Famous Packing Poems by Famous Poets

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

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While The Bannock Bakes

by Robert William Service
 Light up your pipe again, old chum, and sit awhile with me;
I've got to watch the bannock bake -- how restful is the air!
You'd little think that we were somewhere north of Sixty-three,
Though where I don't exactly know, and don't precisely care.
The man-size mountains palisade us round on every side;
The river is a-flop with fish, and ripples silver-clear;
The midnight...Read more of this...

On The New Forcers Of Conscience Under The Long Parliament

by John Milton
 Because you have thrown of your Prelate Lord,
And with stiff Vowes renounc'd his Liturgie
To seise the widdow'd whore Pluralitie
From them whose sin ye envi'd, not abhor'd,
Dare ye for this adjure the Civill Sword
To force our Consciences that Christ set free,
And ride us with a classic Hierarchy
Taught ye by meer A. S. and Rotherford?
Men whose Life, Learning, Faith and pure...Read more of this...

Loud Music

by Stephen Dobyns
 My stepdaughter and I circle round and round.
You see, I like the music loud, the speakers
throbbing, jam-packing the room with sound whether
Bach or rock and roll, the volume cranked up so
each bass notes is like a hand smacking the gut.
But my stepdaughter disagrees. She is four
and likes the music decorous, pitched below
her own voice-that tenuous projection of self.
With music...Read more of this...

Sierra Kid

by Philip Levine
 "I've been where it hurts." the Kid 

He becomes Sierra Kid

 I passed Slimgullion, Morgan Mine, 
 Camp Seco, and the rotting Lode. 
 Dark walls of sugar pine --, 
 And where I left the road 

 I left myself behind; 
 Talked to no one, thought 
 Of nothing. When my luck ran out 
 Lived on...Read more of this...

A Truthful Song

by Rudyard Kipling
 THE BRICKLAYER:
 I tell this tale, which is strictly true,
 Just by way of convincing you
 How very little, since things were made,
 Things have altered in building trade.

 A year ago, come the middle of March,
 We was building flats near the Marble Arch,
 When a thin young man with coal-black hair
 Came up to watch us working...Read more of this...

The Ballad of the Carpet Bag

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 Ho! Darkies, don't you hear dose voters cryin' 
Pack dat carpet bag! 
You must get to de Poll, you must get there flyin'; 
Pack dat carpet bag! 
You must travel by de road, you must travel by de train, 
And the things what you've done you will have to explain, 
And the things what you've promised, you must promise...Read more of this...

Tranquillity

by Robert William Service
 This morning on my pensive walk
I saw a fisher on a rock,
Who watched his ruby float careen
In waters bluely crystalline,
While silver fishes nosed his bait,
Yet hesitated ere they ate.

Nearby I saw a mother mid
Who knitted by her naked child,
And watched him as he romped with glee,
In golden sand, in singing sea,
Her eyes so blissfully love-lit
She gazed and gazed and...Read more of this...

Peter Anderson And Co

by Henry Lawson
 He had offices in Sydney, not so many years ago, 
And his shingle bore the legend `Peter Anderson and Co.', 
But his real name was Careless, as the fellows understood -- 
And his relatives decided that he wasn't any good. 
'Twas their gentle tongues that blasted any `character' he had -- 
He was fond of beer and leisure --...Read more of this...

The Charm Of 5:30

by David Berman
 It's too nice a day to read a novel set in England.

We're within inches of the perfect distance from the sun,
the sky is blueberries and cream,
and the wind is as warm as air from a tire.
Even the headstones in the graveyard
 Seem to stand up and say "Hello! My name is..."

It's enough to be sitting here on my porch,
thinking...Read more of this...

Scarecrow Crimes

by John Lindley
 In Hayfield I imagine
not just the nuts and bolts of split cockpits 
but a Spitfire’s sunk fuselage 

has smoked out its entirety unseen 
from one century to the next.
At Edale Cross, Birch Vale or Kinder,

in rock, field or peat bog
more than machinery beds down and is lost, 
it’s true

but here in this field
with all of the exposed corn, 
yellow...Read more of this...

