Famous Row Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Dont Cheer

by Robert William Service
 Don't cheer, damn you! Don't cheer!
Silence! Your bitterest tear
Is fulsomely sweet to-day. . . .
Down on your knees and pray.

See, they sing as they go,
Marching row upon row.
Who will be spared to return,
Sombre and starkly stern?
Chaps whom we knew - s0 strange,
Distant and dark with change;
Silent as those they slew,
Something in them dead too.
Who will return this way,
To sing...Read more of this...

Beachcomber

by Robert William Service
 When I have come with happy heart to sixty years and ten,
I'll buy a boat and sail away upon a summer sea;
And in a little lonely isle that's far and far from men,
In peace and praise I'll spend the days the Gods allow to me.
For I am weary of a strife so pitiless and vain;
And in a far and...Read more of this...

Narva and Mored

by Thomas Chatterton
 Recite the loves of Narva and Mored 
The priest of Chalma's triple idol said. 
High from the ground the youthful warriors sprung, 
Loud on the concave shell the lances rung: 
In all the mystic mazes of the dance, 
The youths of Banny's burning sands advance, 
Whilst the soft virgin panting looks behind, 
And rides upon the pinions of the...Read more of this...

The Last Post

by Robert Graves
 The bugler sent a call of high romance— 
“Lights out! Lights out!” to the deserted square. 
On the thin brazen notes he threw a prayer, 
“God, if it’s this for me next time in France… 
O spare the phantom bugle as I lie
Dead in the gas and smoke and roar of guns, 
Dead in a row with the other...Read more of this...

Place for a Third

by Robert Frost
 Nothing to say to all those marriages!
She had made three herself to three of his.
The score was even for them, three to three.
But come to die she found she cared so much:
She thought of children in a burial row;
Three children in a burial row were sad.
One man's three women in a burial row
Somehow made her impatient with the man.
And...Read more of this...

September On Jessore Road

by Allen Ginsberg
 Millions of babies watching the skies
Bellies swollen, with big round eyes
On Jessore Road--long bamboo huts
Noplace to **** but sand channel ruts

Millions of fathers in rain
Millions of mothers in pain
Millions of brothers in woe
Millions of sisters nowhere to go

One Million aunts are dying for bread
One Million uncles lamenting the dead
Grandfather millions homeless and sad
Grandmother millions silently mad

Millions of daughters walk...Read more of this...

The Task: Book I The Sofa (excerpts)

by William Cowper
 Thou know'st my praise of nature most sincere,
And that my raptures are not conjur'd up
To serve occasions of poetic pomp,
But genuine, and art partner of them all.
How oft upon yon eminence our pace
Has slacken'd to a pause, and we have borne
The ruffling wind, scarce conscious that it blew,
While admiration, feeding at the eye,
And still unsated, dwelt upon the scene.
Thence...Read more of this...

Shut Up And Eat Your Toad

by James Tate
 The disorganization to which I currently belong
has skipped several meetings in a row
which is a pattern I find almost fatally attractive.
Down at headquarters there's a secretary
and a janitor who I shall call Suzie
and boy can she ever shoot straight.
She'll shoot you straight in the eye if you ask her to.
I mow the grass every other Saturday
and that's the day...Read more of this...

The duel

by Eugene Field
 The gingham dog and the calico cat
Side by side on the table sat;
'T was half-past twelve, and (what do you think!)
Nor one nor t' other had slept a wink!
The old Dutch clock and the Chinese plate
Appeared to know as sure as fate
There was going to be a terrible spat.
(I wasn't there; I simply state
What was told to me by...Read more of this...

Tortoise Family Connections

by D. H. Lawrence
 On he goes, the little one,
Bud of the universe,
Pediment of life.
Setting off somewhere, apparently.
Whither away, brisk egg?

His mother deposited him on the soil as if he were no more than droppings,
And now he scuffles tinily past her as if she were an old rusty tin.

A mere obstacle,
He veers round the slow great mound of her --
Tortoises always foresee obstacles.

It...Read more of this...

The Last Rhyme of True Thomas

by Rudyard Kipling
 The King has called for priest and cup,
 The King has taken spur and blade
To dub True Thomas a belted knight,
 And all for the sake o' the songs he made.

They have sought him high, they have sought him low,
 They have sought him over down and lea;
They have found him by the milk-white thorn
 That guards the gates...Read more of this...

The Man Born to Farming

by Wendell Berry
 The Grower of Trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout
to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death
yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.
What miraculous...Read more of this...

A Grammarians Funeral

by Robert Browning
 SHORTLY AFTER THE REVIVAL OF
LEARNING IN EUROPE.

Let us begin and carry up this corpse,
Singing together.
Leave we the common crofts, the vulgar thorpes
Each in its tether
Sleeping safe on the bosom of the plain,
Cared-for till cock-crow:
Look out if yonder be not day again
Rimming the rock-row!
That's the appropriate country; there, man's thought,
Rarer, intenser,
Self-gathered for an outbreak, as it ought,
Chafes in the censer.
Leave...Read more of this...

