a coffee cup.
Hunkered down when she felt the bite,
jerked the pole straight up
reeling and tugging hard at the fish
tha...Read more of this...

by Graves, Robert
...bay where I could cast a net,
yearning to hear a trace of the vendor's voice
still wet with the glimmer of the flapping minnows.

It was a spoiled remnant of the South. The aroma
of muscatel was tainted with whiskey breath.
I carry that dead embrace inside me yet
like a foreign object the flesh tries to reject....Read more of this...

by Guillen, Rafael
...bay where I could cast a net,
yearning to hear a trace of the vendor's voice
still wet with the glimmer of the flapping minnows.

It was a spoiled remnant of the South. The aroma
of muscatel was tainted with whiskey breath.
I carry that dead embrace inside me yet
like a foreign object the flesh tries to reject....Read more of this...

by Meredith, George
...he morn, and in a breezy link
Freshly sparkles garden to stripe-shadowed orchard,
Green across a rill where on sand the minnows wink.
Busy in the grass the early sun of summer
Swarms, and the blackbird's mellow fluting notes
Call my darling up with round and roguish challenge:
Quaintest, richest carol of all the singing throats!

Cool was the woodside; cool as her white dairy
Keeping sweet the cream-pan; and there the boys from school,
Cricketing below, rushed brown and r...Read more of this...

by Field, Eugene
...When in the halcyon days of old, I was a little tyke,
I used to fish in pickerel ponds for minnows and the like;
And oh, the bitter sadness with which my soul was fraught
When I rambled home at nightfall with the puny string I'd caught!
And, oh, the indignation and the valor I'd display
When I claimed that all the biggest fish I'd caught had got away!

Sometimes it was the rusty hooks, sometimes the fragile lines,
And many times the treacherous re...Read more of this...

by Brautigan, Richard
...nnings, the mountain in back of the

lake promised us eternity, but the lake itself was filled with

thousands of silly minnows, swimming close to the shore

and busy putting in hours of Mack Sennett time.

 The minnows were an Idaho tourist attraction. They

should have been made into a National Monument. Swimming

close to shore, like children they believed in their own im-

mortality .

 A third-year student in engineering at the University of

Montana atte...Read more of this...

by Blunden, Edmund
...f twenty summers slain,
For such delights below the flashing weir
And up the sluice-cut, playing buccaneer
Among the minnows; lolling in hot sun
When bathing vagabonds had drest and done;
Rootling in salty flannel-weed for meal
And river shrimps, when hushed the trundling wheel;
Snapping the dapping moth, and with new wonder
Prowling through old drowned barges falling asunder.
And O a thousand things the whole year through
They did together, never more to do.Read more of this...

by Thomas, Dylan
...t, racking house
And the hewn coils of his trade perceives
 Herons walk in their shroud,

 The livelong river's robe
Of minnows wreathing around their prayer;
 And far at sea he knows,
Who slaves to his crouched, eternal end
 Under a serpent cloud,
Dolphins dive in their turnturtle dust,
 The rippled seals streak down
To kill and their own tide daubing blood
 Slides good in the sleek mouth.

 In a cavernous, swung
Wave's silence, wept white angelus knells.
 Thirty-fiv...Read more of this...

by Graham, Jorie
...Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl
themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the
way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re-
 infolding,
entering and exiting their own unison in unison) making of themselves a
visual current, one that cannot freight or sway by
minutest fractions the water's downdrafts and upswirls, the
dockside cycles of f...Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...et he dazzled her with his dancing stick. 
They lay together upon the yellowy threads, 
swimming through them 
like minnows through kelp 
and they sang out benedictions like the Pope. 

Each day he brought her a skein of silk 
to fashion a ladder so they could both escape. 
But Mother Gothel discovered the plot 
and cut off Rapunzel's hair to her ears 
and took her into the forest to repent. 
When the prince came the witch fastened 
the hair to a hook and let ...Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...et he dazzled her with his dancing stick. 
They lay together upon the yellowy threads, 
swimming through them 
like minnows through kelp 
and they sang out benedictions like the Pope. 

Each day he brought her a skein of silk 
to fashion a ladder so they could both escape. 
But Mother Gothel discovered the plot 
and cut off Rapunzel's hair to her ears 
and took her into the forest to repent. 
When the prince came the witch fastened 
the hair to a hook and let ...Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...sucking out the throb. 
Our bodies were trash. 
We leave them on the shore. 
I and thou and she 
swin like minnows, 
losing all our queens and kinds, 
losing our hells and our tongues, 
cool, cool, all day that Sunday in July 
when we were young and did not look 
into the abyss, 
that God spot....Read more of this...

by Gluck, Louise
...Night covers the pond with its wing.
Under the ringed moon I can make out
your face swimming among minnows and the small
echoing stars. In the night air
the surface of the pond is metal.

Within, your eyes are open. They contain
a memory I recognize, as though
we had been children together. Our ponies
grazed on the hill, they were gray
with white markings. Now they graze
with the dead who wait
like children under their granite breastpl...Read more of this...

by Dyke, Henry Van
...spent,
He scanned his empty creel with discontent,
Called for a net, and cast it far and wide,
And drew --- a thousand minnows from the tide!
Then came the fisher to conclude the match,
And at the monarch's feet spread out his catch ---
A hundred salmon, greater than before ---
"I win!" he cried: "the King must pay the score."
Then Martin, angry, threw his tackle down:
"Rather than lose this game I'd lose me crown!"


"Nay, thou has lost them both," the fisher said;
And ...Read more of this...

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