Famous Papers Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Papers poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous papers poems. These examples illustrate what a famous papers poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
See also:
by
Edgar Lee Masters
The sudden death of Eugene Carman
Put me in line to be promoted to fifty dollars a month,
And I told my wife and children that night.
But it didn't come, and so I thought
Old Rhodes suspected me of stealing
The blankets I took and sold on the side
For money to pay a doctor's bill for my little girl.
Then like a bolt old...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
I
Let others sing of Empire and of pomp beyond the sea,
A song of Little Puddleton is good enough for me,
A song of kindly living, and of coming home to tea.
I seldom read the papers, so I don't know what goes on.
I go to bed at sunset, and I leap alert at dawn,
To gossip with my garden, which I'll have...Read more of this...
by
T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
I
THE WINTER evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.
II
The morning comes to consciousness
Of...Read more of this...
by
Michael Drayton
To the Critic
Methinks I see some crooked mimic jeer,
And tax my Muse with this fantastic grace,
Turning my papers asks, "What have we here?"
Making withal some filthy antic face.
I fear no censure, nor what thou canst say,
Nor shall my spirit one jot of vigor lose;
Think'st thou my wit shall keep the pack-horse way
That...Read more of this...
by
Robert Browning
(PIANO DI SORRENTO.)
Fortu, Frotu, my beloved one,
Sit here by my side,
On my knees put up both little feet!
I was sure, if I tried,
I could make you laugh spite of Scirocco;
Now, open your eyes—
Let me keep you amused till he vanish
In black from the skies,
With telling my memories over
As you tell your beads;
All the memories plucked at Sorrento
—The flowers,...Read more of this...
by
Jonathan Swift
Desponding Phillis was endu'd
With ev'ry Talent of a Prude,
She trembled when a Man drew near;
Salute her, and she turn'd her Ear:
If o'er against her you were plac't
She durst not look above your Wa[i]st;
She'd rather take you to her Bed
Than let you see her dress her Head;
In Church you heard her thro'...Read more of this...
by
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
My letters! all dead paper, mute and white!
And yet they seem alive and quivering
Against my tremulous hands which loose the string
And let them drop down on my knee to-night.
This said,—he wished to have me in his sight
Once, as a friend: this fixed a day in spring
To come and touch my hand . . . a simple thing,
Yet I wept...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
WHAT does the hangman think about
When he goes home at night from work?
When he sits down with his wife and
Children for a cup of coffee and a
Plate of ham and eggs, do they ask
Him if it was a good day’s work
And everything went well or do they
Stay off some topics and talk about
The weather, base ball, politics
And the comic...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
SOMEBODY’S little girl—how easy to make a sob story over who she was once and who she is now.
Somebody’s little girl—she played once under a crab-apple tree in June and the blossoms fell on the dark hair.
It was somewhere on the Erie line and the town was Salamanca or Painted Post or Horse’s Head.
And out of her hair she...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Lee Masters
To be able to see every side of every question;
To be on every side, to be everything, to be nothing long;
To pervert truth, to ride it for a purpose,
To use great feelings and passions of the human family
For base designs, for cunning ends,
To wear a mask like the Greek actors --
Your eight-page paper -- behind which you huddle,
Bawling through...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
1901 ". . . and will supply details to guard the Blood River Bridge." District Orders-Lines of Communication, South African War.
Sudden the desert changes,
The raw glare softens and clings,
Till the aching Oudtshoorn ranges
Stand up like the thrones of Kings --
Ramparts of slaughter and peril --
Blazing, amazing, aglow --
'Twixt the sky-line's belting beryl
And the wine-dark flats...Read more of this...
by
Henry Lawson
So you're writing for a paper? Well, it's nothing very new
To be writing yards of drivel for a tidy little screw;
You are young and educated, and a clever chap you are,
But you'll never run a paper like the CAMBAROORA STAR.
Though in point of education I am nothing but a dunce,
I myself -- you mayn't...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
In my dream
I milked a cow,
the terrible udder
like a great rubber lily
sweated in my fingers
and as I yanked,
waiting for the moon juice,
waiting for the white mother,
blood spurted from it
and covered me with shame.
Then God spoke to me and said:
People say only good things about Christmas.
If they want to say something bad,
they whisper.
