Famous Routine Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Routine poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous routine poems. These examples illustrate what a famous routine poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Barry Tebb
I
Eddie Linden
Dear Eddie we’ve not met
Except upon the written page
And at your age the wonder
Is that you write at all
When so many have gone under
Or been split asunder by narcissistic humours
Blunder following blunder
Barker and Graham, godfathering my verse
Bearing me cloud-handed to Haworth moor
From my chained metropolitan moorings,
O hyaline March morning with Leeds
At its thrusting best, the...Read more of this...
by
Geoffrey Hill
born 19.6.32 - deported 24.9.42
Undesirable you may have been, untouchable
you were not. Not forgotten
or passed over at the proper time.
As estimated, you died. Things marched,
sufficient, to that end.
Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented
terror, so many routine cries.
(I have made
an elegy for myself it
is true)
September fattens on vines. Roses
flake from the wall. The smoke
of harmless fires drifts to my...Read more of this...
by
Stephen Dunn
When Mother died
I thought: now I'll have a death poem.
That was unforgivable.
Yet I've since forgiven myself
as sons are able to do
who've been loved by their mothers.
I stared into the coffin
knowing how long she'd live,
how many lifetimes there are
in the sweet revisions of memory.
It's hard to know exactly
how we ease ourselves back from sadness,
but I remembered when I was twelve,...Read more of this...
by
Theodore Roethke
When I put her out, once, by the garbage pail,
She looked so limp and bedraggled,
So foolish and trusting, like a sick poodle,
Or a wizened aster in late September,
I brought her back in again
For a new routine--
Vitamins, water, and whatever
Sustenance seemed sensible
At the time: she'd lived
So long on gin, bobbie pins, half-smoked cigars, dead beer,
Her shriveled petals falling
On the faded...Read more of this...
by
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Though not for common praise of him,
Nor yet for pride or charity,
Still would I make to Vanderberg
One tribute for his memory:
One honest warrant of a friend
Who found with him that flesh was grass—
Who neither blamed him in defect
Nor marveled how it came to pass;
Or why it ever was that he—
That Vanderberg,...Read more of this...
by
Alan Seeger
Not that I always struck the proper mean
Of what mankind must give for what they gain,
But, when I think of those whom dull routine
And the pursuit of cheerless toil enchain,
Who from their desk-chairs seeing a summer cloud
Race through blue heaven on its joyful course
Sigh sometimes for a life less cramped and bowed,
I...Read more of this...
by
Amy Lowell
How empty seems the town now you are gone!
A wilderness of sad streets, where gaunt walls
Hide nothing to desire; sunshine falls
Eery, distorted, as it long had shone
On white, dead faces tombed in halls of stone.
The whir of motors, stricken through with calls
Of playing boys, floats up at intervals;
But all these noises blur to one long moan.
What quest is worth...Read more of this...
by
Amy Clampitt
Daily the cortege of crumpled
defunct cars
goes by by the lasagna-
layered flatbed
truckload: hardtop
reverting to tar smudge,
wax shine antiqued to crusted
winepress smear,
windshield battered to
intact ice-tint, a rarity
fresh from the Pleistocene.
I like it; privately
I find esthetic
satisfaction in these
ceremonial removals
from the category of
received ideas
to regions where pigeons'
svelte smoke-velvet
limousines, taxiing
in whirligigs, reclaim...Read more of this...
by
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I cannot spare water or wine,
Tobacco-leaf, or poppy, or rose;
From the earth-poles to the Line,
All between that works or grows,
Every thing is kin of mine.
Give me agates for my meat,
Give me cantharids to eat,
From air and ocean bring me foods,
From all zones and altitudes.
From all natures, sharp and slimy,
Salt and basalt, wild and tame,
Tree, and lichen, ape, sea-lion,
Bird and...Read more of this...
by
Randall Jarrell
It was not dying: everybody died.
It was not dying: we had died before
In the routine crashes-- and our fields
Called up the papers, wrote home to our folks,
And the rates rose, all because of us.
We died on the wrong page of the almanac,
Scattered on mountains fifty miles away;
Diving on haystacks, fighting with a...Read more of this...
by
Robert Burns
THIS day, Time winds th’ exhausted chain;
To run the twelvemonth’s length again:
I see, the old bald-pated fellow,
With ardent eyes, complexion sallow,
Adjust the unimpair’d machine,
To wheel the equal, dull routine.
