Famous Playground Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Playground poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous playground poems. These examples illustrate what a famous playground poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Philip Larkin
Walking around in the park
Should feel better than work:
The lake, the sunshine,
The grass to lie on,
Blurred playground noises
Beyond black-stockinged nurses -
Not a bad place to be.
Yet it doesn't suit me.
Being one of the men
You meet of an afternoon:
Palsied old step-takers,
Hare-eyed clerks with the jitters,
Waxed-fleshed out-patients
Still vague from accidents,
And characters in long coats
Deep in the litter-baskets -
All dodging the toad...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
I struggled through streets of
Bricked-up, boarded-up houses,
Mostly burned-out, keeping
To the middle of the road,
Watching the abandoned gardens
With here and there a house
Still lived in, curtained
Against the daylight and distantly
I saw the iron railings of the school
I’d taught in thirty years before.
The same brick buildings, hop scotch
Squares and rounders posts
And the sign, ‘Welcome to Wyther Park
Primary School’. The wooden prefabs
Where...Read more of this...
by
Stephen Dunn
A woman's taking her late-afternoon walk
on Chestnut where no sidewalk exists
and houses with gravel driveways
sit back among the pines. Only the house
with the vicious dog is close to the road.
An electric fence keeps him in check.
When she comes to that house, the woman
always crosses to the other side.
I'm the woman's husband. It's a problem
loving your protagonist too much.
Soon the...Read more of this...
by
Kahlil Gibran
One hour devoted to the pursuit of Beauty
And Love is worth a full century of glory
Given by the frightened weak to the strong.
From that hour comes man's Truth; and
During that century Truth sleeps between
The restless arms of disturbing dreams.
In that hour the soul sees for herself
The Natural Law, and for that century...Read more of this...
by
D. H. Lawrence
It is stormy, and raindrops cling like silver bees to the pane,
The thin sycamores in the playground are swinging with flattened leaves;
The heads of the boys move dimly through a yellow gloom that stains
The class; over them all the dark net of my discipline weaves.
It is no good, dear, gentleness and forbearance, I endured too...Read more of this...
by
D. H. Lawrence
I
=A Snowy Day in School=
All the slow school hours, round the irregular hum of the class,
Have pressed immeasurable spaces of hoarse silence
Muffling my mind, as snow muffles the sounds that pass
Down the soiled street. We have pattered the lessons ceaselessly--
But the faces of the boys, in the brooding, yellow light
Have shone for me like a crowded constellation of stars,
Like full-blown...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Albert Guest
The crowded street his playground is, a patch of blue his sky;
A puddle in a vacant lot his sea where ships pass by:
Poor little orphan boy of five, the city smoke and grime
Taint every cooling breeze he gets throughout the summer time;
And he is just as your boy is, a child who loves to play,
Except that he is...Read more of this...
by
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Oh, what shall I do? I am wholly upset;
I am sure I 'll be jailed for a lunatic yet.
I 'll be out of a job—it's the thing to expect
When I 'm letting my duty go by with neglect.
You may judge the extent and degree of my plight
When I 'm thinking all day and a-dreaming all night,
And a-trying my hand at...Read more of this...
by
Weldon Kees
Unmanageable as history: these
Followers of Tammuz to the land
That offered no return, where dust
Grew thick on every bolt and door. And so the world
Chilled, and the women wept, tore at their hair.
Yet, in the skies, a goddess governed Sirius, the Dog,
Who shines alike on mothers, lesbians, and whores.
What are we governed by? Dido and Carrie
Chapman Catt arrange themselves as...Read more of this...
by
Robinson Jeffers
The continent's a tamed ox, with all its mountains,
Powerful and servile; here is for plowland, here is
for park and playground, this helpless
Cataract for power; it lies behind us at heel
All docile between this ocean and the other. If
flood troubles the lowlands, or earthquake
Cracks walls, it is only a slave's blunder or the
natural
Shudder of a new made...Read more of this...
by
Vernon Scannell
And now another autumn morning finds me
With chalk dust on my sleeve and in my breath,
Preoccupied with vague, habitual speculation
On the huge inevitability of death.
Not wholly wretched, yet knowing absolutely
That I shall never reacquaint myself with joy,
I sniff the smell of ink and chalk and my mortality
And think of when I rolled, a gormless boy,
And rollicked round the playground...Read more of this...
by
Brooks Haxton
In the hidden part thou shalt make me to know
wisdom. Psalm 51
That young man
firing his Kalashnikov
into the playground
has been made to know
the hidden part.
Me, I want to pray.
I’m on my knees.
But all I am is screaming
I don’t know what for. Maybe
the best God can do is pay no mind....Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
Yearly, with tent and rifle, our careless white men go
By the Pass called Muttianee, to shoot in the vale below.
Yearly by Muttianee he follows our white men in --
Matun, the old blind beggar, bandaged from brow to chin.
Eyeless, noseless, and lipless -- toothless, broken of speech,
Seeking a dole at the doorway he mumbles his tale to each;
Over and over...Read more of this...
by
Philip Levine
from an officer's diary during the last war
I
The sour daylight cracks through my sleep-caked lids.
"Stephan! Stephan!" The rattling orderly
Comes on a trot, the cold tray in his hands:
Toast whitening with oleo, brown tea,
Yesterday's napkins, and an opened letter.
"Your asthma's bad, old man." He doesn't answer,
And turns to the grey windows and the...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
They say that Monte Carlo is
A sunny place for shady people;
But I'm not in the gambling biz,
And sober as a parish steeple.
so though this paradisal spot
The devil's playground of the rich is,
I love it and I love it not,
As men may sometimes fall for bitches.
I lazed beneath the sky's blue bliss,
The sea swooned with a sequin glimmer;
The breeze was...Read more of this...
by
William Topaz McGonagall
A little child stood thinking, sorrowfully and ill at ease,
In a forest beneath the branches of the tall pine trees -
And his big brown eyes with tears seemed dim,
While one soft arm rested on a huge dog close by him.
And only four summers had passed o'er his baby head,
And, poor little child, his twin brother was dead,
Who had...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
I met my mates in the morning (and oh, but I am old!)
Where roaring on the ledges the summer ground-swell rolled;
I heard them lift the chorus that dropped the breakers' song --
The beaches of Lukannon -- two million voices strong!
The song of pleasant stations beside the salt lagoons,
The song of blowing squadrons that shuffled down the dunes,
The song...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Moore
What life like that of the bard can be --
The wandering bard, who roams as free
As the mountain lark that o'er him sings,
And, like that lark a music brings,
Within him, where'er he comes or goes --
A fount that for ever flows!
The world's to him like some playground,
Where fairies dance their moonlight round;...Read more of this...
Dont forget to view our wonderful member Playground poems.