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Famous Promptly Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Holmes, Oliver Wendell
...r album the school-girl presents for your name;

Each morning the post brings you autograph letters;
You'll answer them promptly,-- an hour isn't much
For the honor of sharing a page with your betters,
With magistrates, members of Congress, and such.

Of course you're delighted to serve the committees
That come with requests from the country all round,
You would grace the occasion with poems and ditties
When they've got a new schoolhouse, or poorhouse, or pound.

With...Read more of this...



by Lawrence, D. H.
...
But she's waiting, I know, impatient and cold, half 
Sobs struggling into her frosty sigh. 

Why does she come so promptly, when she must know 
That she's only the nearer to the inevitable farewell; 
The hill is steep, on the snow my steps are slow— 
Why does she come, when she knows what I have to tell?...Read more of this...

by Browning, Robert
...less as a lamb: 
Only impatient, let him do his best, 
At ignorance and carelessness and sin-- 
An indignation which is promptly curbed: 
As when in certain travels I have feigned 
To be an ignoramus in our art 
According to some preconceived design, 
And happed to hear the land's practitioners, 
Steeped in conceit sublimed by ignorance, 
Prattle fantastically on disease, 
Its cause and cure--and I must hold my peace! 

Thou wilt object--why have I not ere this 
Sought out th...Read more of this...

by Bishop, Elizabeth
...der
"Where is the music coming from, the energy?
The day was meant for what ineffable creature
we must have missed?" Oh promptly he
appears and takes his earthly nature
 instantly, instantly falls
 victim of long intrigue,
 assuming memory and mortal
 mortal fatigue.

More slowly falling into sight
and showering into stippled faces,
darkening, condensing all his light;
in spite of all the dreaming
squandered upon him with that look,
suffers our uses and abuses,
sinks thro...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...y kind.
Yet there was one in her own hand,
A Home for Ailing Cats she planned.
Well, you can understand my ire:
Promptly I put it in the fire.

In misery she chose to die,
Yet we will make her money fly.
And as we mourn for poor Aunt Jane
The thought alleviates our pain:
Perhaps her savings in the end
Gave her more joy than we who spend....Read more of this...



by Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...e at last with a new liberty 
And with no sore to fester. He perceived 
In me an altered favor of God’s works, 
And promptly took upon himself the credit,
Which, in a fashion, was as accurate 
As one’s interpretation of another 
Is like to be. So for a frosty fortnight 
We had the sunlight with us on the lake, 
And the moon with us when the sun was down.
‘God gave his adjutants a holiday,’ 
Asher assured me, ‘when He made this place’; 
And I agreed with him that i...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...d the belated
 lighter;

Curious what Gods can exceed these that clasp me by the hand, and with voices I love call
 me
 promptly and loudly by my nighest name as I approach; 
Curious what is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that looks in my
 face,
Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you. 

We understand, then, do we not? 
What I promis’d without mentioning it, have you not accepted? 
What the study could not teach—what the preachi...Read more of this...

by Dickinson, Emily
...noons to play.
I met one, -- forgot my school-mates,
All, for him, straightaway.

God calls home the angels promptly
At the setting sun;
I missed mine. How dreary marbles,
After playing the Crown!...Read more of this...

by Alighieri, Dante
...ose, 
"perch'io non temo di venir qua entro . 

'Because you want to fathom things so deeply, 
I now shall tell you promptly,' she replied, 
'why I am not afraid to enter here. 


Temer si dee di sole quelle cose 
c'hanno potenza di fare altrui male; 
de l'altre no, ch? non son paurose . 

One ought to be afraid of nothing other 
than things possessed of power to do us harm, 
but things innocuous need not be feared. 


I' son fatta da Dio, sua merc?, tale, 
ch...Read more of this...

by Nash, Ogden
...r>
Somebody said, Sail on! Sail on!
And studied China and China's lingo,
And cried from the bow, There's China now!
And promptly bumped into San Domingo.
Somebody murmured, Oh dear, oh dear!
I've discovered the Western Hemisphere.

And that, you may think, my friends, was that.
But it wasn't. Not by a fireman's hat.
Well enough wasn't left alone,
And Columbus was only a cornerstone.
There came the Spaniards,
There came the Greeks,
There came the Pilgri...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...the worst of all;
No doubt a child of tender age
Has written it, so I'll be kind,
And send an answer to her mind. 