Tortoise Gallantry

by D. H. Lawrence
 Making his advances
He does not look at her, nor sniff at her,
No, not even sniff at her, his nose is blank.
Only he senses the vulnerable folds of skin
That work beneath her while she sprawls along
In her ungainly pace,
Her folds of skin that work and row
Beneath the earth-soiled hovel in which she moves.

And so he strains beneath her housey wall,
And...Read more of this...

The Assault Heroic

by Robert Graves
 Down in the mud I lay, 
Tired out by my long day 
Of five damned days and nights, 
Five sleepless days and nights,… 
Dream-snatched, and set me where
The dungeon of Despair 
Looms over Desolate Sea, 
Frowning and threatening me 
With aspect high and steep— 
A most malignant keep.
My foes that lay within 
Shouted and made a din, 
Hooted and...Read more of this...

Javanese Dancers

by Arthur Symons
 Twitched strings, the clang of metal, beaten drums, 
Dull, shrill, continuous, disquieting: 
And now the stealthy dancer comes 
Undulantly with cat-like steps that cling; 

Smiling between her painted lids a smile, 
Motionless, unintelligible, she twines 
Her fingers into mazy lines, 
The scarves across her fingers twine the while. 

One, two, three, four glide forth, and, to and fro, 
Delicately...Read more of this...

To Penshurst

by Ben Jonson
  II. — TO PENSHURST.                Thou hast no lantern whereof tales are told ; Or stair, or courts ;  but stand'st an ancient pile, And these grudg'd at, art reverenced the while. Thou joy'st in better marks, of soil, of air, Of wood, of water ;  therein thou art fair. Thou hast thy walks for health, as well as sport :...Read more of this...

Three little birds in a row

by Stephen Crane
 Three little birds in a row
Sat musing.
A man passed near that place.
Then did the little birds nudge each other.

They said, "He thinks he can sing."
They threw back their heads to laugh.
With quaint countenances
They regarded him.
They were very curious,
Those three little birds in a row....Read more of this...

For A Row Of Laurel Shrubs

by David Wagoner
 They don't want to be your hedge,
 Your barrier, your living wall, the no-go
 Go-between between your property
And the prying of dogs and strangers. They don't

 Want to settle any of your old squabbles
 Inside or out of bounds. Their new growth
In three-foot shoots goes thrusting straight
 Up in the air each April or goes off

 Half-cocked sideways to...Read more of this...

284. Song—Ca' the Yowes to the Knowes (older set)

by Robert Burns
 Chorus.—Ca’ the yowes to the knowes,
Ca’ them where the heather grows,
Ca’ them where the burnie rowes,
 My bonie dearie


AS I gaed down the water-side,
There I met my shepherd lad:
He row’d me sweetly in his plaid,
 And he ca’d me his dearie.
 Ca’ the yowes, &c.


Will ye gang down the water-side,
And see the waves sae sweetly glide
Beneath the hazels spreading...Read more of this...

Roscoe Purkapile

by Edgar Lee Masters
 She loved me. Oh! how she loved me!
I never had a chance to escape
From the day she first saw me.
But then after we were married I thought
She might prove her mortality and let me out,
Or she might divorce me.
But few die, none resign.
Then I ran away and was gone a year on a lark.
But she never complained. She said...Read more of this...

The Great Franchise Demonstration

by William Topaz McGonagall
 'Twas in the year of 1884, and on Saturday the 20th of September,
Which the inhabitants of Dundee will long remember
The great Liberal Franchise Demonstration,
Which filled their minds with admiration. 

Oh! it was a most magnificent display,
To see about 20 or 30 thousand men all in grand array;
And each man with a medal on his breast;
And every man in the...Read more of this...

The Burglar Of Babylon

by Elizabeth Bishop
 On the fair green hills of Rio
 There grows a fearful stain:
The poor who come to Rio
 And can't go home again.

On the hills a million people,
 A million sparrows, nest,
Like a confused migration
 That's had to light and rest,

Building its nests, or houses,
 Out of nothing at all, or air.
You'd think a breath would end them,
 They perch...Read more of this...

To the Pay Toilet

by Marge Piercy
 You strop my anger, especially
when I find you in restaurant or bar
and pay for the same liquid, coming and going.
In bus depots and airports and turnpike plazas
some woman is dragging in with three kids hung off her
shrieking their simple urgency like gulls.
She's supposed to pay for each of them
and the privilege of not dirtying the corporate floor.
Sometimes a woman...Read more of this...

Genoa and the Mediterranean

by Thomas Hardy
 O epic-famed, god-haunted Central Sea, 
Heave careless of the deep wrong done to thee 
When from Torino's track I saw thy face first flash on me. 

And multimarbled Genova the Proud, 
Gleam all unconscious how, wide-lipped, up-browed, 
I first beheld thee clad--not as the Beauty but the Dowd. 

Out from a deep-delved way my vision lit 
On housebacks pink,...Read more of this...

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