Famous Puddle Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Puddle poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous puddle poems. These examples illustrate what a famous puddle poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...- square.
Crumpled grey-white papers
Blow along the side-walks,
Contorted, horrible,
Without curves.
A horse steps in a puddle,
And white, glaring water spurts up
In stiff, outflaring lines,
Like the rattling stems of reeds.
The city is heraldic with angles,
A sombre escutcheon of argent and sable
And countercoloured bends of rain
Hung over a four-square civilization.
When a street lamp comes out,
I gaze at it for fully thirty seconds
To rest my brain with the suffusing, roun...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...s, penal codes, dead cats floating on their backs, locomotives.
They turn in the skeins of white clouds like trash in a puddle.
While below on the earth a banner, the color of a romantic rose,
flutters,
and a long row of military trains crawls on the weed-covered tracks....Read more of this...
by
Milosz, Czeslaw
...And how can I, born in evil days
And fresh from failure, ask a kindness of Fate?
-- Written A.D. 819
Po Chu-i, balding old politician,
What's the use?
I think of you,
Uneasily entering the gorges of the Yang-Tze,
When you were being towed up the rapids
Toward some political job or other
In the city of Chungshou.
You made it, I guess,
By dark.
But it i...Read more of this...
by
Wright, James
...found an old man running there:
He had ragged long grass-coloured hair;
He had knees that stuck out of his hose;
He had puddle-water in his shoes;
He had half a cloak to keep him dry,
Although he had a squirrel's eye.
O wandering hirds and rushy beds,
You put such folly in our heads
With all this crying in the wind,
No common love is to our mind,
And our poor kate or Nan is less
Than any whose unhappiness
Awoke the harp-strings long ago.
Yet they that know all things hut kno...Read more of this...
by
Yeats, William Butler
...
It chanced in the first of the Sixties that Ally and I and McKean
Were sinking a shaft on Mundoorin, near Fosberry's puddle-machine.
The bucket we used was a big one, and rather a weight when 'twas full,
Though Alister wound it up easy, for he had the strength of a bull.
He hinted at heart-disease often, but, setting his fancy apart,
I always believed there was nothing the matter with Cameron's heart.
One day I was working below -- I was filling the bucket with clay,...Read more of this...
by
Lawson, Henry
...are their natural foemen
And they like to poke each other's abdomen. Their joy needs another woe's to cushion it,
Say a puddle, and someone littler to push in it.
They observe with glee the ballistic results
Of ice cream with spoons for catapults, And inform the assembly with tears and glares
That everyone's presents are better than theirs.
Oh, little women and little men,
Someday I hope to love you again, But not till after the party's over,
So give me the key to the doghous...Read more of this...
by
Nash, Ogden
...lue as still water.
Blue as the eyes of a Siamese cat.
Blue as shadows on new snow, as a spring
azure sipping from a puddle on the blacktop.
Cobalt as the midnight sky
when day has gone without a trace
and we lie in each other's arms
eyes shut and fingers open
and all the colors of the world
pass through our bodies like strings of fire....Read more of this...
by
Piercy, Marge
...Doctor Foster went to Glo'ster, In a shower of rain;He stepped in a puddle, up to his middle, And never went there again. ...Read more of this...
by
Goose, Mother
...anonymous
and straight among them, between
their sand pails and nursery crafts.
The breakers cartwheeled in and over
to puddle their toes and test their perfect
skin. He was my brother, my small
Johnny brother, almost ten. We flopped
down upon a towel to grind the sand
under us and watched the Atlantic sea
move fire, like night sparklers;
and lost our weight in the festival
season. He dreamed, he said, to be
a man designed like a balanced wave...
how someday he would wait, gi...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...DOCTOR
CALIGARI
Once water bugs were my field. I remember that childhood
spring when I studied the winter-long mud puddles of the
Pacific Northwest. I had a fellowship.
My books were a pair of Sears Roebuck boots, ones with
green rubber pages. Most of my classrooms were close to
the shore. That's where the important things were happen-
ing and that's where the good things were happening.
