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Famous Rakes Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Whitman, Walt
...e inventions, the labor-saving implements:
Beholdest, moving in every direction, imbued as with life, the revolving hay-rakes, 
The steam-power reaping-machines, and the horse-power machines, 
The engines, thrashers of grain, and cleaners of grain, well separating the straw—the
 nimble work of the patent pitch-fork; 
Beholdest the newer saw-mill, the southern cotton-gin, and the rice-cleanser. 

Beneath thy look, O Maternal,
With these, and else, and with their own strong...Read more of this...



by Laurence Dunbar, Paul
...ies
Up from the perfumed bosom of the South.
Like sentinels, the pines stand in the park;
And hither hastening, like rakes that roam,
With lamps to light their wayward footsteps home,
The fireflies come stagg'ring down the dark.
...Read more of this...

by Masters, Edgar Lee
...I bought every kind of machine that's known --
Grinders, shellers, planters, mowers,
Mills and rakes and ploughs and threshers --
And all of them stood in the rain and sun,
Getting rusted, warped and battered,
For I had no sheds to store them in,
And no use for most of them.
And toward the last, when I thought it over,
There by my window, growing clearer
About myself, as my pulse slowed down,
And looked at one of the mills I bought --
Which I didn...Read more of this...

by McKay, Claude
...ure women's hearts. 

Down in the glory-hole Alfonso sings 
An olden song of wine and clinking glasses 
And riotous rakes; magnificently flings 
Gay kisses to imaginary lasses. 

Alfonso's voice of mellow music thrills 
Our swaying forms and steals our hearts with joy; 
And when he soars, his fine falsetto trills 
Are rarest notes of gold without alloy. 

But, O Alfonso! wherefore do you sing 
Dream-songs of carefree men and ancient places? 
Soon we shall be beset...Read more of this...

by Betjeman, John
...With one consuming roar along the shingle
The long wave claws and rakes the pebbles down
To where its backwash and the next wave mingle,
A mounting arch of water weedy-brown
Against the tide the off-shore breezes blow.
Oh wind and water, this is Felixstowe.

In winter when the sea winds chill and shriller
Than those of summer, all their cold unload
Full on the gimcrack attic of the villa
Where I am lodging off the ...Read more of this...



by Field, Edward
...hink he is evil and dangerous because he is ugly
and makes ugly noises.
They wave firebrands at him and cudgels and rakes,
but he escapes and comes to the thatched cottage
of an old blind man playing on the violin Mendelssohn's "Spring Song."

Hearing him approach, the blind man welcomes him:
"Come in, my friend," and takes him by the arm.
"You must be weary," and sits him down inside the house.
For the blind man has long dreamed of having a friend
to share hi...Read more of this...

by Verhaeren, Emile
...Long as unending threads, the long-drawn rain
Interminably, with its nails of grey,
Athwart the dull grey day,
Rakes the green window-pane—
So infinitely, endlessly, the rain,
The long, long rain.
The rain.

Since yesternight it keeps unravelling
Down from the frayed and flaccid rags that cling
About the sullen sky.
The low black sky;
Since yesternight, so slowly, patiently.
Unravelling its threads upon the roads.
Upon the roads and lanes, with even fall
...Read more of this...

by Sassoon, Siegfried
...hite, 
And white receding slow, submerged in gloom.
Guns into mimic thunder burst and boom, 
And mirthless laughter rakes the whistling night. 
The sentry keeps his watch where no one stirs 
But the brown rats, the nimble scavengers....Read more of this...

by Mueller, Lisel
...When the moon was full they came to the water.
some with pitchforks, some with rakes,
some with sieves and ladles,
and one with a silver cup.

And they fished til a traveler passed them and said,
"Fools,
to catch the moon you must let your women
spread their hair on the water --
even the wily moon will leap to that bobbing
net of shimmering threads,
gasp and flop till its silver scales
lie black and still at your feet."

And th...Read more of this...

by Scott, Sir Walter
...de your gutters stink not; 
But all is fresh and clean and gay, 
And merry lambkins sport and play, 
And they toss with rakes uncommonly short hay, 
Which looks as if it had been sown only the other day, 
And where oats are twenty-five shillings a boll, they say; 
But all's one for that, since I must and will away....Read more of this...

by Aiken, Conrad
...umming; 
In the blue sea above me lazily stream 
Cloud upon thin-brown cloud, revolving, scattering; 
The mulberry tree rakes heaven and drops its fruit; 
Amazing sunlight sings in the opened vault 
On dust and bones, and I am mute.

It is noon; the bells let fall soft flowers of sound. 
They turn on the air, they shrink in the flare of noon. 
It is night; and I lie alone, and watch through the window 
The terrible ice-white emptiness of the moon. 
Small bells...Read more of this...

by Turner Smith, Charlotte
...The night-flood rakes upon the stony shore;
Along the rugged cliffs and chalky caves
Mourns the hoarse Ocean, seeming to deplore
All that are buried in his restless waves—
Mined by corrosive tides, the hollow rock 
Falls prone, and rushing from its turfy height,
Shakes the broad beach with long-resounding shock,
Loud thundering on the ear of sullen Night;
Above the desolate...Read more of this...

by Kipling, Rudyard
...ires rave
 Astern, abeam, ahead!
Panic that shells the drifting spar --
 Loud waste with none to check --
Mad fear that rakes a scornful star
 Or sweeps a consort's deck.

Now, while their silly smoke hangs thick,
 Now ere their wits they find,
Lay in and lance them to the quick --
 Our gallied whales are blind!
Good luck to those that see end end,
 Good-bye to those that drown --
For each his chance as chance shall send --
 And God for all! Shut down!

The strength of tw...Read more of this...

by Austin, Alfred
...ws it, 
Clink, jugs, clink! 
To him that mows and makes it, 
That scatters it and shakes it, 
That turns, and teds, and rakes it, 
Clink, jugs, clink! 

Now here ’s to him that stacks it, 
Drink, lads, drink!
That thrashes and that tacks it, 
Clink, jugs, clink! 
That cuts it out for eating, 
When March-dropp’d lambs are bleating, 
And the slate-blue clouds are sleeting,
Drink, lads, drink! 

And here ’s to thane and yeoman, 
Drink, lads, drink! 
To horseman and to bowman, 
C...Read more of this...

by Collins, Billy
...lassy surface
and is moving away from me and the iron bridge,
swiveling his curious head,
slipping out to where the sun rakes the water
and filters through the trees that crowd the shore.

And now he dives,
disappears below the surface,
and while I wait for him to pop up,
I picture him flying underwater with his strange wings,

as I picture you, my tiny mother,
who disappeared last year,
flying somewhere with your strange wings,
your wide eyes, and your heavy wet dress,
k...Read more of this...

by Verhaeren, Emile
...ary evenings, yon
The whirr of a wheel can yet be heard;
Something by unseen hands is stirred.
And parallel o'er the rakes, that trace
An even space
From point to point along all the way,
The flaxen hemp still plaits its chain
Ceaseless, for days and weeks amain.
With his poor, tired fingers, nimble still.
Fearing to break for want of skill
The fragments of gold that the gliding light
Threads through his toil so scantily—
Passing the walls and the houses by
The r...Read more of this...

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Book: Shattered Sighs