Famous Minute Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Minute poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous minute poems. These examples illustrate what a famous minute poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Elizabeth Bishop
At six o'clock we were waiting for coffee,
waiting for coffee and the charitable crumb
that was going to be served from a certain balcony
—like kings of old, or like a miracle.
It was still dark. One foot of the sun
steadied itself on a long ripple in the river.
The first ferry of the day had just...Read more of this...
by
Delmira Agustini
SpanishSi la vida es amor, bendita sea!Quiero más vida para amar! Hoy sientoQue no valen mil años de la ideaLo que un minuto azul del sentimiento.Mi corazon moria triste y lento…Hoy abre en luz como una flor febea;La vida brota como un mar violentoDonde la mano del amor golpea!Hoy partio hacia la noche, triste, fríaRotas las alas mi melancolía;Como una...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
Quarter to three: I wake again at the hour of his birth
Thirty years ago and now he paces corridors of dark
In nightmares of self-condemnation where random thoughts
Besiege his fevered imagination – England’s
Imminent destruction, his own, the world’s…
Sixty to eighty cigarettes a day, unavailing depot injections,
Failed abscondings, failed everything: Eton and Balliol
Hold no sway on ward one, nor even...Read more of this...
by
Robert Herrick
Only a little more
I have to write:
Then I'll give o'er,
And bid the world good-night.
'Tis but a flying minute,
That I must stay,
Or linger in it:
And then I must away.
O Time, that cut'st down all,
And scarce leav'st here
Memorial
Of any men that were;
--How many lie forgot
In vaults beneath,
And piece-meal rot
Without a fame in death?
Behold this living stone
I rear for me,
Ne'er to be...Read more of this...
by
William Butler Yeats
A cursing rogue with a merry face,
A bundle of rags upon a crutch,
Stumbled upon that windy place
Called Cruachan, and it was as much
As the one sturdy leg could do
To keep him upright while he cursed.
He had counted, where long years ago
Queen Maeve's nine Maines had been nursed,
A pair of lapwings, one old sheep,
And not a house to the plain's...Read more of this...
by
Mother Goose
Who killed Cock Robin?
"I," said the sparrow,
"With my little bow and arrow,
I killed Cock Robin."
Who saw him die?
"I," said the fly,
"With my little eye,
I saw him die."
Who caught his blood?
"I," said the fish,
"With my little dish,
I caught his blood."
Who'll make his shroud?
"I," said the beetle,
"With my thread and needle.
I'll make his shroud."
Who'll carry the torch?
"I," said the linnet,
"I'll come in...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
On the southwest side of Capri
we found a little unknown grotto
where no people were and we
entered it completely
and let our bodies lose all
their loneliness.
All the fish in us
had escaped for a minute.
The real fish did not mind.
We did not disturb their personal life.
We calmly trailed over them
and under them, shedding
air bubbles, little white
balloons that drifted up
into the sun by...Read more of this...
by
Jorie Graham
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 finally-arriving boat-wakes, there...Read more of this...
by
Walter de la Mare
ENOUGH; and leave the rest to Fame!
'Tis to commend her, but to name.
Courtship which, living, she declined,
When dead, to offer were unkind:
Nor can the truest wit, or friend,
Without detracting, her commend.
To say--she lived a virgin chaste
In this age loose and all unlaced;
Nor was, when vice is so allowed,
Of virtue or...Read more of this...
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...
by
Pablo Neruda
From blossoms
released
by the moonlight,
from an
aroma of exasperated
love,
steeped in fragrance,
yellowness
drifted from the lemon tree,
and from its plantarium
lemons descended to the earth.
Tender yield!
The coasts,
the markets glowed
with light, with
unrefined gold;
we opened
two halves
of a miracle,
congealed acid
trickled
from the hemispheres
of a star,
the most intense liqueur
of nature,
unique, vivid,
concentrated,
born of the cool, fresh
lemon,
of its fragrant house,
its acid, secret symmetry.
Knives
sliced a small
cathedral
in the lemon,
the concealed apse, opened,
revealed acid...Read more of this...
by
Robert Louis Stevenson
Smooth it glides upon its travel,
Here a wimple, there a gleam--
O the clean gravel!
O the smooth stream!
Sailing blossoms, silver fishes,
Pave pools as clear as air--
How a child wishes
To live down there!
