Famous Roundabout Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Inexpensive Progress

...he roads with tin signs
'Keep Left,' 'M4,' 'Keep Out!'
Command, instruction, warning,
Repetitive adorning
The rockeried roundabout;

For every raw obscenity
Must have its small 'amenity,'
Its patch of shaven green,
And hoardings look a wonder
In banks of floribunda
With floodlights in between.

Leave no old village standing
Which could provide a landing
For aeroplanes to roar,
But spare such cheap defacements
As huts with shattered casements
Unlived-in since the war.

Let no ...Read more of this...
by Betjeman, John


Last Words To A Dumb Friend

...e an ache.

From the chair whereon he sat
Sweep his fur, nor wince thereat;
Rake his little pathways out
Mid the bushes roundabout;
Smooth away his talons' mark
From the claw-worn pine-tree bark,
Where he climbed as dusk embrowned,
Waiting us who loitered round.

Strange it is this speechless thing,
Subject to our mastering,
Subject for his life and food
To our gift, and time, and mood;
Timid pensioner of us Powers,
His existence ruled by ours,
Should - by crossing at a breat...Read more of this...
by Hardy, Thomas

Little Orphant Annie

...' press,
An' seeked him up the chimbly-flue, an' ever'-wheres, I guess;
But all they ever found wuz thist his pants an' roundabout:--
An' the Gobble-uns 'll git you
Ef you
Don't
Watch
Out!

An' one time a little girl 'ud allus laugh an' grin,
An' make fun of ever' one, an' all her blood-an'-kin;
An' wunst, when they was "company," an' ole folks wuz there,
She mocked 'em an' shocked 'em, an' said she didn't care!
An' thist as she kicked her heels, an' turn't to run an' hide,
T...Read more of this...
by Riley, James Whitcomb

The Choirmasters Burial

...t any tune.

But 'twas said that, when
At the dead of next night
The vicar looked out,
There struck on his ken
Thronged roundabout,
Where the frost was graying
The headstoned grass,
A band all in white
Like the saints in church-glass,
Singing and playing
The ancient stave
By the choirmaster's grave.

Such the tenor man told
When he had grown old....Read more of this...
by Hardy, Thomas

The Road to Roundabout

...ven towns. 
I see no scientific proof 
That this idea is sound, 
And I should say they wound about 
To find the town of Roundabout, 
The merry town of Roundabout, 
That makes the world go round. 

Some say that Robin Goodfellow, 
Whose lantern lights the meads 
(To steal a phrase Sir Walter Scott 
In heaven no longer needs), 
Such dance around the trysting-place 
The moonstruck lover leads; 
Which superstition I should scout 
There is more faith in honest doubt 
(As Tennyson ...Read more of this...
by Chesterton, G K


The Sightseers

...ord

not to visit some graveyard—one died of shingles,
one of fever, another's knees turned to jelly—
but the brand-new roundabout at Ballygawley,
the first in mid-Ulster.

Uncle Pat was telling us how the B-Specials
had stopped him one night somewhere near Ballygawley
and smashed his bicycle

and made him sing the Sash and curse the Pope of Rome.
They held a pistol so hard against his forehead
there was still the mark of an O when he got home....Read more of this...
by Muldoon, Paul

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