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Famous Pilings Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Pinsky, Robert
...In 1927 the Chief of Police
And Mrs. W. killed themselves together,
Sitting in a roadster. Ancient unshaken pilings
And underwater chunks of still-mortared brick
In shapes like bits of puzzle strew the bottom
Where the landing was for Price's Hotel and Theater.
And here's where boats blew two blasts for the keeper
To shunt the iron swing-bridge. He leaned on the gears
Like a skipper in the hut that housed the works
And the bridge moaned and turned on its m...Read more of this...



by Hecht, Anthony
...t of his indignities.

So is it with that man, not just with me.
He seems like a frail jetty facing North
Whose pilings the waves batter from all quarters;
From where the sun comes up, from where it sets,
From freezing boreal regions, from below,
A whole winter of miseries now assails him,
Thrashes his sides and breaks over his head....Read more of this...

by Wilbur, Richard
...ferry for the shore of death
Glides looming toward the dock, 
Her engines cut, her spirits bating breath
As the ranked pilings narrow toward the shock, 

So memory and expectation set 
Some pulseless clangor free
Of circumstance, and charm us to forget 
This twilight crumbling in the churchyard tree, 

Those swifts or swallows which do not pertain, 
Scuffed voices in the drive, 
That light flicked on behind the vestry pane, 
Till, unperplexed from all that is alive, 

It sha...Read more of this...

by Sandburg, Carl
...st,
and the press of time running into centuries, play
on the building inside and out and use it.

Men who sunk the pilings and mixed the mortar are laid
in graves where the wind whistles a wild song
without words
And so are men who strung the wires and fixed the pipes
and tubes and those who saw it rise floor by floor.
Souls of them all are here, even the hod carrier begging
at back doors hundreds of miles away and the brick-
layer who went to state's prison for shoo...Read more of this...

by Bishop, Elizabeth
...tide like this how sheer the water is.
White, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare
and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches.
Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,
the water in the bight doesn't wet anything,
the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.
One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire
one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.
The little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock
already plays the dry...Read more of this...



by Bishop, Elizabeth
...-But no kite. 

I wanted to get as far as my proto-dream-house, 
my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box 
set up on pilings, shingled green, 
a sort of artichoke of a house, but greener 
(boiled with bicarbonate of soda?), 
protected from spring tides by a palisade 
of--are they railroad ties? 
(Many things about this place are dubious.) 
I'd like to retire there and do nothing, 
or nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms: 
look through binoculars, read boring books,...Read more of this...

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