Famous Poked Poems by Famous Poets

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

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O sweet spontaneous

by Edward Estlin (E E) Cummings
O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting

fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked

thee
has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy

beauty .how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true

to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover

thou answerest

them only with

spring)...Read more of this...

Insomniac

by Sylvia Plath
 The night is only a sort of carbon paper,
Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars
Letting in the light, peephole after peephole --
A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.
Under the eyes of the stars and the moon's rictus
He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness
Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions.

Over and over the old, granular movie
Exposes embarrassments--the mizzling days
Of...Read more of this...

Richard Coeur de Lion

by Marriott Edgar
 Richard the First, Coeur-de-Lion, 
Is a name that we speak of with pride, 
Though he only lived six months in England
From his birth to the day that he died. 

He spent all his time fighting battles, 
Dressed up in most rigid attire, 
For he had his suits made by the Blacksmith, 
And his underwear knitted of wire. 

He married...Read more of this...

Gunner

by Randall Jarrell
 Did they send me away from my cat and my wife
To a doctor who poked me and counted my teeth,
To a line on a plain, to a stove in a tent?
Did I nod in the flies of the schools?
And the fighters rolled into the tracer like rabbits,
The blood froze over my splints like a scab --
Did I snore, all...Read more of this...

Evening Song of the Thoughtful Child

by Katherine Mansfield
 Shadow children, thin and small,
Now the day is left behind,
You are dancing on the wall,
On the curtains, on the blind.

On the ceiling, children, too,
Peeping round the nursery door,
Let me come and play with you,
As we always played before.

Let's pretend that we have wings
And can really truly fly
Over every sort of things
Up and up into the sky.

Where the sweet star...Read more of this...

The Torture of Cuauhtemoc

by Alan Seeger
 Their strength had fed on this when Death's white arms 
Came sleeved in vapors and miasmal dew, 
Curling across the jungle's ferny floor, 
Becking each fevered brain. On bleak divides, 
Where Sleep grew niggardly for nipping cold 
That twinged blue lips into a mouthed curse, 
Not back to Seville and its sunny plains 
Winged their brief-biding dreams, but once...Read more of this...

Fishermen

by James A Emanuel
 When three, he fished these lakes,
Curled sleeping on a lip of rock,
Crib blankets tucked from ants and fishbone flies,
Twitching as the strike of bass and snarling reel
Uncoiled my shouts not quit
Till he jerked blinking up on all-fours,
Swaying with the winking leaves.
Strong awake, he shook his cane pole like a spoon
And dipped among the wagging perch
Till, tired, he drew his...Read more of this...

The End Of Your Life

by Philip Levine
 First light. This misted field 
 is the world, that man 
 slipping the greased bolt 

back and forth, that man 
 tunneled with blood 
 the dark smudges of whose eyes 

call for sleep, calls 
 for quiet, and the woman 
 down your line, 

the woman who screamed the loudest, 
 will be quiet. 
 The rushes,...Read more of this...

The Dreamer

by Robert William Service
 The lone man gazed and gazed upon his gold,
His sweat, his blood, the wage of weary days;
But now how sweet, how doubly sweet to hold
All gay and gleamy to the campfire blaze.
The evening sky was sinister and cold;
The willows shivered, wanly lay the snow;
The uncommiserating land, so old,
So worn, so grey, so niggard in its woe,
Peered through its ragged...Read more of this...

Faust In Old Age

by Delmore Schwartz
 "Poet and veteran of childhood, look!
See in me the obscene, for you have love,

For you have hatred, you, you must be judge,
Deliver judgement, Delmore Schwartz.

Well-known wishes have been to war,
The vicious mouth has chewed the vine.

The patient crab beneath the shirt
Has charmed such interests as Indies meant.

For I have walked within and seen each sea,
The fish that flies, the...Read more of this...

The Ole in the Ark

by Marriott Edgar
 One evening at dusk as Noah stood on his Ark,
Putting green oil in starboard side lamp,
His wife came along and said, 'Noah, summat's wrong,
Our cabin is getting quite damp.

Noah said, 'Is that so?' Then he went down below,
And found it were right what she'd said,
For there on the floor quite a puddle he saw,
It was slopping around under t'...Read more of this...

The Ghost Of Roger Casement

by William Butler Yeats
 O what has made that sudden noise?
What on the threshold stands?
It never crossed the sea because
John Bull and the sea are friends;
But this is not the old sea
Nor this the old seashore.
What gave that roar of mockery,
That roar in the sea's roar?

The ghost of Roger Casement
Is beating on the door.

John Bull has stood for Parliament,
A dog must have his...Read more of this...

The Ballad Of The Children Of The Czar

by Delmore Schwartz
 1

The children of the Czar
Played with a bouncing ball

In the May morning, in the Czar's garden,
Tossing it back and forth.

It fell among the flowerbeds
Or fled to the north gate.

A daylight moon hung up
In the Western sky, bald white.

Like Papa's face, said Sister,
Hurling the white ball forth.

 2

While I ate a baked potato
Six thousand miles apart,

In Brooklyn, in 1916,
Aged two,...Read more of this...

Incident

by Countee Cullen
 Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee;
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, "******."

I saw the whole of Balimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember....Read more of this...

Alive Together

by Lisel Mueller
 Speaking of marvels, I am alive
together with you, when I might have been
alive with anyone under the sun,
when I might have been Abelard's woman
or the whore of a Renaissance pop
or a peasant wife with not enough food
and not enough love, with my children
dead of the plague. I might have slept
in an alcove next to the man
with the golden nose,...Read more of this...

Adventures Of Isabel

by Ogden Nash
 Isabel met an enormous bear,
Isabel, Isabel, didn't care;
The bear was hungry, the bear was ravenous,
The bear's big mouth was cruel and cavernous.
The bear said, Isabel, glad to meet you,
How do, Isabel, now I'll eat you!
Isabel, Isabel, didn't worry.
Isabel didn't scream or scurry.
She washed her hands and she straightened her hair up,
Then Isabel quietly ate the bear up.
Once in a...Read more of this...

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