Famous Pulls Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The Butter Factory

by Les Murray
 It was built of things that must not mix:
paint, cream, and water, fire and dusty oil.
You heard the water dreaming in its large
kneed pipes, up from the weir. And the cordwood
our fathers cut for the furnace stood in walls
like the sleeper-stacks of a continental railway.

The cream arrived in lorried tides; its procession
crossed a platform of workers' stagecraft: Come here
Friday-Legs!...Read more of this...

Unlike For Example The Sound Of A Riptooth Saw

by Thomas Lux
 gnawing through a shinbone, a high howl
inside of which a bloody, slashed-by-growls note
is heard, unlike that
sound, and instead, its opposite: a barely sounded
sound (put your nuclear ears
on for it, your giant hearing horn, its cornucopia mouth
wide) -- a slippery whoosh of rain
sliding down a mirror
leaned against a windfallen tree stump, the sound
a child's head makes
falling against his mother's breast,
or...Read more of this...

They Feed They Lion

by Philip Levine
 Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow. 

 Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride, 
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
Mothers hardening...Read more of this...

My Hero Bares His Nerves

by Dylan Thomas
 My hero bares his nerves along my wrist
That rules from wrist to shoulder,
Unpacks the head that, like a sleepy ghost,
Leans on my mortal ruler,
The proud spine spurning turn and twist.

And these poor nerves so wired to the skull
Ache on the lovelorn paper
I hug to love with my unruly scrawl
That utters all love hunger
And tells the page the empty ill.

My...Read more of this...

Ninth Inning

by David Lehman
 He woke up in New York City on Valentine's Day,
Speeding. The body in the booth next to his was still warm,
Was gone. He had bought her a sweater, a box of chocolate
Said her life wasn't working he looked stricken she said
You're all bent out of shape, accusingly, and when he
She went from being an Ivy League professor of French
To...Read more of this...

Possum Trot

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
I 've journeyed 'roun' consid'able, a-seein' men an' things,
An' I 've learned a little of the sense that meetin' people brings;
But in spite of all my travelling an' of all I think I know,
I 've got one notion in my head, that I can't git to go;
An' it is that the folks I meet in any other spot
Ain't half so...Read more of this...

I Go Back To The House For A Book

by Billy Collins
 I turn around on the gravel
and go back to the house for a book,
something to read at the doctor's office,
and while I am inside, running the finger
of inquisition along a shelf,
another me that did not bother
to go back to the house for a book
heads out on his own,
rolls down the driveway,
and swings left toward town,
a ghost in his ghost...Read more of this...

A Little Song

by Amy Lowell
 When you, my Dear, are away, away,
How wearily goes the creeping day.
A year drags after morning, and night
Starts another year of candle light.
O Pausing Sun and Lingering Moon!
Grant me, I beg of you, this boon.
Whirl round the earth as never sun
Has his diurnal journey run.
And, Moon, slip past the ladders of air
In a single flash, while your streaming hair
Catches...Read more of this...

Sexism

by David Lehman
 The happiest moment in a woman's life
Is when she hears the turn of her lover's key
In the lock, and pretends to be asleep
When he enters the room, trying to be
Quiet but clumsy, bumping into things,
And she can smell the liquor on his breath
But forgives him because she has him back
And doesn't have to sleep alone.

The happiest moment is a...Read more of this...

Monet Refuses The Operation

by Lisel Mueller
 Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the...Read more of this...

Old Age Gets Up

by Ted Hughes
 Stirs its ashes and embers, its burnt sticks

An eye powdered over, half melted and solid again
Ponders
Ideas that collapse
At the first touch of attention

The light at the window, so square and so same
So full-strong as ever, the window frame
A scaffold in space, for eyes to lean on

Supporting the body, shaped to its old work
Making small movements in gray air
Numbed from...Read more of this...

In Answer to a Request

by Amy Lowell
 You ask me for a sonnet. Ah, my Dear,
Can clocks tick back to yesterday at noon?
Can cracked and fallen leaves recall last June
And leap up on the boughs, now stiff and sere?
For your sake, I would go and seek the year,
Faded beyond the purple ranks of dune,
Blown sands of drifted hours, which the moon
Streaks with a ghostly finger, and...Read more of this...

If You Only Knew

by Robert Desnos
 Far from me and like the stars, the sea and all the trappings of poetic myth,
Far from me but here all the same without your knowing,
Far from me and even more silent because I imagine you endlessly.
Far from me, my lovely mirage and eternal dream, you cannot know.
If you only knew.
Far from me and even farther yet from being...Read more of this...

The Scapegoat

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 We have all of us read how the Israelites fled 
From Egypt with Pharaoh in eager pursuit of 'em, 
And Pharaoh's fierce troop were all put "in the soup" 
When the waters rolled softly o'er every galoot of 'em. 
The Jews were so glad when old Pharaoh was "had" 
That they sounded their timbrels and capered like mad. 
You...Read more of this...

