Famous Scarecrow Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Scarecrow poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous scarecrow poems. These examples illustrate what a famous scarecrow poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...A bird that I don't know,
Hunched on his light-pole like a scarecrow,
Looks sideways out into the wheat
The wind waves under the waves of heat.
The field is yellow as egg-bread dough
Except where (just as though they'd let
It live for looks) a locust billows
In leaf-green and shade-violet,
A standing mercy.
The bird calls twice, "Red clay, red clay";
Or else he's saying, "Directly, directly."
If someone came by I co...Read more of this...
by
Jarrell, Randall
...ad pretty plumage once - enough of that,
Better to smile on all that smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.
V
What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her Son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?
VI
Plato ...Read more of this...
by
Yeats, William Butler
...throb like advertisements.
The small animals of the woods
are carrying their deathmasks
into a narrow winter cave.
The scarecrow has plucked out
his two eyes like diamonds
and walked into the village.
The general and the postman
have taken off their packs.
This has all happened before
but nothing here is obsolete.
Everything here is possible.
Because of this
perhaps a young girl has laid down
her winter clothes and has casually
placed herself upon a tree limb
that hangs ove...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...y friend;
Wine, and woman soft and pink!
Well, each tether has its end:
Sir, it's later than you think.
See yon living scarecrow pass
With a wild and wolfish stare
At each empty absinthe glass,
As if he saw Heaven there.
Poor damned wretch, to end your pain
There is still the Greater Drink.
Yonder waits the sanguine Seine . . .
It is later than you think.
Lastly, you who read; aye, you
Who this very line may scan:
Think of all you planned to do . . .
Have you done the best ...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...h for a Salade
Niçoise I've just watched The Singing Detective all
six hours of it and can't get it out of my mind,
the scarecrow that turns into Hitler, the sad-eyed
father wearing a black arm-band, the yellow umbrellas
as Bing Crosby's voice comes out of Michael Gambon's
mouth, "you've got to ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive,
e-lim-inate the negative" advice as sound today
as in 1945 though it also remains true that
the only thing to do with good advice is pass it on...Read more of this...
by
Lehman, David
...ll every leaf of every paper
Of Mills & Hicks, and mother Draper;
Draw proclamations, works of toil,
In true sublime of scarecrow style,
Write farces too 'gainst sons of freedom,
All for your good, and none would read 'em;
Denounce damnation on their frenzy,
Who died in Whig-impenitency;
Affirm that heav'n would lend us aid,
As all our Tory writers said;
And calculate so well its kindness,
He told the moment when it join'd us?
"'Twas then belike," Honorius cried,
"When you ...Read more of this...
by
Trumbull, John
...ets red roses in different places,
the head, that time he was as sleepy as a river,
the back, that time he was a broken scarecrow,
the arm like a diamond had bitten it,
the leg, twisted like a licorice stick,
all the dance they did together,
Blue Lady and Tommy.
You fell, she said, just remember you fell.
I fell, is all he told the doctors
in the big hospital. A nice lady came
and asked him questions but because
he didn't want to be sent away he said, I fell.
He never said an...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...In Hayfield I imagine
not just the nuts and bolts of split cockpits
but a Spitfire’s sunk fuselage
has smoked out its entirety unseen
from one century to the next.
At Edale Cross, Birch Vale or Kinder,
in rock, field or peat bog
more than machinery beds down and is lost,
it’s true
but here in this field
with all of the exposed corn,
yellow as scatt...Read more of this...
by
Lindley, John
...cried Deo Deo.
The ocean offered them up in the vein of its might.
I wanted to share this
but I stood alone like a pink scarecrow.
The ocean steamed in and out,
the ocean gasped upon the shore
but I could not define her,
I could not name her mood, her locked-up faces.
Far off she rolled and rolled
like a woman in labor
and I thought of those who had crossed her,
in antiquity, in nautical trade, in slavery, in war.
I wondered how she had borne those bulwarks.
She should be en...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...to dim meteors, lost in the deep,
And I turned in dazed wonder, thinking of sleep.
I heard a cricket's cymbals play,
A scarecrow lightly flapped his rags,
And a pan that hung by his shoulder rang,
Rattled and thumped in a listless way,
And now the wind in the chimney sang,
The wind in the chimney,
The wind in the chimney,
The wind in the chimney,
Seemed to say: —
"Dream, boy, dream,
If you anywise can.
To dream is the work
Of beast or man.
Life is the west-going dream-storm'...Read more of this...
by
Lindsay, Vachel
...and a mother gathered so that a father
Might die opportunely and without succour in a hill-top hospital,
Lonely as a scarecrow and inaccessible on the moorland midnight,
Beyond the reach of all but death standing at the bed-head.
Similarly your own father blundering ‘into the Selby Road, high on morphine’
Could but end in the same way.
These griefs were only too normal, as was my mother’s death you wrote of
With such sad eloquence as you shared my vigil: nothing c...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...light glow
Between a dark line and his leg. Vertigo
I get gazing up at him, a pygmy flashed with sun.
A weathercock or scarecrow or both things in one?
As bright as a jewelled crown hung above a throne.
Say, what is the use of him if he doesn't turn?
Just put up to glitter there, like a torch to burn,
A sort of sacrificial show in a lofty urn?
But why a little soldier in an obsolete dress?
I'd rather see a Goddess with a spear, I confess.
Something allegorical and fine. Why,...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
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