Famous Rats Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Rats poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous rats poems. These examples illustrate what a famous rats poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Take it away, and swallow it yourself.
Ha! Look you, there’s a rat.
Last night there were a dozen on that shelf,
And two of them were living in my hat.
Look! Now he goes, but he’ll come back—
Ha? But he will, I say …
Il reviendra-z-à Pâques,
Ou à la Trinité …
Be very sure that he’ll return again;...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Albert Guest
To wed, or not to wed; that is the question;
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The bills and house rent of a wedded fortune,
Or to say "nit" when she proposes,
And by declining cut her. To wed; to smoke
No more; And have a wife at home to mend
The holes in socks and shirts
And underwear and so forth. 'Tis a...Read more of this...
by
Edwin Arlington Robinson
As often as he let himself be seen
We pitied him, or scorned him, or deplored
The inscrutable profusion of the Lord
Who shaped as one of us a thing so mean—
Who made him human when he might have been
A rat, and so been wholly in accord
With any other creature we abhorred
As always useless and not...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
This is the law of the Yukon, and ever she makes it plain:
"Send not your foolish and feeble; send me your strong and your sane --
Strong for the red rage of battle; sane for I harry them sore;
Send me men girt for the combat, men who are grit to the core;
Swift as the panther in triumph, fierce as the...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
THEY were calling certain styles of whiskers by the name of “lilacs.”
And another manner of beard assumed in their chatter a verbal guise
Of “mutton chops,” “galways,” “feather dusters.”
Metaphors such as these sprang from their lips while other street cries
Sprang from sparrows finding scattered oats among interstices of the curb.
Ah-hah these metaphors—and Ah-hah these boys—among the police they were known
As...Read more of this...
by
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Three times thrice hath winter's rough white wing
Crossed and curdled wells and streams with ice
Since his birth whose praises love would sing
Three times thrice.
Earth nor sea bears flower nor pearl of price
Fit to crown the forehead of my king,
Honey meet to please him, balm, nor spice.
Love can think of nought but love to bring
Fit to serve or do him...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
1
SAUNTERING the pavement, or riding the country by-road—lo! such faces!
Faces of friendship, precision, caution, suavity, ideality;
The spiritual, prescient face—the always welcome, common, benevolent face,
The face of the singing of music—the grand faces of natural lawyers and judges, broad
at
the
back-top;
The faces of hunters and fishers, bulged at the brows—the shaved blanch’d faces
of
orthodox...Read more of this...
by
Russell Edson
A man stumbled on some rat droppings.
Hey, who put those there? That's dangerous, he said.
His wife said, those are pieces of a rat.
Wait, he's coming apart, he's all over the floor, said the
husband.
He can't help it; you don't think he wants to drop pieces of
himself all over the floor, do you? said the wife.
But...Read more of this...
by
Charles Bukowski
starving there, sitting around the bars,
and at night walking the streets for hours,
the moonlight always seemed fake
to me, mabye it was,
and in the French Quarter I watched
the horses and buggies going by,
everybody sitting high in the open
carriages, the black driver, and in
back the man and the woman,
usually young and always white.
and I was always white.
and hardly charmed by the
world.
New...Read more of this...
by
Wilfred Owen
(Being the philosophy of many Soldiers.)
Sit on the bed; I'm blind, and three parts shell,
Be careful; can't shake hands now; never shall.
Both arms have mutinied against me -- brutes.
My fingers fidget like ten idle brats.
I tried to peg out soldierly -- no use!
One dies of war like any old disease.
This bandage feels like pennies on my eyes.
I have my...Read more of this...
by
Henry Lawson
Ten miles down Reedy River
A pool of water lies,
And all the year it mirrors
The changes in the skies,
And in that pool's broad bosom
Is room for all the stars;
Its bed of sand has drifted
O'er countless rocky bars.
Around the lower edges
There waves a bed of reeds,
Where water rats are hidden
And...Read more of this...
by
T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
Mistah Kurtz -- he dead.
