Famous Playing Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Playing poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous playing poems. These examples illustrate what a famous playing poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Ted Hughes
Russia and America circle each other;
Threats nudge an act that were without doubt
A melting of the mould in the mother,
Stones melting about the root.
The quick of the earth burned out:
The toil of all our ages a loss
With leaf and insect. Yet flitting thought
(Not to be thought ridiculous)
Shies from the world-cancelling black
Of its playing shadow: it has learned
That...Read more of this...
by
Friedrich von Schiller
Play on thy mother's bosom, babe, for in that holy isle
The error cannot find thee yet, the grieving, nor the guile;
Held in thy mother's arms above life's dark and troubled wave,
Thou lookest with thy fearless smile upon the floating grave.
Play, loveliest innocence!--Thee yet Arcadia circles round,
A charmed power for thee has set the lists of fairy ground;
Each gleesome impulse...Read more of this...
by
John Betjeman
The flag that hung half-mast today
Seemed animate with being
As if it knew for who it flew
And will no more be seeing.
He loved each corner of the links-
The stream at the eleventh,
The grey-green bents, the pale sea-pinks,
The prospect from the seventh;
To the ninth tee the uphill climb,
A grass and sandy stairway,
And at the top the scent of thyme
And long extent...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
SUNDAY night and the park policemen tell each other it
is dark as a stack of black cats on Lake Michigan.
A big picnic boat comes home to Chicago from the peach
farms of Saugatuck.
Hundreds of electric bulbs break the night's darkness, a
flock of red and yellow birds with wings at a standstill.
Running along the deck railings are festoons and leaping
in curves...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
When I played my penny whistle on the braes above Lochgyle
The heather bloomed about us, and we heard the peewit call;
As you bent above your knitting something fey was in your smile,
And fine and soft and slow the rain made silver on your shawl.
Your cheeks were pink like painted cheeks, your eyes a pansy blue . . .
My heart...Read more of this...
by
Czeslaw Milosz
On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A Fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it it should always be.
On the day the world ends
Women walk through fields under their umbrellas
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in...Read more of this...
by
Rabindranath Tagore
Child, how happy you are sitting in the dust, playing with a broken twig all the morning.
I smile at your play with that little bit of a broken twig.
I am busy with my accounts, adding up figures by the hour.
Perhaps you glance at me and think, "What a stupid game to spoil your morning with!"
Child,...Read more of this...
by
Hilaire Belloc
Who caroused in the Dirt and was corrected by His Uncle.
His Uncle came upon Franklin Hyde
Carousing in the Dirt.
He Shook him hard from Side to Side
And Hit him till it Hurt,
Exclaiming, with a Final Thud,
"Take that! Abandoned boy!
For Playing with Disgusting Mud
As though it were a Toy!"
Moral:
From Franklin Hyde's adventure, learn
To pass your Leisure Time
In Cleanly Merriment, and turn
From...Read more of this...
by
Charles Bukowski
drunk again at 3 a.m. at the end of my 2nd bottle
of wine, I have typed from a dozen to 15 pages of
poesy
an old man
maddened for the flesh of young girls in this
dwindling twilight
liver gone
kidneys going
pancrea pooped
top-floor blood pressure
while all the fear of the wasted years
laughs between my toes
no woman will live with me
no Florence Nightingale to watch...Read more of this...
by
Amy Lowell
How empty seems the town now you are gone!
A wilderness of sad streets, where gaunt walls
Hide nothing to desire; sunshine falls
Eery, distorted, as it long had shone
On white, dead faces tombed in halls of stone.
The whir of motors, stricken through with calls
Of playing boys, floats up at intervals;
But all these noises blur to one long moan.
What quest is worth...Read more of this...
by
Arthur Hugh Clough
Ye flags of Piccadilly,
Where I posted up and down,
And wished myself so often
Well away from you and town--
Are the people walking quietly
And steady on their feet,
Cabs and omnibuses plying
Just as usual in the street?
Do the houses look as upright
As of old they used to be,
And does nothing seem affected
By the pitching of the sea?
Through the Green Park iron railings
Do...Read more of this...
by
Katherine Mansfield
Now this is the story of Olaf
Who ages and ages ago
Lived right on the top of a mountain,
A mountain all covered with snow.
And he was quite pretty and tiny
With beautiful curling fair hair
And small hands like delicate flowers--
Cheeks kissed by the cold mountain air.
He lived in a hut made of pinewood
Just one little room and a door
A table, a...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
There they are
drooping over the breakfast plates,
angel-like,
folding in their sad wing,
animal sad,
and only the night before
there they were
playing the banjo.
