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Famous Mummer Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Service, Robert William
...Great Divide of Thirty-five.

And looking back I must confess
I've little cause to feel elate.
I've played the mummer more or less;
I fumbled fortune, flouted fate.
I've vastly dreamed and little done;
I've idly watched my brothers strive:
Oh, I have loitered in the sun
By primrose paths to Thirty-five!

And those who matched me in the race,
Well, some are out and trampled down;
The others jog with sober pace;
Yet one wins delicate renown.
O midnight feast an...Read more of this...



by Thomas, Dylan
...ghost that hatched his havoc as he flew
Blinds their cloud-tracking eye.


II

My world is pyramid. The padded mummer
Weeps on the desert ochre and the salt
Incising summer.
My Egypt's armour buckling in its sheet,
I scrape through resin to a starry bone
And a blood parhelion.

My world is cypress, and an English valley.
I piece my flesh that rattled on the yards
Red in an Austrian volley.
I hear, through dead men's drums, the riddled lads,
Screwing t...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...all the people pass;
You beside your bock of beer,
I behind my demi-tasse.
Chatting of no matter what.
You the Mummer, I the Bard;
Oh, it's jolly, is it not? --
Sitting on the Boulevard.

More amusing than a book,
If a chap has eyes to see;
For, no matter where I look,
Stories, stories jump at me.
Moving tales my pen might write;
Poems plain on every face;
Monologues you could recite
With inimitable grace.

(Ah! Imagination's power)
See yon demi-mondaine ...Read more of this...

by Schwartz, Delmore
...
You too, Crusoe, to utter the emotion
Of finding Friday, no longer alone;
You too, Chaplin, muse of the curbstone,
Mummer of hope, you understand!"

But this is fantastic and pitiful,
And no one comes, none will, we are alone,
And what is possible is my own voice,
Speaking its wish, despite its lasting fear;
Speaking of its hope, its promise and its fear,
The voice drunk with itself and rapt in fear,
Exaggeration, braggadocio,
Rhetoric and hope, and always fear:

"For fi...Read more of this...

by Dyke, Henry Van
...ale that the poet Rückert told
To German children, in days of old;
Disguised in a random, rollicking rhyme
Like a merry mummer of ancient time,
And sent, in its English dress, to please
The little folk of the Christmas trees. 

A little fir grew in the midst of the wood 
Contented and happy, as young trees should. 
His body was straight and his boughs were clean; 
And summer and winter the bountiful sheen 
Of his needles bedecked him, from top to root, 
In a beautiful...Read more of this...



by Raine, Kathleen
...elsewhere gone, 
And I who have been Virgin and Aphrodite, 
The mourning Isis and the queen of corn 
Wait for the last mummer, dread Persephone 
To dance my dust at last into the tomb....Read more of this...

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