Sometimes as experiments I laid boards out into the mud
puddles, so I could...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...both in pure
Affirmation that doesn't affirm anything.
The balloon pops, the attention
Turns dully away. Clouds
In the puddle stir up into sawtoothed fragments.
I think of the friends
Who came to see me, of what yesterday
Was like. A peculiar slant
Of memory that intrudes on the dreaming model
In the silence of the studio as he considers
Lifting the pencil to the self-portrait.
How many people came and stayed a certain time,
Uttered light or dark speech that became part of y...Read more of this...
by
Ashbery, John
...Behold the duck.
It does not cluck.
A cluck it lacks.
It quacks.
It is specially fond
Of a puddle or pond.
When it dines or sups,
It bottoms ups....Read more of this...
by
Nash, Ogden
...an careful mouth
Closed on the soiled webs, growling, took them out to the back stoop.
But still, dark blood, a sticky puddle on the floor
Remained, of all my my mother's tender, wounding passion
For a whole wild, lost, betrayed and secret life
Among its dens and burrows, its clean stones,
Whose denizens can turn upon the world
With spitting tongue, an odor, talon, claw
To sting or soil benevolence, alien
As our clumsy traps, our random scatter of shot,
She swept to the kitc...Read more of this...
by
Kizer, Carolyn
...stic goose,
So don't pretend to fly."
Great cock-a-doodle from his perch
Crowed daily loud and clear,
"Stay in the puddle, foolish bird,
That is your proper sphere,"
The ducks and hens said, one and all,
In gossip by the pool,
"Our children never play such pranks;
My dear, that fowl's a fool."
The owls came out and flew about,
Hooting above the rest,
"No useful egg was ever hatched
From transcendental nest."
Good little goslings at their play
And well-condu...Read more of this...
by
Alcott, Louisa May
...The crowded street his playground is, a patch of blue his sky;
A puddle in a vacant lot his sea where ships pass by:
Poor little orphan boy of five, the city smoke and grime
Taint every cooling breeze he gets throughout the summer time;
And he is just as your boy is, a child who loves to play,
Except that he is drawn and white and cannot get away.
And he would like the open fields, for often in his dreams
The angels kind...Read more of this...
by
Guest, Edgar Albert
...A Recitation for Martha Wakefield, Three Years Old
There was a little turtle.
He lived in a box.
He swam in a puddle.
He climbed on the rocks.
He snapped at a mosquito.
He snapped at a flea.
He snapped at a minnow.
And he snapped at me.
He caught the mosquito.
He caught the flea.
He caught the minnow.
But he didn't catch me....Read more of this...
by
Lindsay, Vachel
...ah 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' bed.
Said he, 'There's an 'ole in the bottom somewhere,
We must find it before we retire.'
Then he thowt for a bit, and he said 'Aye, that's it,
A bloodhound is what we require.'
Se he went and fetched bloodhound from place where it lay,
'Tween the skunk and the polecat it were,
And as things there below, were...Read more of this...
by
Edgar, Marriott
...o have
become as theoretical as a point.
Then someone said, get up, big one, you're not doing
yourself any good. You puddle and stagnate in your weight.
Best to be up and toward. It irrigates you.
What, said the big one, have I not disappeared? Have you
not mistaken a cloud for me? Perhaps some local hill fulfills
your expectation?
No, it's no mistake, it's you; those interconnecting puddles
of flesh pulling at your bones, attempting that world-weary fall
toward the ...Read more of this...
by
Edson, Russell
...e of the
house where the water spigot thrust itself out of the ground like the finger
of a saint, surrounded by a mud puddle.
He opened the Kool-Aid and dumped it into the jar. Putting the
jar under the spigot, he turned the water on. The water spit, splashed and
guzzled out of the spigot.
He was careful to see that the jar did not overflow and the precious
Kool-Aid spill out onto the ground. When the jar was full he turned the
water off with a sudden but delicate m...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
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