Famous Profit Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Our Fathers Also

by Rudyard Kipling
 "Below the Mill Dam" --Traffics and Discoveries
Thrones, Powers, Dominions, Peoples, Kings,
Are changing 'neath our hand.
Our fathers also see these things
But they do not understand.

By--they are by with mirth and tears,
Wit or the works of Desire-
Cushioned about on the kindly years
Between the wall and the fire.

The grapes are pressed, the corn is shocked--
Standeth no more to glean;
For the Gates of...Read more of this...

War Profit Litany

by Allen Ginsberg
 To Ezra Pound

These are the names of the companies that have made
 money from this war
nineteenhundredsixtyeight Annodomini fourthousand
 eighty Hebraic
These are the Corporations who have profited by merchan-
 dising skinburning phosphorous or shells fragmented
 to thousands of fleshpiercing needles
and here listed money millions gained by each combine for
 manufacture
and here are gains numbered, index'd swelling a decade, set
 in...Read more of this...

Theme with Variations

by Lewis Carroll
 I never loved a dear Gazelle-- 
Nor anything that cost me much: 
High prices profit those who sell, 
But why should I be fond of such? 
To glad me with his soft black eye 
My son comes trotting home from school; 
He's had a fight but can't tell why-- 
He always was a little fool! 

But, when he came...Read more of this...

Rules For Monarchs

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 IF men are never their thoughts to employ,
Take care to provide them a life full of joy;
But if to some profit and use thou wouldst bend them,
Take care to shear them, and then defend them.

 1815.*...Read more of this...

A Satirical Elegy

by Jonathan Swift
 On the Death of a Late FAMOUS GENERAL


His Grace! impossible! what dead!
Of old age, too, and in his bed!
And could that Mighty Warrior fall?
And so inglorious, after all!
Well, since he's gone, no matter how,
The last loud trump must wake him now:
And, trust me, as the noise grows stronger,
He'd wish to sleep a little longer.
And could he be indeed so...Read more of this...

My coming brought no profit to the sky,

by Omar Khayyam
My coming brought no profit to the sky,
Nor does my going swell its majesty;
Coming and going put me to a stand,
Ear never heard their wherefore nor their why....Read more of this...

Françoise And The Fruit Farmer

by James A Emanuel
 In town to sell his fruit, he saw her—
Françoise in her summer slacks—
turning to him, coming back
to feel the swelling plums,
one held in each soft hand, breast-high,
above them her eyes enclosing him
in quietness brushed up to colors,
urgings green, thrustings yellow.

A vine-like touch, her promise seemed all profit,
surplus to lay aside and store,
quick harvest if he collapsed his stand,
pulled down...Read more of this...

The Rock Cries Out to Us Today

by Maya Angelou
 A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
Mark the mastodon.
The dinosaur, who left dry tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.
But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But...Read more of this...

At the Top of My voice

by Vladimir Mayakovsky
 My most respected
 comrades of posterity!
Rummaging among
 these days’ 
 petrified crap,
exploring the twilight of our times,
you,
 possibly,
 will inquire about me too.

And, possibly, your scholars
 will declare,
with their erudition overwhelming
 a swarm of problems;
once there lived
 a certain champion of boiled water,
and inveterate enemy of raw water.

Professor,
 take off your bicycle glasses!
I myself will expound
 those times
 and...Read more of this...

Ave Imperatrix

by Oscar Wilde
 Set in this stormy Northern sea,
Queen of these restless fields of tide,
England! what shall men say of thee,
Before whose feet the worlds divide?

The earth, a brittle globe of glass,
Lies in the hollow of thy hand,
And through its heart of crystal pass,
Like shadows through a twilight land,

The spears of crimson-suited war,
The long white-crested waves of fight,
And all the deadly fires...Read more of this...

Something For The Touts The Nuns The Grocery Clerks And You . .

by Charles Bukowski
 we have everything and we have nothing
and some men do it in churches
and some men do it by tearing butterflies
in half
and some men do it in Palm Springs
laying it into butterblondes
with Cadillac souls
Cadillacs and butterflies
nothing and everything,
the face melting down to the last puff
in a cellar in Corpus Christi.
there's something for the touts, the nuns,
the grocery clerks and you...Read more of this...

The Rain and the Wind

by William Ernest Henley
 The rain and the wind, the wind and the rain --
They are with us like a disease:
They worry the heart, they work the brain,
As they shoulder and clutch at the shrieking pane,
And savage the helpless trees.

What does it profit a man to know
These tattered and tumbling skies
A million stately stars will show,
And the ruining grace of the after-glow
And the...Read more of this...

A Calendar of Sonnets: November

by Helen Hunt Jackson
 This is the treacherous month when autumn days 
With summer's voice come bearing summer's gifts. 
Beguiled, the pale down-trodden aster lifts 
Her head and blooms again. The soft, warm haze 
Makes moist once more the sere and dusty ways, 
And, creeping through where dead leaves lie in drifts, 
The violet returns. Snow noiseless sifts 
Ere night, an icy shroud,...Read more of this...

