Famous Scraped Poems by Famous Poets

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

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In The Baggage Room At Greyhound

by Allen Ginsberg
 I

In the depths of the Greyhound Terminal 
sitting dumbly on a baggage truck looking at the sky 
 waiting for the Los Angeles Express to depart 
worrying about eternity over the Post Office roof in 
 the night-time red downtown heaven 
staring through my eyeglasses I realized shuddering 
 these thoughts were not eternity, nor the poverty 
 of...Read more of this...

Darkness

by George (Lord) Byron
 I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chilled into...Read more of this...

Barb-Wire Bill

by Robert William Service
 At dawn of day the white land lay all gruesome-like and grim,
When Bill Mc'Gee he says to me: "We've got to do it, Jim.
We've got to make Fort Liard quick. I know the river's bad,
But, oh! the little woman's sick . . . why! don't you savvy, lad?"
And me! Well, yes, I must confess it wasn't hard to see
Their...Read more of this...

Old Deuteronomy

by T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
 Old Deuteronomy's lived a long time;
He's a Cat who has lived many lives in succession.
He was famous in proverb and famous in rhyme
A long while before Queen Victoria's accession.
Old Deuteronomy's buried nine wives
And more--I am tempted to say, ninety-nine;
And his numerous progeny prospers and thrives
And the village is proud of him in his decline.
At the sight of that placid...Read more of this...

My Job

by Robert William Service
 I've got a little job on 'and, the time is drawin' nigh;
 At seven by the Captain's watch I'm due to go and do it;
I wants to 'ave it nice and neat, and pleasin' to the eye,
 And I 'opes the God of soldier men will see me safely through it.
Because, you see, it's somethin' I 'ave never done...Read more of this...

The Cambaroora Star

by Henry Lawson
 So you're writing for a paper? Well, it's nothing very new 
To be writing yards of drivel for a tidy little screw; 
You are young and educated, and a clever chap you are, 
But you'll never run a paper like the CAMBAROORA STAR. 
Though in point of education I am nothing but a dunce, 
I myself -- you mayn't...Read more of this...

shaw and jung

by Rg Gregory
 shaw had the gift of the crab
how he took the straight idea
and scuttled with it sideways
marking sand and word with sea's
inventions - what shaw perceived
went deeper than the lounger's eye
stripped for entertainment in the sun
shaw's art was nip and prick
sending the red-skinned lounger home
with buzzing brain shocked tongue
and sandstorms stinging in his ears

jung went for niches in the night
believing...Read more of this...

Julot The Apache

by Robert William Service
 You've heard of Julot the apache, and Gigolette, his mome. . . .
Montmartre was their hunting-ground, but Belville was their home.
A little chap just like a boy, with smudgy black mustache, --
Yet there was nothing juvenile in Julot the apache.
From head to heel as tough as steel, as nimble as a cat,
With every trick of twist and kick, a...Read more of this...

The Show

by Wilfred Owen
 My soul looked down from a vague height with Death,
As unremembering how I rose or why,
And saw a sad land, weak with sweats of dearth,
Gray, cratered like the moon with hollow woe,
And fitted with great pocks and scabs of plaques.

Across its beard, that horror of harsh wire,
There moved thin caterpillars, slowly uncoiled.
It seemed they pushed themselves to be as...Read more of this...

Minstrels

by William Wordsworth
The minstrels played their Christmas tune
To-night beneath my cottage-eaves;
While, smitten by a lofty moon,
The encircling laurels, thick with leaves,
Gave back a rich and dazzling sheen,
That overpowered their natural green.

Through hill and valley every breeze
Had sunk to rest with folded wings:
Keen was the air, but could not freeze,
Nor check, the music of the strings;
So stout and hardy were the band
That scraped...Read more of this...

Number 3 on the Docket

by Amy Lowell
 The lawyer, are you?
Well! I ain't got nothin' to say.
Nothin'!
I told the perlice I hadn't nothin'.
They know'd real well 'twas me.
Ther warn't no supposin',
Ketchin' me in the woods as they did,
An' me in my house dress.
Folks don't walk miles an' miles
In the drifted snow,
With no hat nor wrap on 'em
Ef everythin's all right, I guess.
All right? Ha! Ha! Ha!
Nothin'...Read more of this...

My Papas Waltz

by Theodore Roethke
 The whiskey on your breath 
Could make a small boy dizzy; 
But I hung on like death: 
Such waltzing was not easy. 

We romped until the pans 
Slid from the kitchen shelf; 
My mother's countenance 
Could not unfrown itself. 

The hand that held my wrist 
Was battered on one knuckle; 
At every step you missed 
My right ear scraped...Read more of this...