Lesbos

by Sylvia Plath
 Viciousness in the kitchen!
The potatoes hiss.
It is all Hollywood, windowless,
The fluorescent light wincing on and off like a terrible migraine,
Coy paper strips for doors --
Stage curtains, a widow's frizz.
And I, love, am a pathological liar,
And my child -- look at her, face down on the floor,
Little unstrung puppet, kicking to disappear --
Why she is schizophrenic,
Her face is red and...Read more of this...

Something For The Touts The Nuns The Grocery Clerks And You . .

by Charles Bukowski
 we have everything and we have nothing
and some men do it in churches
and some men do it by tearing butterflies
in half
and some men do it in Palm Springs
laying it into butterblondes
with Cadillac souls
Cadillacs and butterflies
nothing and everything,
the face melting down to the last puff
in a cellar in Corpus Christi.
there's something for the touts, the nuns,
the grocery clerks and you...Read more of this...

The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket

by Robert Lowell
 (For Warren Winslow, Dead At Sea)
 Let man have dominion over the fishes of the sea and
 the fowls of the air and the beasts and the whole earth,
 and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth.

 I
A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket--
The sea was still breaking violently and night
Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet,
When the...Read more of this...

Traveling Dream

by Marge Piercy
 I am packing to go to the airport 
but somehow I am never packed. 
I keep remembering more things 
I keep forgetting. 

Secretly the clock is bolting 
forward ten minutes at a click 
instead of one. Each time 
I look away, it jumps. 

Now I remember I have to find 
the cats. I have four cats 
even when I...Read more of this...

Ant Hill

by Robert William Service
 Black ants have made a musty mound
My purple pine tree under,
And I am often to be found,
Regarding it with wonder.
Yet as I watch, somehow it;s odd,
Above their busy striving
I feel like an ironic god
Surveying human striving.
Then one day came my serving maid,
And just in time I caught her,
For on each lusty arm she weighed
A pail of boiling water.
She said...Read more of this...

At Tower Peak

by Gary Snyder
At Tower Peak

 Every tan rolling meadow will turn into housing
 Freeways are clogged all day
 Academies packed with scholars writing papers
 City people lean and dark
 This land most real 
 As its western-tending golden slopes
 And bird-entangled central valley swamps
 Sea-lion, urchin coasts
 Southerly salmon-probes 
 Into the aromatic almost-Mexican hills
 Along a range of granite peaks
 The...Read more of this...

A Fountain a Bottle a Donkeys Ears and Some Books

by Robert Frost
 Old Davis owned a solid mica mountain
In Dalton that would someday make his fortune.
There'd been some Boston people out to see it:
And experts said that deep down in the mountain
The mica sheets were big as plate-glass windows.
He'd like to take me there and show it to me.

"I'll tell you what you show me. You remember
You said you knew the...Read more of this...

A Story

by Li-Young Lee
 Sad is the man who is asked for a story
and can't come up with one.

His five-year-old son waits in his lap.
Not the same story, Baba. A new one.
The man rubs his chin, scratches his ear.

In a room full of books in a world
of stories, he can recall
not one, and soon, he thinks, the boy
will give up on his father.

Already...Read more of this...

American Feuillage

by Walt Whitman
 AMERICA always! 
Always our own feuillage! 
Always Florida’s green peninsula! Always the priceless delta of Louisiana! Always the
 cotton-fields of Alabama and Texas! 
Always California’s golden hills and hollows—and the silver mountains of New
 Mexico!
 Always soft-breath’d Cuba! 
Always the vast slope drain’d by the Southern Sea—inseparable with the slopes
 drain’d
 by the Eastern and Western Seas;
The area the...Read more of this...

The Trail Of Ninety-Eight

by Robert William Service
 Gold! We leapt from our benches. Gold! We sprang from our stools.
Gold! We wheeled in the furrow, fired with the faith of fools.
Fearless, unfound, unfitted, far from the night and the cold,
Heard we the clarion summons, followed the master-lure--Gold!

Men from the sands of the Sunland; men from the woods of the West;
Men from the farms and the cities, into...Read more of this...

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