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Famous Pounds Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Kipling, Rudyard
...d fit to face the foe --
The flying bullet down the Pass,
That whistles clear: "All flesh is grass."

Three hundred pounds per annum spent
 On making brain and body meeter
For all the murderous intent
 Comprised in "villanous saltpetre!"
And after -- ask the Yusufzaies
What comes of all our 'ologies.

A scrimmage in a Border Station --
 A canter down some dark defile --
Two thousand pounds of education
 Drops to a ten-rupee jezail --
The Crammer's boast, the Squadron'...Read more of this...



by Estep, Maggie
...amed Rocco. Suzee loves Rocco,
she loves him so much she's got her eyes closed as she describes him:
"6 foot 2, 193 pounds and, girlfriend, his arms so big and long they
wrap around me twice like I'm a little Suzee sandwich."

Little Suzee Sandwich is rapt, she blindly snips and clips at my poor punk
head. She snips and clips and snips and clips, she pauses, I look in the
mirror: "Holy ****, I'm bald."

"Holy ****, baby, you're bald." Suzee says, finally o...Read more of this...

by Browning, Robert
...ellar, or Whitechapel life 
"Limned after dark!" it made me laugh, I know, 
And pleased a month, and brought you in ten pounds. 
--Success I recognize and compliment, 
And therefore give you, if you choose, three words 
(The card and pencil-scratch is quite enough) 
Which whether here, in Dublin or New York, 
Will get you, prompt as at my eyebrow's wink, 
Such terms as never you aspired to get 
In all our own reviews and some not ours. 
Go write your lively sketches! ...Read more of this...

by Rilke, Rainer Maria
...d and utterly disappear:

just as a raving madman, when nothing else
can ease him, charges into his dark night
howling, pounds on the padded wall, and feels
the rage being taken in and pacified.

She seems to hide all looks that have ever fallen
into her, so that, like an audience,
she can look them over, menacing and sullen,
and curl to sleep with them. But all at once

as if awakened, she turns her face to yours;
and with a shock, you see yourself, tiny,
inside the ...Read more of this...

by Thayer, Ernest Lawrence
...uldn't let that ball go by again. 

The sneer has fled from Casey's lip, the teeth are clenched in hate. 
He pounds, with cruel violence, his bat upon the plate. 

And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go, 
and now the air is shattered by the force of Casey's blow. 

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright. 
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light. 
And, somewhere men are laughing, a...Read more of this...



by Rossetti, Christina
...look, Lizzie,
Down the glen tramp little men.
One hauls a basket,
One bears a plate,
One lugs a golden dish
Of many pounds' weight.
How fair the vine must grow
Whose grapes are so luscious;
How warm the wind must blow
Through those fruit bushes."
"No," said Lizzie, "no, no, no;
Their offers should not charm us,
Their evil gifts would harm us."
She thrust a dimpled finger
In each ear, shut eyes and ran:
Curious Laura chose to linger
Wondering at each merchant m...Read more of this...

by Chin, Staceyann
...hem from city to city
all the while waiting in separate rooms

I want to be forty years old
and weigh three hundred pounds
and ride a motorcycle in the wintertime
with four hell raising children
and a one hundred ten pound female lover
who writes poetry about my life
and my children and loves me
like no one has ever loved me before

I want to be the girl your parents will use
as a bad example of a lady

I want to be the dyke who likes to **** men

I want to b...Read more of this...

by Celan, Paul
...tall poplars -- human beings of this earth!
black pounds of happiness -- you mirror them to death!

I saw you, sister, stand in that effulgence....Read more of this...

by Brautigan, Richard
...he plateau made him too nervous to graze there.

My friend said jokingly that George had lost around two hun-

dred pounds. The good wine country around Pleasanton in the

Livermore Valley probably had looked a lot better to George

than the wild side of the Santa Lucia Mountains.

 My friend's place was a shack right beside a huge fire-

place where there had once been a great mansion during the

1920s, built by a famous movie actor. The mansion was built

be...Read more of this...

by Brautigan, Richard
...g in America as

they ate their apples together.



A Standing Crust for Great Pies



Take a peck of flour and six pounds of butter

boiled in a gallon of water: skim it off into

the flour, and as little of the liquor as you

can. Work it up well into a paste, and then

pull it into pieces till it is cold. Then make

it up into what form you please.



And Trout Fishing in America smiled at Maria Callas as

they ate their pie crust together.