The Blue Bowl

by Jane Kenyon
 Like primitives we buried the cat
with his bowl. Bare-handed
we scraped sand and gravel
back into the hole.
 They fell with a hiss
and thud on his side,
on his long red fur, the white feathers
between his toes, and his
long, not to say aquiline, nose.

We stood and brushed each other off.
There are sorrows keener than these.

Silent the rest of the day, we worked,
ate,...Read more of this...

Joliet

by Carl Sandburg
 ON the one hand the steel works.
On the other hand the penitentiary.
Sante Fé trains and Alton trains
Between smokestacks on the west
And gray walls on the east.
And Lockport down the river.

Part of the valley is God’s.
And part is man’s.
The river course laid out
A thousand years ago.
The canals ten years back.

The sun on two canals and one river
Makes three stripes of...Read more of this...

Daddy

by Sylvia Plath
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. 

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time---
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal 

And a head in the freakish...Read more of this...

Subtraction Flower

by Lisa Zaran
 You could die for it-- 
love, 
or refuse it altogether 
and know nothing 
except the urgency 
of youth. Men 

have been 
solitary 
for ages 
carrying the 
stoniest of hearts 
in their broad chests 
while we women 

begin too early 
brush the brown leaves 
from our shoulders, go 
from bloom to fade 
as soon as 
we see the sunrise 

We...Read more of this...

Sadie and Maud

by Gwendolyn Brooks
 Maud went to college.
Sadie stayed home.
Sadie scraped life
With a fine toothed comb.

She didn't leave a tangle in
Her comb found every strand.
Sadie was one of the livingest chicks
In all the land.

Sadie bore two babies
Under her maiden name.
Maud and Ma and Papa
Nearly died of shame.

When Sadie said her last so-long
Her girls struck out from home.
(Sadie left as heritage
Her fine-toothed comb.)

Maud, who...Read more of this...

Portent

by Robert William Service
 Courage mes gars:
La guerre est proche.

I plant my little plot of beans,
I sit beneath my cyprus tree;
I do not know what trouble means,
I cultivate tranquillity . . .
But as to-day my walk I made
In all serenity and cheer,
I saw cut in an agave blade:
"Courage, my comrades, war is near!"

Seward I went, my feet were slow,
Awhile I dowsed upon the...Read more of this...

At the Fishhouses

by Elizabeth Bishop
Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one's nose run and one's eyes water.
The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs
and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up
to storerooms in the gables
for the wheelbarrows to...Read more of this...

Lottery Ticket

by Robert William Service
 'A ticket for the lottery
I've purchased every week,' said she
 'For years a score
Though desperately poor am I,
Oh how I've scrimped and scraped to buy
 One chance more.

Each week I think I'll gain the prize,
And end my sorrows and my sighs,
 For I'll be rich;
Then nevermore I'll eat bread dry,
With icy hands to cry and cry
 And stitch and...Read more of this...

The Break

by Anne Sexton
 It was also my violent heart that broke,
falling down the front hall stairs.
It was also a message I never spoke,
calling, riser after riser, who cares

about you, who cares, splintering up
the hip that was merely made of crystal,
the post of it and also the cup.
I exploded in the hallway like a pistol.

So I fell apart. So I came all undone.
Yes....Read more of this...

Ivas Pantoum

by Marilyn Hacker
 We pace each other for a long time.
I packed my anger with the beef jerky.
You are the baby on the mountain. I am 
in a cold stream where I led you.

I packed my anger with the beef jerky.
You are the woman sticking her tongue out 
in a cold stream where I led you.
You are the woman with spring water...Read more of this...

A Woman Waking

by Philip Levine
 She wakens early remembering 
her father rising in the dark 
lighting the stove with a match 
scraped on the floor. Then measuring 
water for coffee, and later the smell 
coming through. She would hear 
him drying spoons, dropping 
them one by one in the drawer. 
Then he was on the stairs 
going for the milk. So soon 
he would...Read more of this...

Now

by Dylan Thomas
 I sit here on the 2nd floor
hunched over in yellow
pajamas
still pretending to be
a writer.
some damned gall,
at 71,
my brain cells eaten
away by
life.
rows of books
behind me,
I scratch my thinning
hair
and search for the
word. 
for decades now
I have infuriated the
ladies,
the critics,
the university
suck-toads. 
they all will soon have
their time to
celebrate. 
"terribly overrated..." 
"gross..." 
"an aberration..." 
my hands sink into the
keyboard
of my
Macintosh,
it's the same old
con
that...Read more of this...

Vain Venture

by Robert William Service
 To have a business of my own
 With toil and tears,
I wore my fingers to the bone
 For weary years.
With stoic heart, for sordid gold
 In patient pain
My life and liberty I sold
 For others gain.

I scrimped and scraped, as cent by cent
 My savings grew;
I found a faded shop for rent,
 Made it like new.
Above the door the...Read more of this...

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