A penny for the Old Guy
I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes,...Read more of this...
by
Charles Bukowski
I pick up the skirt,
I pick up the sparkling beads
in black,
this thing that moved once
around flesh,
and I call God a liar,
I say anything that moved
like that
or knew
my name
could never die
in the common verity of dying,
and I pick
up her lovely
dress,
all her loveliness gone,
and I speak to all the gods,
Jewish gods, Christ-gods,
chips of blinking things,
idols, pills, bread,
fathoms, risks,
knowledgeable surrender,
rats...Read more of this...
by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I AM the bard known far and wide,
The travell'd rat-catcher beside;
A man most needful to this town,
So glorious through its old renown.
However many rats I see,
How many weasels there may be,
I cleanse the place from ev'ry one,
All needs must helter-skelter run.
Sometimes the bard so full of cheer
As a child-catcher will appear,
Who e'en the wildest captive brings,
Whene'er his golden tales...Read more of this...
by
Lucille Clifton
me and you be sisters.
we be the same.
me and you
coming from the same place.
me and you
be greasing our legs
touching up our edges.
me and you
be scared of rats
be stepping on roaches.
me and you
come running high down purdy street one time
and mama laugh and shake her head at
me and you.
me and you
got babies
got thirty-five
got black
let our hair go back
be loving ourselves
be...Read more of this...
by
Amy Lowell
The tall yellow hollyhocks stand,
Still and straight,
With their round blossoms spread open,
In the quiet sunshine.
And still is the old Roman wall,
Rough with jagged bits of flint,
And jutting stones,
Old and cragged,
Quite still in its antiquity.
The pear-trees press their branches against it,
And feeling it warm and kindly,
The little pears ripen to yellow and red.
They hang heavy, bursting with juice,
Against the wall.
So...Read more of this...
by
Edwin Arlington Robinson
“Gawaine, Gawaine, what look ye for to see,
So far beyond the faint edge of the world?
D’ye look to see the lady Vivian,
Pursued by divers ominous vile demons
That have another king more fierce than ours?
Or think ye that if ye look far enough
And hard enough into the feathery west
Ye’ll have a glimmer of the...Read more of this...
by
Stephen Vincent Benet
(France -- Ancient Regime.)
I.
Go away!
Go away; I will not confess to you!
His black biretta clings like a hangman's cap; under his twitching fingers the beads shiver and click,
As he mumbles in his corner, the shadow deepens upon him;
I will not confess! . . .
Is he there or is it intenser shadow?
Dark huddled...Read more of this...
by
Spike Milligan
Pussy-cat
What are vices?
Catching rats
And eating mices!...Read more of this...
by
Siegfried Sassoon
Soldiers are citizens of death's gray land,
Drawing no dividend from time's to-morrows.
In the great hour of destiny they stand,
Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.
Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win
Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives.
Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin
They think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives.
I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
Jerry MacMullen, the millionaire,
Driving a red-meat bus out there --
How did he win his Croix de Guerre?
Bless you, that's all old stuff:
Beast of a night on the Verdun road,
Jerry stuck with a woeful load,
Stalled in the mud where the red lights glowed,
Prospect devilish tough.
"Little Priscilla" he called his car,
Best of our battered bunch by far,
Branded with many a bullet...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
All day long when the shells sail over
I stand at the sandbags and take my chance;
But at night, at night I'm a reckless rover,
And over the parapet gleams Romance.
Romance! Romance! How I've dreamed it, writing
Dreary old records of money and mart,
Me with my head chuckful of fighting
And the blood of vikings to thrill my heart.
But...Read more of this...
by
Edward Lear
There was an old person of Shields,Who frequented the vallies and fields;All the mice and the cats, and the snakes and the rats,Followed after that person of Shields. ...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Hood
The sun was slumbering in the West,
My daily labors past;
On Anna's soft and gentle breast
My head reclined at last;
The darkness closed around, so dear
To fond congenial souls,
And thus she murmur'd at my ear,
"My love, we're out of coals!
"That Mister Bond has call'd again,
Insisting on his rent;
And all the Todds...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
YES, the Dead speak to us.
This town belongs to the Dead, to the Dead and to the Wilderness.
Back of the clamps on a fireproof door they hold the papers of the Dead in a house here
And when two living men fall out, when one says the Dead spoke a Yes, and the other says the Dead spoke a No,...Read more of this...
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