Famous Quarries Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The Widening Spell Of Leaves

by Larry Levis
 --The Carpathian Frontier, October, 1968
 --for my brother

Once, in a foreign country, I was suddenly ill.
I was driving south toward a large city famous
For so little it had a replica, in concrete,
In two-thirds scale, of the Arc de Triomphe stuck
In the midst of traffic, & obstructing it.
But the city was hours away, beyond the hills
Shaped like the bodies of...Read more of this...

Water

by Robert Lowell
 It was a Maine lobster town—
each morning boatloads of hands
pushed off for granite
quarries on the islands,

and left dozens of bleak 
white frame houses stuck
like oyster shells
on a hill of rock,

and below us, the sea lapped
the raw little match-stick 
mazes of a weir,
where the fish for bait were trapped.

Remember? We sat on a slab of rock.
>From this distance in time
it...Read more of this...

Banquet Night

by Rudyard Kipling
 "ONCE in so often," King Solomon said,
 Watching his quarrymen drill the stone,
"We will curb our garlic and wine and bread
 And banquet together beneath my Throne,
And all Brethren shall come to that mess
As Fellow-Craftsmen-no more and no less."

"Send a swift shallop to Hiram of Tyre,
 Felling and floating our beautiful trees,
Say that the Brethren and I desire
 Talk...Read more of this...

Mercian Hymns VII

by Geoffrey Hill
 Gasholders, russet among fields. Milldams, marlpools that lay
unstirring. Eel-swarms. Coagulations of frogs: once, with branches and
half-bricks, he battered a ditchful; then sidled away from the stillness
and silence.

Ceolred was his friend and remained so, even after the day of the lost
fighter: a biplane, already obsolete and irreplaceable, two inches of
heavy snub silver. Ceolred let it spin through a hole in...Read more of this...

Been There Before

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 There came a stranger to Walgett town, 
To Walgett town when the sun was low, 
And he carried a thirst that was worth a crown, 
Yet how to quench it he did not know; 
But he thought he might take those yokels down, 
The guileless yokels of Walgett town. 
They made him a bet in a private bar, 
In...Read more of this...

The Palace

by Rudyard Kipling
 When I was a King and a Mason -- a Master proven and skilled --
I cleared me ground for a Palace such as a King should build.
I decreed and dug down to my levels. Presently, under the silt,
I came on the wreck of a Palace such as a King had built.

There was no worth in the fashion -- there...Read more of this...

Temporary Poem Of My Time

by Yehuda Amichai
 Hebrew writing and Arabic writing go from east to west,
Latin writing, from west to east.
Languages are like cats:
You must not stroke their hair the wrong way.
The clouds come from the sea, the hot wind from the desert,
The trees bend in the wind,
And stones fly from all four winds,
Into all four winds. They throw stones,
Throw this land, one at the...Read more of this...

The Sinner

by George Herbert
 Lord, how I am all ague, when I seek
What I have treasur'd in my memory! 
Since, if my soul make even with the week, 
Each seventh note by right is due to thee.
I find there quarries of pil'd vanities, 
But shreds of holiness, that dare not venture
To show their face, since cross to thy decrees: 
There the circumference earth...Read more of this...

Welsh Landscape

by R S Thomas
 To live in Wales is to be conscious
At dusk of the spilled blood
That went into the making of the wild sky,
Dyeing the immaculate rivers
In all their courses.
It is to be aware,
Above the noisy tractor
And hum of the machine
Of strife in the strung woods,
Vibrant with sped arrows.
You cannot live in the present,
At least not in Wales.
There is the language for...Read more of this...

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