Promptly I typed a nice reply
And thought that it would be the end,
But in due course confused was I
To get a letter signed: Your Friend;
And with it, full of girlish grace,
A snapshot of a winsome face. 

"I am afraid," she wrote to me,
"That you must have bees sure surprised
At my poor penmanship . . . You see,
My arms and legs are paralyze...Read more of this...

by Brautigan, Richard
...and get something to eat,

 and she'd said, "You can mow the lawn. "

 "Thanks, maram, " he'd said and went out and promptly

 cut three fingers off his right hand with that medieval mach-

 ine.

 I was always very careful with that lawnmower, knowing

 that somewhere on that place, the ghosts of three fingers

 were living it up in the grand spook manner. They needed no

 company from my fingers. My fingers looked just great, rigl:

 there on my hands.

...Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...ght to be hearable 
if it didn't mix into the reruns 
and thus enlarge into what it is not, 
a sea pest's sting turning promptly 
into the shark's neat biting off 
of a leg because the soul 
wears a magnifying glass. 
Kicking the heart 
with pain's big boots running up and down 
the intestines like a motorcycle racer. 

Yet one does get out of bed 
and start over, plunge into the day 
and put on a hopeful look 
and does not allow fear to build a wall 
between you and ...Read more of this...

by Field, Eugene
...upon the second floor;
And then he asked us would we like a drop uv ody vee.
Connivin' at his meanin', we responded promptly, "Wee."
A conversazzhyony is a thing where people speak
The langwidge in the which they air partickulerly weak:
"I see," sez Sorry Tom, "you grasp what that 'ere lingo means."
"You bet yer boots," sez Hoover; "I've lived at Noo Orleens,
An', though I ain't no Frenchie, nor kin unto the same,
I kin parly voo, an' git there, too, like Eli, too...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Amy
...ay I beg to introduce myself?
Heinrich Marohl of Munich. And your name?"
Charlotta told him. And the artful elf
Promptly exclaimed about her husband's fame.
So Lotta, half-unwilling, slowly came
To conversation with him. When she went
Into the house, she found the evening spent.
Theodore arrived quite wearied out and teased,
With all excitement in him burned away.
It had gone well, he said, the audience pleased,
And he had played his very best to-day,
...Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...evator with you
don't turn away,
immediately touch his hump
for his child will be born from his back tomorrow
and if he promptly bites the baby's nails off
(so it won't become a thief)
that child will be holy
and you, simple bird that you are,
may go on flying.

When you knock on wood,
and you do,
you knock on the Cross
and Jesus gives you a fragment of His body
and breaks an egg in your toilet,
giving up one life
for one life....Read more of this...

by Frost, Robert
...our stealing from us,
We don't cut off from coming to church suppers,
But what we miss we go to him and ask for.
He promptly gives it back, that is if still
Uneaten, unworn out, or undisposed of.
It wouldn't do to be too hard on Brad
About his telescope. Beyond the age
Of being given one for Christmas gift,
He had to take the best way he knew how
To find himself in one. Well, all we said was
He took a strange thing to be roguish over.
Some sympathy was was...Read more of this...

by Field, Eugene
...and good, and smart
That, if you asked me to suggest which one I should prefer
Of all the Stoddard treasures, I should promptly mention her.

O dear old man, how I should like to be with you this night,
Down in your home in Fifteenth street, where all is snug and bright;
Where the shaggy little Cerberus dreams in its cushioned place,
And the books and pictures all around smile in their old friend's face;
Where the dainty little sweetheart, whom you still were proud to wo...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...of James dashed John,
Then turned, and lo! his own was gone.

And when the great World War began,
To volunteer John promptly ran;
And while he learned live bombs to lob,
James stayed at home and -- sneaked his job.

John came home with a missing limb;
That didn't seem to worry him;
But oh, it set his brain awhirl
To find that James had -- sneaked his girl!

Time passed. John tried his grief to drown;
To-day James owns one-half the town;
His army contracts riches y...Read more of this...

by Larkin, Philip
...tching us go,

As if out on the end of an event
 Waving goodbye
To something that survived it. Struck, I leant
More promptly out next time, more curiously,
And saw it all again in different terms:
The fathers with broad belts under their suits
And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;
An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,
The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,
The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that

Marked off the girls unreally from the rest. 
 Yes, fr...Read more of this...

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