Famous Needles Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Work and Play

by Ted Hughes
 The swallow of summer, she toils all the summer,
A blue-dark knot of glittering voltage,
A whiplash swimmer, a fish of the air.
 But the serpent of cars that crawls through the dust
 In shimmering exhaust
 Searching to slake
 Its fever in ocean
 Will play and be idle or else it will bust. 

The swallow of summer, the barbed harpoon,
She flings...Read more of this...

A Weight with Needles on the pounds

by Emily Dickinson
 A Weight with Needles on the pounds --
To push, and pierce, besides --
That if the Flesh resist the Heft --
The puncture -- coolly tries --

That not a pore be overlooked
Of all this Compound Frame --
As manifold for Anguish --
As Species -- be -- for name --...Read more of this...

Blood Money

by Syl Cheney-Coker
Along the route of this river,
with a little luck, we shall chance upon
our brothers' fortune, hidden with that cold smile
reserved for discreet bankers unmindful of the hydra
growing fiery mornings from our discontent
Wealth was always fashionable, telluric,
not honor pristine and profound.
In blasphemous glee, they raise to God's lips
those cups filled with ethnic offerings
that saps the blood of all human good.
Having no...Read more of this...

Needles And Pins

by Mother Goose
Needles and pins, needles and pins,
When a man marries his trouble begins....Read more of this...

Eighty Not Out

by Robert William Service
 In the gay, gleamy morn I adore to go walking,
And oh what sweet people I meet on my way!
I hail them with joy for I love to be talking,
Although I have nothing important to say.
I cheer the old grannies whose needles are plying;
I watch the wee kiddies awhoop at their play:
When sunny the sky is, you'll not be denying
The...Read more of this...

The Fiddling Wood

by Stephen Vincent Benet
 Gods, what a black, fierce day! The clouds were iron, 
Wrenched to strange, rugged shapes; the red sun winked 
Over the rough crest of the hairy wood 
In angry scorn; the grey road twisted, kinked, 
Like a sick serpent, seeming to environ 
The trees with magic. All the wood was still -- 

Cracked, crannied pines bent like malicious cripples...Read more of this...

The Crazed Moon

by William Butler Yeats
 Crazed through much child-bearing
The moon is staggering in the sky;
Moon-struck by the despairing
Glances of her wandering eye
We grope, and grope in vain,
For children born of her pain.

Children dazed or dead!
When she in all her virginal pride
First trod on the mountain's head
What stir ran through the countryside
Where every foot obeyed her glance!
What manhood led the dance!

Fly-catchers of the moon,
Our hands...Read more of this...

The Girt Woak Tree

by Ingeborg Bachmann
 The girt woak tree that's in the dell !
There's noo tree I do love so well;
Vor times an' times when I wer young
I there've a-climb'd, an' there've a-zwung,
An' pick'd the eacorns green, a-shed
In wrestlen storms from his broad head,
An' down below's the cloty brook
Where I did vish with line an' hook,
An' beat, in playsome dips and zwims,
The foamy stream,...Read more of this...

Fleckno an English Priest at Rome

by Andrew Marvell
 Oblig'd by frequent visits of this man,
Whom as Priest, Poet, and Musician,
I for some branch of Melchizedeck took,
(Though he derives himself from my Lord Brooke)
I sought his Lodging; which is at the Sign
Of the sad Pelican; Subject divine
For Poetry: There three Stair Cases high,
Which signifies his triple property,
I found at last a Chamber, as 'twas said,
But seem'd a Coffin...Read more of this...

I In My Intricate Image

by Dylan Thomas
 I

I, in my intricate image, stride on two levels,
Forged in man's minerals, the brassy orator
Laying my ghost in metal,
The scales of this twin world tread on the double,
My half ghost in armour hold hard in death's corridor,
To my man-iron sidle.

Beginning with doom in the bulb, the spring unravels,
Bright as her spinning-wheels, the colic season
Worked on a world of petals;
She...Read more of this...

Tulips

by Sylvia Plath
 The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
And my history to the...Read more of this...

Georgia Dusk

by Jean Toomer
 The sky, lazily disdaining to pursue
 The setting sun, too indolent to hold
 A lengthened tournament for flashing gold,
Passively darkens for night's barbecue, 

A feast of moon and men and barking hounds,
 An orgy for some genius of the South
 With blood-hot eyes and cane-lipped scented mouth,
Surprised in making folk-songs from soul sounds.

The sawmill blows its whistle, buzz-saws stop,
...Read more of this...

The Girt Woak Tree

by William Barnes
 The girt woak tree that's in the dell !
There's noo tree I do love so well;
Vor times an' times when I wer young
I there've a-climb'd, an' there've a-zwung,
An' pick'd the eacorns green, a-shed
In wrestlen storms from his broad head,
An' down below's the cloty brook
Where I did vish with line an' hook,
An' beat, in playsome dips and zwims,
The foamy stream,...Read more of this...