A Spoonfu...Read more of this...

by Ginsberg, Allen
...nd, I speak with 
 your presence, I roar your Lion Roar with mortal
 mouth.
One microgram inspired to one lung, ten pounds of 
 heavy metal dust adrift slow motion over grey
 Alps
the breadth of the planet, how long before your radiance
 speeds blight and death to sentient beings?
Enter my body or not I carol my spirit inside you,
 Unnaproachable Weight,
O heavy heavy Element awakened I vocalize your con-
 sciousness to six worlds
I chant your absolute Vanity. Yeah mo...Read more of this...

by Sandburg, Carl
...ys a silver shaft on the last shower, sing to the bush at the backyard fence: Mighty Lak a Rose.
When the icy sleet pounds on the storm windows and the house lifts to a great breath, sing for the outside hills: The Ole Sheep Done Know the Road, the Young Lambs Must Find the Way.. . .
Spring slips back with a girl face calling always: “Any new songs for me? Any new songs?”

O prairie girl, be lonely, singing, dreaming, waiting—your lover comes—your child co...Read more of this...

by Twain, Mark
...with it began!"

So overboard a keg of nails
And anvils three we threw,
Likewise four bales of gunny-sacks,
Two hundred pounds of glue,
Two sacks of corn, four ditto wheat,
A box of books, a cow,
A violin, Lord Byron's works,
A rip-saw and a sow.

A curve! a curve! the dangers grow!
"Labbord!--stabbord!--s-t-e-a-d-y!--so!--
Hard-a-port, Dol!--hellum-a-lee!
Haw the head mule!--the aft one gee!
Luff!--bring her to the wind!"

For straight a farmer brought a plank,--
(Myster...Read more of this...

by Goldsmith, Oliver
...lose,
The village preacher's modest mansion rose.
A man he was to all the country dear,
And passing rich with forty pounds a year;
Remote from towns he ran his godly race,
Nor e'er had changed, nor wished to change, his place;
Unpractised he to fawn, or seek for power,
By doctrines fashioned to the varying hour;
Far other aims his heart had learned to prize,
More skilled to raise the wretched than to rise.
His house was known to all the vagrant train,
He chid their wa...Read more of this...

by Masefield, John
...-sprained my thumb, 
We'll fight after the harvest hum. 
And Silas Jones, that bookie wide, 
Will make a purse five pounds a side." 
Those were the words, that was the place 
By which God brought me into grace. 

On Wood Top Field the peewits go 
Mewing and wheeling ever so; 
And like the shaking of a timbrel 
Cackles the laughter of the whimbrel.. 

In the old quarry-pit they say 
Head-keeper Pike was made away. 
He walks, head-keeper Pike, for harm, ...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Amy
...at and rap.
A Prussian hussar on a grey horse goes by at a dash.
From other shops, the noise of striking blows:
Pounds, thumps, and whacks;
Wooden sounds: splinters -- cracks.
Paris is full of the galloping of horses and the knocking of hammers.
"Hullo! Friend Martin, is business slack
That you are in the street this morning? Don't turn your 
back
And scuttle into your shop like a rabbit to its hole.
I've just been taking a stroll.
The stinking Cossack...Read more of this...

by Carroll, Lewis
...
 For he knew it was useless to fly.

He offered large discount--he offered a cheque
 (Drawn "to bearer") for seven-pounds-ten:
But the Bandersnatch merely extended its neck
 And grabbed at the Banker again.

Without rest or pause--while those frumious jaws
 Went savagely snapping around--
He skipped and he hopped, and he floundered and flopped,
 Till fainting he fell to the ground.

The Bandersnatch fled as the others appeared
 Led on by that fear-stricken yell:
...Read more of this...

by Tebb, Barry
...ll

The few hundred books we’d brought and furniture bought

At auction in the town, left-overs knocked down to the few pounds

We had between us, dumped outside the red front door by the

Carrier’s cart; stared at by neighbours constantly grimacing

Though the grimy nets of the weavers’ cottage windows, baffled

As to who we were and how and why we’d come there.



I never gave it a thought (perhaps I should have) but with

The sense of ‘poet’ in my soul, a book to read ...Read more of this...

by Tebb, Barry
...ood night out,

A relief from factory, shop floor and market stall

Running from the reality of the ward where my son 

Pounds the ledge with his fist and seems out to blast

My very existence with words like bullets.

The need to anaesthetise the pain resurfaces 

Again and again. In Leeds City Square where 

Pugin’s church, the Black Prince and the Central Post Office

In its Edwardian grandeur are startled by the arching spumes

Or white water fountains and the ste...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Robert
...ere are no Mayflower
screwballs in the Catholic Church.)

After a hearty New England breakfast,
I weigh two hundred pounds
this morning. Cock of the walk,
I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor's jersey
before the metal shaving mirrors,
and see the shaky future grow familiar
in the pinched, indigenous faces
of these thoroughbred mental cases,
twice my age and half my weight.
We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor....Read more of this...

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Book: Reflection on the Important Things