The absent lover, minor heir,
In vain assail him with their prayer;
Deaf as my friend, he sees them press,
Nor makes the hour one moment less,
Will you (the Major’s with the hounds,
The...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Lee Masters
You have become a forge of snow-white fire,
A crucible of molten steel, O France!
Your sons are stars who cluster to a dawn
And fade in light for you, O glorious France!
They pass through meteor changes with a song
Which to all islands and all continents
Says life is neither comfort, wealth, nor fame,
Nor quiet hearthstones, friendship, wife nor child,
Nor love, nor youth's...Read more of this...
by
John Berryman
In a blue series towards his sleepy eyes
they slid like wonder, women tall & small,
of every shape & size,
in many languages to lisp 'We do'
to Henry almost waking. What is the night at all,
his closed eyes beckon you.
In the Marriage of the Dead, a new routine,
he gasped his crowded vows past lids shut tight
and a-many rings fumbled on.
His coffin...Read more of this...
by
Marilyn Hacker
You happened to me. I was happened to
like an abandoned building by a bull-
dozer, like the van that missed my skull
happened a two-inch gash across my chin.
You were as deep down as I've ever been.
You were inside me like my pulse. A new-
born flailing toward maternal heartbeat through
the shock of cold and glare: when you were gone,
swaddled in strange...Read more of this...
by
Robert Pinsky
to Robert Hass and in memory of Elliot Gilbert
Slow dulcimer, gavotte and bow, in autumn,
Bashõ and his friends go out to view the moon;
In summer, gasoline rainbow in the gutter,
The secret courtesy that courses like ichor
Through the old form of the rude, full-scale joke,
Impossible to tell in writing. "Bashõ"
He named himself, "Banana Tree": banana
After the plant some grateful students...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
WHOEVER you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams,
I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your feet and hands;
Even now, your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners, troubles, follies, costume,
crimes, dissipate away from you,
Your true Soul and Body appear before me,
They stand forth out of affairs—out of commerce,...Read more of this...
by
Lisel Mueller
I. Insomnia
The bulb at the front door burns and burns.
If it were a white rose it would tire of blooming
through another endless night.
The moon knows the routine;
it beats the bushes from east to west
and sets empty-handed. Again the one
she is waiting for has outrun the moon.
II. Old Money
The spotted hands shake as they polish the coins.
The...Read more of this...
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...
by
Emily Dickinson
To make Routine a Stimulus
Remember it can cease --
Capacity to Terminate
Is a Specific Grace --
Of Retrospect the Arrow
That power to repair
Departed with the Torment
Become, alas, more fair --...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
1
COURAGE yet! my brother or my sister!
Keep on! Liberty is to be subserv’d, whatever occurs;
That is nothing, that is quell’d by one or two failures, or any number of failures,
Or by the indifference or ingratitude of the people, or by any unfaithfulness,
Or the show of the tushes of power, soldiers, cannon, penal statutes.
Revolt! and still...Read more of this...
by
G K Chesterton
Impetuously I sprang from bed,
Long before lunch was up,
That I might drain the dizzy dew
From the day's first golden cup.
In swift devouring ecstasy
Each toil in turn was done;
I had done lying on the lawn
Three minutes after one.
For me, as Mr. Wordsworth says,
The duties shine like stars;
I formed my uncle's character,
Decreasing his cigars.
But could my kind engross me? No!
Stern Art-what...Read more of this...
by
T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
Bustopher Jones is not skin and bones--
In fact, he's remarkably fat.
He doesn't haunt pubs--he has eight or nine clubs,
For he's the St. James's Street Cat!
He's the Cat we all greet as he walks down the street
In his coat of fastidious black:
No commonplace mousers have such well-cut trousers
Or such an impreccable back.
In the whole of St. James's the smartest of...Read more of this...
by
Joseph Brodsky
As though the mercury's under its tongue, it won't
talk. As though with the mercury in its sphincter,
immobile, by a leaf-coated pond
a statue stands white like a blight of winter.
After such snow, there is nothing indeed: the ins
and outs of centuries, pestered heather.
That's what coming full circle means -
when your countenance starts to resemble weather,
when Pygmalion's vanished. And you...Read more of this...
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