Famous Motors Poems by Famous Poets

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

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From One Who Stays

by Amy Lowell
 How empty seems the town now you are gone!
A wilderness of sad streets, where gaunt walls
Hide nothing to desire; sunshine falls
Eery, distorted, as it long had shone
On white, dead faces tombed in halls of stone.
The whir of motors, stricken through with calls
Of playing boys, floats up at intervals;
But all these noises blur to one long moan.
What quest is worth...Read more of this...

The Legend Of Boastful Bill

by Badger Clark
  At a roundup on the Gily,
    One sweet mornin' long ago,
  Ten of us was throwed right freely
    By a hawse from Idaho.
  And we thought he'd go-a-beggin'
    For a man to break his pride
  Till, a-hitchin' up one leggin,
    Boastful Bill cut...Read more of this...

Leather Leggings

by Carl Sandburg
 THEY have taken the ball of earth
 and made it a little thing.

They were held to the land and horses;
 they were held to the little seas.
They have changed and shaped and welded;
 they have broken the old tools and made
 new ones; they are ranging the white
 scarves of cloudland; they are bumping
 the sunken bells of the...Read more of this...

Statistics

by Carl Sandburg
 NAPOLEON shifted,
Restless in the old sarcophagus
And murmured to a watchguard:
"Who goes there?"
"Twenty-one million men,
Soldiers, armies, guns,
Twenty-one million
Afoot, horseback,
In the air,
Under the sea."
And Napoleon turned to his sleep:
"It is not my world answering;
It is some dreamer who knows not
The world I marched in
From Calais to Moscow."
And he slept on
In the old sarcophagus
While the aeroplanes
Droned their motors
Between Napoleon's mausoleum
And the cool...Read more of this...

The Walking Man of Rodin

by Carl Sandburg
 LEGS hold a torso away from the earth.
And a regular high poem of legs is here.
Powers of bone and cord raise a belly and lungs
Out of ooze and over the loam where eyes look and ears hear
And arms have a chance to hammer and shoot and run motors.
You make us
Proud of our legs, old man.

And you left off the...Read more of this...

from imperfect Eden

by Rg Gregory
 (1)
and off to scott's (the dockers' restaurant)
burly men packed in round solid tables
but what the helle (drowned in hellespont)
this place for me was rich in its own fables
i'll be the lover sunk if that enables
an awesome sense of just how deep the spells
that put scotts for me beyond the dardanelles

lace-curtained windows (or memory plays me false)
no capped odysseus could...Read more of this...

The Fire Sermon

by T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
  The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
  Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
  Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
  Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
  The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
  Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
  Or...Read more of this...

The Unknown Citizen

by Wystan Hugh (W H) Auden
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to beOne against whom there was no official complaint,And all the reports on his conduct agreeThat, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was asaint,For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.Except for the War till the day he retiredHe worked in a factory and never got fired,But...Read more of this...

In a Breath

by Carl Sandburg
 To the Williamson Brothers

HIGH noon. White sun flashes on the Michigan Avenue
asphalt. Drum of hoofs and whirr of motors.
Women trapsing along in flimsy clothes catching
play of sun-fire to their skin and eyes.

Inside the playhouse are movies from under the sea.
From the heat of pavements and the dust of sidewalks,
passers-by go in a breath to be witnesses of
large cool sponges,...Read more of this...

Who Runs America?

by Allen Ginsberg
Oil brown smog over Denver 
Oil red dung colored smoke 
level to level across the horizon 

blue tainted sky above 
Oil car smog gasoline 
hazing red Denver's day 

December bare trees 

sticking up from housetop streets 

Plane lands rumbling, planes rise over 

radar wheels, black smoke 

drifts from tailfins 

Oil millions of cars speeding the cracked plains 
Oil from Texas,...Read more of this...

i wrote a life

by Billy Jno Hope
 this might be the swan song
i have traveled beyond misty mountains
spilled my seed on the hungry rock
hallowed days
blasphemous timelines
art nourishment
prolific like sin
to the serpent edge of youth
once my head rolled in the streets
motors crashing by
inches from my intoxication
a fleshful laugh echoed in time
a mad initiation as part of the door
to the unrepentant lyric
heathen apprentices
i cracked the demon-s egg
tattooed pandora-s...Read more of this...

Wars

by Carl Sandburg
 IN the old wars drum of hoofs and the beat of shod feet.
In the new wars hum of motors and the tread of rubber tires.
In the wars to come silent wheels and whirr of rods not
yet dreamed out in the heads of men.

In the old wars clutches of short swords and jabs into
faces with spears.
In the new wars long...Read more of this...

Spring Day

by Amy Lowell
 Bath
The day is fresh-washed and fair, and there is 
a smell of tulips and narcissus
in the air.
The sunshine pours in at the bath-room window and 
bores through the water
in the bath-tub in lathes and planes of greenish-white. It 
cleaves the water
into flaws like a jewel, and cracks it to bright light.
Little spots of sunshine lie on the surface of...Read more of this...

A Statesmans Holiday

by William Butler Yeats
 I lived among great houses,
Riches drove out rank,
Base drove out the better blood,
And mind and body shrank.
No Oscar ruled the table,
But I'd a troop of friends
That knowing better talk had gone
Talked of odds and ends.
Some knew what ailed the world
But never said a thing,
So I have picked a better trade
And night and morning sing:
Tall dames go walking in grass-green...Read more of this...

Here Died

by Henry Lawson
 There's many a schoolboy's bat and ball that are gathering dust at home, 
For he hears a voice in the future call, and he trains for the war to come; 
A serious light in his eyes is seen as he comes from the schoolhouse gate; 
He keeps his kit and his rifle clean, and he sees that his back...Read more of this...

A Motor Courtship

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 Into her presence he gaily pranced, 
A very fat spark, and a bit advanced. 
With a Samson tread on the earth he trod, 
He was stayed and gaitered, and fifty odd. 

And she was a tulip just unfurled, 
The sweetest thing in the motor world. 

Her body was one of which poets dreamed; 
Eighteen -- twenty, or so she...Read more of this...

Lines On A Young Ladys Photograph Album

by Philip Larkin
 At last you yielded up the album, which
Once open, sent me distracted. All your ages
Matt and glossy on the thick black pages!
Too much confectionery, too rich:
I choke on such nutritious images.

My swivel eye hungers from pose to pose --
In pigtails, clutching a reluctant cat;
Or furred yourself, a sweet girl-graduate;
Or lifting a heavy-headed rose
Beneath a trellis, or in a trilby-hat

(Faintly...Read more of this...

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