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

by Wendell Berry
 Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more 
of everything ready-made. Be afraid 
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head. 
Not even your future will be a mystery 
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card 
and shut away in a little drawer. 

When they want...Read more of this...

Manhattan Streets I Saunter'd Pondering

by Walt Whitman
 1
MANHATTAN’S streets I saunter’d, pondering, 
On time, space, reality—on such as these, and abreast with them, prudence. 

2
After all, the last explanation remains to be made about prudence; 
Little and large alike drop quietly aside from the prudence that suits immortality. 

The Soul is of itself;
All verges to it—all has reference to what ensues; 
All that a person does,...Read more of this...

In Memoriam A. H. H.: 82. I wage not any feud with death

by Alfred Lord Tennyson
 I wage not any feud with Death
For changes wrought on form and face;
No lower life that earth's embrace
May breed with him, can fright my faith.
Eternal process moving on,
From state to state the spirit walks;
And these are but the shatter'd stalks,
Or ruin'd chrysalis of one.
Nor blame I Death, because he bare
The use of virtue out of earth:
I know transplanted human...Read more of this...

My Rival

by Rudyard Kipling
 I go to concert, party, ball --
 What profit is in these?
I sit alone against the wall
 And strive to look at ease.
The incense that is mine by right
 They burn before her shrine;
And that's because I'm seventeen
 And She is forty-nine.

I cannot check my girlish blush,
 My color comes and goes;
I redden to my finger-tips,
 And sometimes to...Read more of this...

Canute the Great

by Marriott Edgar
 I'll tell of Canute, King of England,
A native of Denmark was he,
His hobbies was roving and raiding
And paddling his feet in the sea. 

By trade he were what's called a Viking,
Every summer he'd visit our shore,
Help himself to whatever he wanted,
And come back in the autumn for more.

These trips always showed him a profit,
But what stumped him to know...Read more of this...

Sestina III

by Francesco Petrarch
SESTINA III. L' aere gravato, e l' importuna nebbia. HE COMPARES LAURA TO WINTER, AND FORESEES THAT SHE WILL ALWAYS BE THE SAME.  The overcharged air, the impending cloud,Compress'd together by impetuous winds,Must presently discharge themselves in rain;Already as of crystal are the streams,And, for the fine grass late that clothed...Read more of this...

See! from the world what profit have I gained?

by Omar Khayyam
See! from the world what profit have I gained?
What fruitage of my life in hand retained?
What use is Jamshid's goblet, once 'tis crushed?
What pleasure's torch, when once its light has waned?...Read more of this...

Gehazi

by Rudyard Kipling
 1915

Whence comest thou, Gehazi,
 So reverend to behold,
In scarlet and in ermines
 And chain of England's gold?"

"From following after Naaman
 To tell him all is well,
Whereby my zeal hath made me
 A Judge in Israel."

Well done; well done, Gehazi!
 Stretch forth thy ready hand,
Thou barely 'scaped from judgment,
 Take oath to judge the land
Unswayed by gift of money
 Or...Read more of this...

The Gardener

by Robert Louis Stevenson
 The gardener does not love to talk,
He makes me keep the gravel walk;
And when he puts his tools away,
He locks the door and takes the key.

Away behind the currant row
Where no one else but cook may go,
Far in the plots, I see him dig
Old and serious, brown and big.

He digs the flowers, green, red and blue,
Nor wishes to be...Read more of this...

A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General

by Jonathan Swift
His Grace! impossible! what dead!
Of old age too, and in his bed!
And could that mighty warrior fall?
And so inglorious, after all!
Well, since he's gone, no matter how,
The last loud trump must wake him now:
And, trust me, as the noise grows stronger,
He'd wish to sleep a little longer.
And could he be indeed so old
As by the newspapers we're told?
Threescore, I think,...Read more of this...

The Newport Railway

by William Topaz McGonagall
 Success to the Newport Railway,
Along the braes of the Silvery Tay,
And to Dundee straghtway,
Across the Railway Bridge o' the Silvery Tay,
Which was opened on the 12th of May,
In the year of our Lord 1879,
Which will clear all expenses in a very short time
Because the thrifty housewives of Newport
To Dundee will often resort,
Which will be to them profit and sport,
By...Read more of this...

On The Victory Obtained By Blake Over the Spaniards In The Bay Of Scanctacruze In The Island Of teneriff.1657

by Andrew Marvell
 Now does Spains Fleet her spatious wings unfold,
Leaves the new World and hastens for the old:
But though the wind was fair, the slowly swoome
Frayted with acted Guilt, and Guilt to come:
For this rich load, of which so proud they are,
Was rais'd by Tyranny, and rais'd for war;
Every capatious Gallions womb was fill'd,
With what the Womb of wealthy Kingdomes yield,
The...Read more of this...

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