So I went to the well and drew...Read more of this...
by
Jerome Rothenberg
I am not a native of this palce.(Yosimasu G.)
nor yet a stranger.
With the rst of you
I hunt for shade
my boots half off
to let the air through.
My head is on my shoulders
& is real.
I plant cucumbers
twice a year
& count the bounty.
Often I read
the papers
standing.
I am clean & pure.
I carry buckets
from the pond
more than my arms can bear.
Under a full moon
fish...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
YES, the Dead speak to us.
This town belongs to the Dead, to the Dead and to the Wilderness.
Back of the clamps on a fireproof door they hold the papers of the Dead in a house here
And when two living men fall out, when one says the Dead spoke a Yes, and the other says the Dead spoke a No,...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Lee Masters
My name used to be in the papers daily
As having dined somewhere,
Or traveled somewhere,
Or rented a house in Paris,
Where I entertained the nobility.
I was forever eating or traveling,
Or taking the cure at Baden-Baden.
Now I am here to do honor
To Spoon River, here beside the family whence I sprang.
No one cares now where I dined,
Or lived, or whom I entertained,
Or...Read more of this...
by
Randall Jarrell
It was not dying: everybody died.
It was not dying: we had died before
In the routine crashes-- and our fields
Called up the papers, wrote home to our folks,
And the rates rose, all because of us.
We died on the wrong page of the almanac,
Scattered on mountains fifty miles away;
Diving on haystacks, fighting with a...Read more of this...
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...
by
Edgar Lee Masters
I was sick, but more than that, I was mad
At the crooked police, and the crooked game of life.
So I wrote to the Chief of Police at Peoria:
"I am here in my girlhood home in Spoon River,
Gradually wasting away.
But come and take me, I killed the son
Of the merchant prince, in Madam Lou's,
And the papers that said he killed...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
(Soudan Expeditionary Force)
We've fought with many men acrost the seas,
An' some of 'em was brave an' some was not:
The Paythan an' the Zulu an' Burmese;
But the Fuzzy was the finest o' the lot.
We never got a ha'porth's change of 'im:
'E squatted in the scrub an' 'ocked our 'orses,
'E cut our sentries up at Suakim,
An' 'e...Read more of this...
by
Anne Kingsmill Finch
FOR He, that made, must new create us,
Ere Seneca, or Epictetus,
With all their serious Admonitions,
Can, for the Spleen, prove good Physicians.
The Heart's unruly Palpitation
Will not be laid by a Quotation;
Nor will the Spirits move the lighter
For the most celebrated Writer.
Sweats, Swoonings, and convulsive Motions
Will not be cur'd by Words, and Notions.
Then live, old Brown! with thy...Read more of this...
by
Eugene Field
Thar showed up out'n Denver in the spring uv '81
A man who'd worked with Dana on the Noo York Sun.
His name wuz Cantell Whoppers, 'nd he wuz a sight ter view
Ez he walked inter the orfice 'nd inquired fer work ter do.
Thar warn't no places vacant then,--fer be it understood,
That wuz the time when talent flourished at that altitood;
But...Read more of this...
by
Conrad Aiken
Snow falls. The sky is grey, and sullenly glares
With purple lights in the canyoned street.
The fiery sign on the dark tower wreathes and flares . . .
The trodden grass in the park is covered with white,
The streets grow silent beneath our feet . . .
The city dreams, it forgets its past to-night.
And one, from his high bright window looking...Read more of this...
by
Chris Mansell
there are times
when you should listen
to the world
I think
like
for instance
the time a meteorite came
through the roof and
through the ceiling and
landed on my desk
in the middle of
the papers and things
undone
to say it
smouldered would be
to become poetic
but it did
smoulder
and I was sitting there
at the time
about to pick up my pen
then I...Read more of this...
by
Marilyn Hacker
After Joseph Roth
Parce que c'était lui; parce que c'était moi.
Montaigne, De L'amitië
The dream's forfeit was a night in jail
and now the slant light is crepuscular.
Papers or not, you are a foreigner
whose name is always difficult to spell.
You pack your one valise. You ring the bell.
Might it not be prudent to disappear
beneath that mauve-blue sky above the square
fronting your cosmopolitan...Read more of this...
Dont forget to view our wonderful member Papers poems.