Once more the day's light comes
with its immense sun,
its mother trucks,
its engines of amputation.
Whereas last night
the cock knew its way home,
as stiff as a hammer,
battering...Read more of this...
by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
WITHIN a town where parity
According to old form we see,--
That is to say, where Catholic
And Protestant no quarrels pick,
And where, as in his father's day,
Each worships God in his own way,
We Luth'ran children used to dwell,
By songs and sermons taught as well.
The Catholic clingclang in truth
Sounded more pleasing to our youth,
For all that we encounter'd there,
To us seem'd varied,...Read more of this...
by
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Thy tones are silver melted into sound,
And as I dream
I see no walls around,
But seem to hear
A gondolier
Sing sweetly down some slow Venetian stream.
Italian skies—that I have never seen—
I see above.
(Ah, play again, my queen;
Thy fingers white
Fly swift and light
And weave for me the golden mesh of love.)
Oh, thou dusk sorceress of the dusky eyes
And soft dark hair,
'T is thou...Read more of this...
by
Rabindranath Tagore
The night was dark when she went away, and the slept.
The night is dark now, and I call for her, "Come back, my
darling; the world is asleep; and no one would know, if you came
for a moment while stars are gazing at stars."
She went away when the trees were in bud and the spring was
young.
Now the flowers are in...Read more of this...
by
John Lindley
“I’d rather make $700 a week playing a maid than earn $7 a day being a maid”. Hattie McDaniel.
I’m the savage in the jungle
and the busboy in the town.
I’m the one who jumps the highest
when the Boss man comes around.
I’m the maid who wields the wooden broom.
I’m the black boot polish cheeks.
I’m the big fat Lawdy Mama
who always...Read more of this...
by
Edmund Spenser
Unhappy verse, the witness of my unhappy state,
Make thy self flutt'ring wings of thy fast flying
Thought, and fly forth unto my love, wheresoever she be:
Whether lying restless in heavy bed, or else
Sitting so cheerless at the cheerful board, or else
Playing alone careless on her heavenly virginals.
If in bed, tell her, that my eyes can take no rest:
If at board,...Read more of this...
by
Ben Jonson
XXIX. ? TO SIR ANNUAL TILTER. TILTER, the most may admire thee, though not I ; And thou, right guiltless, may'st plead to it, Why ? For thy late sharp device. I say 'tis fit All brains, at times of triumph, should run wit : For then our water-conduits do run wine ; But that's put in,...Read more of this...
by
Anne Kingsmill Finch
A WIT, transported with Inditing,
Unpay'd, unprais'd, yet ever Writing;
Who, for all Fights and Fav'rite Friends,
Had Poems at his Fingers Ends;
For new Events was still providing;
Yet now desirous to be riding,
He pack'd-up ev'ry Ode and Ditty
And in Vacation left the City;
So rapt with Figures, and Allusions,
With secret Passions, sweet Confusions;
With...Read more of this...
by
George William Russell
YOU remember, dear, together
Two children, you and I,
Sat once in the autumn weather,
Watching the autumn sky.
There was some one round us straying
The whole of the long day through,
Who seemed to say, “I am playing
At hide and seek with you.”
And one thing after another
Was whispered out of the air,
How God was a big, kind brother
...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
The meal was o'er, the lamp was lit,
The family sat in its glow;
The Mother never ceased to knit,
The Daughter never slacked to sew;
The Father read his evening news,
The Son was playing solitaire:
If peace a happy home could choose
I'm sure you'd swear that it was there.
BUT
The Mother:
"Ah me! this hard lump in my breast . . .
Old Doctor Brown I...Read more of this...
by
Kahlil Gibran
Part One
As night fell and the light glittered in the great house, the servants stood at the massive door awaiting the coming of the guests; and upon their velvet garments shown golden buttons.
The magnificent carriages drew into the palace park and the nobles entered, dressed in gorgeous raiment and decorated with jewels. The instruments filled the air with...Read more of this...
by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
SHE behind yon mountain lives,
Who my love's sweet guerdon gives.
Tell me, mount, how this can be!
Very glass thou seem'st to me,
And I seem to be close by,
For I see her drawing nigh;
Now, because I'm absent, sad,
Now, because she sees me, glad!
Soon between us rise to sight
Valleys cool, with bushes light,
Streams and meadows; next appear
Mills and wheels, the surest token
That...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
I WAS asking for something specific and perfect for my city,
Whereupon, lo! upsprang the aboriginal name!
Now I see what there is in a name, a word, liquid, sane, unruly, musical, self-sufficient;
I see that the word of my city is that word up there,
Because I see that word nested in nests of water-bays, superb, with tall and...Read more of this...
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