Famous Pin Poems by Famous Poets

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

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two spanish poems

by Rg Gregory
 (a) orihuela-time

the sun in orihuela calms the dust
and people glide about the streets at ease
(problems left indoors to cool themselves)
time has grown fat and no one cares
to pin each minute to its proper place
the day is long tomorrow's not yet real

doves and old men occupy the squares
nattering to each other in such tongues
that take the clock away from what...Read more of this...

Hatteras Calling

by Conrad Aiken
 Southeast, and storm, and every weathervane 
shivers and moans upon its dripping pin, 
ragged on chimneys the cloud whips, the rain 
howls at the flues and windows to get in, 
the golden rooster claps his golden wings 
and from the Baptist Chapel shrieks no more, 
the golden arrow in the southeast sings 
and hears on the roof the Atlantic...Read more of this...

The Man-Moth

by Elizabeth Bishop
 Man-Moth: Newspaper misprint for "mammoth."

 Here, above,
cracks in the buldings are filled with battered moonlight.
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,
and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.
He does not see the moon; he observes only her...Read more of this...

Rhapsody on a Windy Night

by T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
 TWELVE o’clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

Half-past one,
The street-lamp sputtered,
The street-lamp muttered,
The street-lamp said, “Regard that woman
Who hesitates...Read more of this...

The Old Song

by G K Chesterton
 A livid sky on London
And like the iron steeds that rear
A shock of engines halted
And I knew the end was near:
And something said that far away, over the hills and far away
There came a crawling thunder and the end of all things here.
For London Bridge is broken down, broken down, broken down,
As digging lets the daylight on the suken...Read more of this...

The Grey Rock

by William Butler Yeats
 Poets with whom I learned my trade.
Companions of the Cheshire Cheese,
Here's an old story I've remade,
Imagining 'twould better please
Your cars than stories now in fashion,
Though you may think I waste my breath
Pretending that there can be passion
That has more life in it than death,
And though at bottling of your wine
Old wholesome Goban had no say;
The moral's yours because it's...Read more of this...

Café Comedy

by Robert William Service
 She

I'm waiting for the man I hope to wed.
I've never seen him - that's the funny part.
I promised I would wear a rose of red,
Pinned on my coat above my fluttered heart,
So that he'd know me - a precaution wise,
Because I wrote him I was twenty-three,
And Oh such heaps and heaps of silly lies. . .
So when we meet...Read more of this...

Tortoise Shell

by D. H. Lawrence
 The Cross, the Cross
Goes deeper in than we know,
Deeper into life;
Right into the marrow
And through the bone.
Along the back of the baby tortoise
The scales are locked in an arch like a bridge,
Scale-lapping, like a lobster's sections
Or a bee's.

Then crossways down his sides
Tiger-stripes and wasp-bands.

Five, and five again, and five again,
And round the edges twenty-five little ones,
The sections of the...Read more of this...

Love and a Question

by Robert Frost
 A stranger came to the door at eve, 
And he spoke the bridegroom fair. 
He bore a green-white stick in his hand, 
And, for all burden, care. 
He asked with the eyes more than the lips 
For a shelter for the night, 
And he turned and looked at the road afar 
Without a window light. 

The bridegroom came forth...Read more of this...

Snow Whites Acne

by Denise Duhamel
 At first she was sure it was just a bit of dried strawberry juice,
or a fleck of her mother's red nail polish that had flaked off
when she'd patted her daughter to sleep the night before.
But as she scrubbed, Snow felt a bump, something festering
under the surface, like a tapeworm curled up and living
in her left cheek.
 Doc the Dwarf...Read more of this...

How Shall My Animal

by Dylan Thomas
 How shall my animal
Whose wizard shape I trace in the cavernous skull,
Vessel of abscesses and exultation's shell,
Endure burial under the spelling wall,
The invoked, shrouding veil at the cap of the face,
Who should be furious,
Drunk as a vineyard snail, flailed like an octopus,
Roaring, crawling, quarrel
With the outside weathers,
The natural circle of the discovered skies
Draw down to its weird eyes?

How shall...Read more of this...

A Minute

by Ellis Parker Butler
 She plucked a blossom fair to see;
 Upon my coat I let her pin it;
And thus we stood beneath the tree
 A minute.

She turned her smiling face to me;
 I saw a roguish sweetness in it;
I kissed her once;—it took, maybe,
 A minute.

The time was paltry, you’ll agree;
 It took but little to begin it;
But since my heart has...Read more of this...

Apollo Belvedere

by Robert William Service
 A-sitttin' on a cracker box an' spittin' in the stove,
I took a sudden notion that I'd kindo' like to rove;
An' so I bought a ticket, jest as easy as could be,
From Pumpkinville in Idaho to Rome in Italy;
An' found myself in seven days of mostly atmosphere
A-starin' at a statoo called Appoller Belvydeer.