A Beautiful Young Nymph Going To Bed

by Jonathan Swift
 Corinna, Pride of Drury-Lane,
For whom no Shepherd sighs in vain;
Never did Covent Garden boast
So bright a batter'd, strolling Toast;
No drunken Rake to pick her up,
No Cellar where on Tick to sup;
Returning at the Midnight Hour;
Four Stories climbing to her Bow'r;
Then, seated on a three-legg'd Chair,
Takes off her artificial Hair: 
Now, picking out a Crystal Eye,
She wipes it clean, and...Read more of this...

Hans Sachs Poetical Mission

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 [I feel considerable hesitation in venturing 
to offer this version of a poem which Carlyle describes to be 'a 
beautiful piece (a very Hans Sacks beatified, both in character 
and style), which we wish there was any possibility of translating.' 
The reader will be aware that Hans Sachs was the celebrated Minstrel- 
Cobbler of Nuremberg, who Wrote 208 plays,...Read more of this...

Eat Your Heart Out

by Charles Bukowski
 I've come by, she says, to tell you
that this is it. I'm not kidding, it's
over. this is it.
I sit on the couch watching her arrange
her long red hair before my bedroom
mirror.
she pulls her hair up and
piles it on top of her head-
she lets her eyes look at
my eyes-
then she drops her hair and
lets it fall down in front of...Read more of this...

Longing

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 WHAT pulls at my heart so?

What tells me to roam?
What drags me and lures me

From chamber and home?
How round the cliffs gather

The clouds high in air!
I fain would go thither,

I fain would be there!

The sociable flight

Of the ravens comes back;
I mingle amongst them,

And follow their track.
Round wall and round mountain

Together we fly;
She tarries below there,

I after her spy.

Then onward...Read more of this...

Britannias Pastorals

by William Browne
 Now as an angler melancholy standing
Upon a green bank yielding room for landing,
A wriggling yellow worm thrust on his hook,
Now in the midst he throws, then in a nook:
Here pulls his line, there throws it in again,
Mendeth his cork and bait, but all in vain,
He long stands viewing of the curled stream;
At last a hungry pike, or well-grown bream
Snatch...Read more of this...

Community Garden

by Laure-Anne Bosselaar
  I watch the man bend over his patch,   
a fat gunny sack at his feet. He combs the earth 

 with his fingers, picks up pebbles around 
tiny heads of sorrel. Clouds bruise in, clog the sky, 

 the first fat drops pock-mark the dust. 
The man wipes his hands on his chest, 

 opens the...Read more of this...

Lui Et Elle

by D. H. Lawrence
 She is large and matronly
And rather dirty,
A little sardonic-looking, as if domesticity had driven her to it.
Though what she does, except lay four eggs at random in the garden once a year
And put up with her husband,
I don't know.

She likes to eat.
She hurries up, striding reared on long uncanny legs
When food is going.
Oh yes, she can make haste when...Read more of this...

Advertisement For The Waldorf-Astoria

by Langston Hughes
 Fine living . . . a la carte?
 Come to the Waldorf-Astoria!

 LISTEN HUNGRY ONES!
Look! See what Vanity Fair says about the
 new Waldorf-Astoria:

 "All the luxuries of private home. . . ."
Now, won't that be charming when the last flop-house
 has turned you down this winter?
 Furthermore:
"It is far beyond anything hitherto attempted in the hotel
 world. ....Read more of this...

Sweeney among the Nightingales

by T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
 APENECK SWEENEY spreads his knees
Letting his arms hang down to laugh,
The zebra stripes along his jaw
Swelling to maculate giraffe.

The circles of the stormy moon
Slide westward toward the River Plate,
Death and the Raven drift above
And Sweeney guards the hornèd gate.

Gloomy Orion and the Dog
Are veiled; and hushed the shrunken seas;
The person in the Spanish cape
Tries to sit on Sweeney’s knees

Slips...Read more of this...

In The Baggage Room At Greyhound

by Allen Ginsberg
 I

In the depths of the Greyhound Terminal 
sitting dumbly on a baggage truck looking at the sky 
 waiting for the Los Angeles Express to depart 
worrying about eternity over the Post Office roof in 
 the night-time red downtown heaven 
staring through my eyeglasses I realized shuddering 
 these thoughts were not eternity, nor the poverty 
 of...Read more of this...

Graceland

by Carl Sandburg
 TOMB of a millionaire,
A multi-millionaire, ladies and gentlemen,
Place of the dead where they spend every year
The usury of twenty-five thousand dollars
For upkeep and flowers
To keep fresh the memory of the dead.
The merchant prince gone to dust
Commanded in his written will
Over the signed name of his last testament
Twenty-five thousand dollars be set aside
For roses, lilacs, hydrangeas, tulips,
For perfume and color,...Read more of this...

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