We can see our colored faces
Floating on the shaken pool
Down in cool places,
Dim and very cool;
Till a...Read more of this...
by
William Wordsworth
A simple child, dear brother Jim, That lightly draws its breath, And feels its life in every limb, What should it know of death? I met a little cottage girl, She was eight years old, she said; Her hair was thick with many a curl That cluster'd round her head. She had a rustic, woodland air, And she was wildly clad; Her eyes were fair, and very fair, —Her...Read more of this...
by
Lewis Carroll
All in the golden afternoon
Full leisurely we glide;
For both our oars, with little skill,
By little arms are plied,
While little hands make vain pretense
Our wanderings to guide.
Ah, cruel Three! In such an hour,
Beneath such dreamy weather,
To beg a tale of breath too weak
To stir the tiniest feather!
Yet what can one poor voice avail
Against three tongues together?
Imperious Prima flashes forth
Her edict...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
Come show thy Durham Breast
To her who loves thee best,
Delicious Robin --
And if it be not me
At least within my Tree
Do the avowing --
Thy Nuptial so minute
Perhaps is more astute
Than vaster suing --
For so to soar away
Is our propensity
The Day ensuing --...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
Oh gallant was our galley from her caren steering-wheel
To her figurehead of silver and her beak of hammered steel;
The leg-bar chafed the ankle and we gasped for cooler air,
But no galley on the waters with our galley could compare!
Our bulkheads bulged with cotton and our masts were stepped in gold --
We ran a mighty merchandise of niggers in the...Read more of this...
by
Suheir Hammad
poem supposed to be about
one minute and the lives of three women in it
writing it and up
the block a woman killed
by her husband
poem now about one minute
and the lives of four women
in it
haitian mother
she walks through
town carrying her son's
head—banging it against
her thigh calling out
creole come see, see what
they've done to my flesh
holds on to him grip tight
through hair...Read more of this...
by
Ellis Parker Butler
She plucked a blossom fair to see;
Upon my coat I let her pin it;
And thus we stood beneath the tree
A minute.
She turned her smiling face to me;
I saw a roguish sweetness in it;
I kissed her once;—it took, maybe,
A minute.
The time was paltry, you’ll agree;
It took but little to begin it;
But since my heart has...Read more of this...
by
William Butler Yeats
And thus declared that Arab lady:
'Last night, where under the wild moon
On grassy mattress I had laid me,
Within my arms great Solomon,
I suddenly cried out in a strange tongue
Not his, not mine.'
Who understood
Whatever has been said, sighed, sung,
Howled, miau-d, barked, brayed, belled, yelled, cried, crowed,
Thereon replied: 'A cockerel
Crew from a blossoming apple bough
Three hundred years before the Fall,
And...Read more of this...
by
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Tim Murphy's gon' walkin' wid Maggie O'Neill,
O chone!
If I was her muther, I'd frown on sich foolin',
O chone!
I'm sure it's unmutherlike, darin' an' wrong
To let a gyrul hear tell the sass an' the song
Of every young felly that happens along,
O chone!
An' Murphy, the things that's be'n sed of his doin',
O chone!
'Tis a cud that no dacent folks wants to be...Read more of this...
by
Andrew Marvell
Daphnis must from Chloe part:
Now is come the dismal Hour
That must all his Hopes devour,
All his Labour, all his Art.
Nature, her own Sexes foe,
Long had taught her to be coy:
But she neither knew t' enjoy,
Nor yet let her Lover go.
But, with this sad News surpriz'd,
Soon she let that Niceness fall;
And would gladly yield to all,
So it had his stay...Read more of this...
by
Dylan Thomas
From love's first fever to her plague, from the soft second
And to the hollow minute of the womb,
From the unfolding to the scissored caul,
The time for breast and the green apron age
When no mouth stirred about the hanging famine,
All world was one, one windy nothing,
My world was christened in a stream of milk.
And earth and sky were as one...Read more of this...
by
Elizabeth Bishop
For John Malcolm Brinnin and Bill Read: Duxbury
It was cold and windy, scarcely the day
to take a walk on that long beach
Everything was withdrawn as far as possible,
indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken,
seabirds in ones or twos.
The rackety, icy, offshore wind
numbed our faces on one side;
disrupted the formation
of a...Read more of this...
by
Federico García Lorca
1. Cogida and death
At five in the afternoon.
It was exactly five in the afternoon.
A boy brought the white sheet
at five in the afternoon.
A frail of lime ready prepared
at five in the afternoon.
The rest was death, and death alone.
The wind carried away the cottonwool
at five in the afternoon.
And the oxide...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Hardy
As I drive to the junction of lane and highway,
And the drizzle bedrenches the waggonette,
I look behind at the fading byway,
And see on its slope, now glistening wet,
Distinctly yet
Myself and a girlish form benighted
In dry March weather. We climb the road
Beside a chaise. We had just alighted
To ease the sturdy pony's load
When he sighed and...Read more of this...
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