In The New Sun

by Philip Levine
 Filaments of light 
slant like windswept rain. 
The orange seller hawks 
into the sky, a man with a hat 
stops below my window 
and shakes his tassels. 
 Awake 
in Tetuan, the room filling 
with the first colors, and water running 
in a tub. 

* 

A row of sparkling carp 
iced in the new sun, odor 
of first love,...Read more of this...

The Story of Ung

by Rudyard Kipling
 Once, on a glittering ice-field, ages and ages ago,
Ung, a maker of pictures, fashioned an image of snow.
Fashioned the form of a tribesman -- gaily he whistled and sung,
Working the snow with his fingers. Read ye the Story of Ung!

Pleased was his tribe with that image -- came in their hundreds to scan --
Handled it, smelt it, and grunted:...Read more of this...

Ode to the Sublime Porte

by Thomas Moore
 Great Sultan, how wise are thy state compositions!
And oh, above all, I admire that Decree,
In which thou command'st, that all she politicians
Shall forthwith be strangled and cast in the sea.

'Tis my fortune to know a lean Benthamite spinster --
A maid, who her faith in old Jeremy puts;
Who talks, with a lisp, of the "last new Westminster,"
And hopes you're delighted...Read more of this...

damsel flies

by Rg Gregory
 certain creatures it seems are never seen 
straight on - they occupy the corner of the eye
once sensed (a second look) they're gone
the damsel even more so than the dragon-fly

she's a tough cookie for all her slender flutters
huge eyes strong jaws belie her evanescence
the kind of female to leave love's lisps in tatters
don't get sucked in by her immaculate...Read more of this...

Governors On Sominex

by David Berman
 It had been four days of no weather
as if nature had conceded its genius to the indoors.

They'd closed down the Bureau of Sad Endings
and my wife sat on the couch and read the paper out loud.

The evening edition carried the magic death of a child
backlit by a construction site sunrise on its front page.

I kept my back to her...Read more of this...

While Someone Telephones

by Elizabeth Bishop
 Wasted, wasted minutes that couldn't be worse, 
minutes of a barbaric condescension. 
--Stare out the bathroom window at the fir-trees, 
at their dark needles, accretions to no purpose 
woodenly crystallized, and where two fireflies 
are only lost. 
Hear nothing but a train that goes by, must go by, like tension; 
nothing. And wait: 
maybe even now these minutes' host...Read more of this...

The Beacon In The Storm

by Victor Hugo
 ("Quels sont ces bruits sourds?") 
 
 {XXIV., July 17, 1836.} 


 Hark to that solemn sound! 
 It steals towards the strand.— 
 Whose is that voice profound 
 Which mourns the swallowed land, 
 With moans, 
 Or groans, 
 New threats of ruin close at hand? 
 It is Triton—the storm to scorn 
 Who doth...Read more of this...

Before the Altar

by Amy Lowell
 Before the Altar, bowed, he stands
With empty hands;
Upon it perfumed offerings burn
Wreathing with smoke the sacrificial urn.
Not one of all these has he given,
No flame of his has leapt to Heaven
Firesouled, vermilion-hearted,
Forked, and darted,
Consuming what a few spare pence
Have cheaply bought, to fling from hence
In idly-asked petition.
His sole condition
Love and poverty.
And while the moon
Swings slow across the sky,
Athwart a...Read more of this...

Celebration

by Denise Levertov
 Brilliant, this day – a young virtuoso of a day.
Morning shadow cut by sharpest scissors,
deft hands. And every prodigy of green – 
whether it's ferns or lichens or needles
or impatient points of buds on spindly bushes – 
greener than ever before. And the way the conifers
hold new cones to the light for the blessing,
a festive right, and sing the...Read more of this...

To Certain Poets

by Joyce Kilmer
 Now is the rhymer's honest trade
A thing for scornful laughter made.
The merchant's sneer, the clerk's disdain,
These are the burden of our pain.
Because of you did this befall,
You brought this shame upon us all.
You little poets mincing there
With women's hearts and women's hair!
How sick Dan Chaucer's ghost must be
To hear you lisp of "Poesie"!
A heavy-handed blow, I think,
Would make your...Read more of this...

from San Ildefonso Nocturne

by Octavio Paz
I am at the entrance to a tunnel
These phrases drill through time.
Perhaps I am that which waits at the end of the tunnel.
I speak with eyes closed.
                         Someone
has planted
       ...Read more of this...

A Book Full of Pictures

by Charles Simic
 Father studied theology through the mail
And this was exam time.
Mother knitted. I sat quietly with a book
Full of pictures. Night fell.
My hands grew cold touching the faces
Of dead kings and queens.

There was a black raincoat
 in the upstairs bedroom
Swaying from the ceiling,
But what was it doing there?
Mother's long needles made quick crosses.
They were black
Like the inside of my head...Read more of this...

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