Now I'm a rum-soaked sinner, an' religion ain't...Read more of this...

The Ballad Of Soulful Sam

by Robert William Service
 You want me to tell you a story, a yarn of the firin' line,
Of our thin red kharki 'eroes, out there where the bullets whine;
Out there where the bombs are bustin',
and the cannons like 'ell-doors slam --
Just order another drink, boys, and I'll tell you of Soulful Sam.

Oh, Sam, he was never 'ilarious, though I've 'ad some mates as...Read more of this...

The Pin

by Ann Taylor
 "Dear me! what signifies a pin! 
I'll leave it on the floor;
My pincushion has others in,
Mamma has plenty more: 
A miser will I never be," 
Said little heedless Emily. 

So tripping on to giddy play,
She left the pin behind, 
For Betty's broom to whisk away, 
Or some one else to find; 
She never gave a thought, indeed, 
To what...Read more of this...

296. The Five Carlins: An Election Ballad

by Robert Burns
 THERE was five Carlins in the South,
 They fell upon a scheme,
To send a lad to London town,
 To bring them tidings hame.


Nor only bring them tidings hame,
 But do their errands there,
And aiblins gowd and honor baith
 Might be that laddie’s share.


There was Maggy by the banks o’ Nith,
 A dame wi’ pride eneugh;
And Marjory o’ the mony...Read more of this...

Snowbanks North of the House

by Robert Bly
 Those great sweeps of snow that stop suddenly six
feet from the house ...
Thoughts that go so far.
The boy gets out of high school and reads no more
books;
the son stops calling home.
The mother puts down her rolling pin and makes no
more bread.
And the wife looks at her husband one night at a
party, and loves him no more.
The energy leaves the...Read more of this...

The List of Famous Hats

by James Tate
 Napoleon's hat is an obvious choice I guess to list as a famous
hat, but that's not the hat I have in mind. That was his hat for
show. I am thinking of his private bathing cap, which in all hon-
esty wasn't much different than the one any jerk might buy at a
corner drugstore now, except for two minor eccentricities. The
first...Read more of this...

1777

by Amy Lowell
 I
The Trumpet-Vine Arbour
The throats of the little red trumpet-flowers are 
wide open,
And the clangour of brass beats against the hot sunlight.
They bray and blare at the burning sky.
Red! Red! Coarse notes of red,
Trumpeted at the blue sky.
In long streaks of sound, molten metal,
The vine declares itself.
Clang! -- from its red and yellow trumpets.
Clang! -- from its long, nasal trumpets,
Splitting...Read more of this...

Rivera Honeymoon

by Robert William Service
 Beneath the trees I lounged at ease
And watched them speed the pace;
They swerved and swung, they clutched and clung,
They leapt in roaring chase;
The crowd was thrilled, a chap was killed:
It was a splendid race.

Two men, they say, went West that day,
But I knew only one;
Geranium-red his blood was spread
And blazoned in the sun;
A lighting crash . . . Lo!...Read more of this...

Compass Rose

by Jennifer Reeser
 I’d buy you a Babushka doll, my heart,
and brush your ash-blonde hair until it gleams,
were Russia and our land not laid apart
by ocean so much deeper than it seems.

I have an oval pin, though -- glossy lacquer
hand-made in Moscow, after glasnost came,
with fine, deft roses on a background blacker
perhaps, than history’s collective shame.

I’ve done my best to compass you...Read more of this...

There was an old Lady of Winchelsea

by Edward Lear
There was an old Lady of Winchelsea,Who said, "If you needle or pin shall seeOn the floor of my room, sweep it up with the broom!"That exhaustive old Lady of Winchelsea! ...Read more of this...

On Receipt Of My Mothers Picture

by William Cowper
 Oh that those lips had language! Life has pass'd
With me but roughly since I heard thee last.
Those lips are thine--thy own sweet smiles I see,
The same that oft in childhood solaced me;
Voice only fails, else, how distinct they say,
"Grieve not, my child, chase all thy fears away!"
The meek intelligence of those dear eyes
(Blest be the art that can immortalize,
The...Read more of this...

The Dawn

by William Butler Yeats
 I would be ignorant as the dawn
That has looked down
On that old queen measuring a town
With the pin of a brooch,
Or on the withered men that saw
From their pedantic Babylon
The careless planets in their courses,
The stars fade out where the moon comes.
And took their tablets and did sums;
I would be ignorant as the dawn
That merely stood, rocking the glittering...Read more of this...

Appreciation

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
My muvver's ist the nicest one
'At ever lived wiz folks;
She lets you have ze mostes' fun,
An' laffs at all your jokes.
I got a ol' maid auntie, too,
The worst you ever saw;
Her eyes ist bore you through and through,—
She ain't a bit like ma.
She's ist as slim, as slim can be,
An' when you want to slide
Down on ze balusters, w'y she
Says...Read more of this...

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