Famous Shovel Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Hole In The Floor

...he parlor floor, and I'm standing
Staring down into it now
At four o'clock in the evening,
As Schliemann stood when his shovel
Knocked on the crowns of Troy.

A clean-cut sawdust sparkles
On the grey, shaggy laths,
And here is a cluster of shavings
>From the time when the floor was laid.
They are silvery-gold, the color
Of Hesperian apple-parings.

Kneeling, I look in under
Where the joists go into hiding.
A pure street, faintly littered
With bits and strokes of light,
Enters...Read more of this...
by Wilbur, Richard


Arrival

...d the curtains fly out like doves
And a past dries in a wind.

Now let me lie down, under
A wide-branched indifference,
Shovel-faces like pennies
Down the back of the mind,
Find voices coined to
An argot of motor-horns,
And let the cluttered-up houses
Keep their thick lives to themselves.

For this ignorance of me
Seems a kind of innocence.
Fast enough I shall wound it:
Let me breathe till then
Its milk-aired Eden,
Till my own life impound it-
Slow-falling; grey-veil-hung; a ...Read more of this...
by Larkin, Philip

Ballad by the Fire

...think where once my fancy strayed, 
I muse on what the years may be 
Whose coming tales are all unsaid, 
Till tongs and shovel, snugly laid 
Within their shadowed niches, grow 

By grim degrees to pick and spade, 
As one by one the phantoms go. 

But then, what though the mystic Three 
Around me ply their merry trade? -- 
And Charon soon may carry me 
Across the gloomy Stygian glade? -- 

Be up, my soul! nor be afraid 
Of what some unborn year may show; 
But mind your human d...Read more of this...
by Robinson, Edwin Arlington

Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)

...'m all shot up with Novocain.
This trance girl
is yours to do with.
You could lay her in a grave,
an awful package,
and shovel dirt on her face
and she'd never call back: Hello there!
But if you kissed her on the mouth
her eyes would spring open
and she'd call out: Daddy! Daddy!
Presto!
She's out of prison.

There was a theft.
That much I am told.
I was abandoned.
That much I know.
I was forced backward.
I was forced forward.
I was passed hand to hand
like a bowl of fruit.
Ea...Read more of this...
by Sexton, Anne

Demolition

...sky is to us when it's framed 
by these columned openings someone meant us 
to take for stone. The enormous, articulate shovel 
nudges the highest row of moldings 
and the whole thing wavers as though we'd dreamed it, 
our black classic, and it topples all at once....Read more of this...
by Doty, Mark


Eating Alone

...father I saw this morning 
waving to me from the trees. I almost 
called to him, until I came close enough 
to see the shovel, leaning where I had 
left it, in the flickering, deep green shade. 

White rice steaming, almost done. Sweet green peas 
fried in onions. Shrimp braised in sesame 
oil and garlic. And my own loneliness. 
What more could I, a young man, want.

Credit: Copyright © 1986 by Li-Young Lee. Reprinted with the permission of BOA Editions, Ltd., www.boaedition...Read more of this...
by Lee, Li-Young

Fuzzy-Wuzzy

...In usin' of 'is long two-'anded swords:
When 'e's 'oppin' in an' out among the bush
 With 'is coffin-'eaded shield an' shovel-spear,
An 'appy day with Fuzzy on the rush
 Will last an 'ealthy Tommy for a year.
 So 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, an' your friends which are no more,
 If we 'adn't lost some messmates we would 'elp you to deplore;
 But give an' take's the gospel, an' we'll call the bargain fair,
 For if you 'ave lost more than us, you crumpled up the square!

'E rush...Read more of this...
by Kipling, Rudyard

In The Kalahari Desert

...read from Helmore's Bible

found open at St. John.
Isabella moved her lips,

'The Word was Manchester.'
Shhh, shhh, the shovel said. Shhh. . ....Read more of this...
by Raine, Craig

Its Grand

...nd kids to keep, 
And find an all-wise Providence 
Has mustered all your sheep. 

It's grand to be a Western man, 
With shovel in your hand, 
To dig your little homestead out 
From underneath the sand. 

It's grand to be a shearer 
Along the Darling-side, 
And pluck the wool from stinking sheep 
That some days since have died. 

It's grand to be a rabbit 
And breed till all is blue, 
And then to die in heaps because 
There's nothing left to chew. 

It's grand to be a Minister...Read more of this...
by Paterson, Andrew Barton

Letter

...gh:
A feeble Norman salt-infested watercourse); 
On the right, to the north, bizarre terrain
All angular--you'd think a shovel did it. 
So that's the foreground. An old chapel adds
Its antique spire, and gathers alongside it 
A few gnarled elms with grumpy silhouettes;
Seemingly tired of all the frisky breezes, 
They carp at every gust that stirs them up.
At one side of my house a big wheelbarrow 
Is rusting; and before me lies the vast
Horizon, all its notches filled with oc...Read more of this...
by Hugo, Victor

Love Letter Written In A Burning Building

...ot just the sheet story
but the belly-button story,
the pried-eyelid story,
the whiskey-sour-of-the-nipple story --
and shovel back our love where it belonged.

Despite my asbestos gloves,
the cough is filling me with black and a red powder seeps through my
veins,
our little crate goes down so publicly
and without meaning it, you see, meaning a solo act,
a cremation of the love,
but instead we seem to be going down right in the middle of a Russian
street,
the flames making th...Read more of this...
by Sexton, Anne

Peter Anderson And Co

...-- 
Cards or billiards -- nothing graver. And the Co. was much the same. 

They tried everything and nothing 'twixt the shovel and the press, 
And were more or less successful in their ventures -- mostly less. 
Once they ran a country paper till the plant was seized for debt, 
And the local sinners chuckle over dingy copies yet. 

They'd been through it all and knew it in the land of Bills and Jims -- 
Using Peter's own expression, they had been in `various swims'. 
Now and t...Read more of this...
by Lawson, Henry

Picnic Lightning

...into the flow of the body's
rivers, the brain a monastery,
defenseless on the shore. This is
what I think about when I shovel
compost into a wheelbarrow, and when
I fill the long flower boxes, then
press into rows the limp roots of red
impatiens -- the instant hand of Death
always ready to burst forth from the
sleeve of his voluminous cloak. Then
the soil is full of marvels, bits of
leaf like flakes off a fresco,
red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick
to burrow back under th...Read more of this...
by Collins, Billy

Sacrifices

...ained elegies, old letters, diaries, dead flowers.
When April finally arrived,
I opened the woodstove one last time
and shoveled the remains of those long cold nights
into a bucket, ash rising
through shafts of sunlight,
as swirling in bright, angelic eddies.
I shoveled out the charred end of an oak log,
black and pointed like a pencil;
half-burnt pages
sacrificed
in the making of poems;
old, square handmade nails
liberated from weathered planks
split for kindling.
I buried m...Read more of this...
by Jones, Richard

Sappers

...in trousers and shirt,
An' the heathen they plug us tail-up in the dirt,
 Annoying, etc.

We blast out the rock an' we shovel the mud,
We make 'em good roads an' -- they roll down the khud,
 Reporting, etc.

We make 'em their bridges, their wells, an' their huts,
An' the telegraph-wire the enemy cuts,
 An' it's blamed on, etc.

An' when we return, an' from war we would cease,
They grudge us adornin' the billets of peace,
 Which are kept for, etc.

We build 'em nice barracks ...Read more of this...
by Kipling, Rudyard

Shoveling Snow With Buddha

...mile so wide it wraps itself around the waist of the universe?

But here we are, working our way down the driveway,
one shovelful at a time.
We toss the light powder into the clear air.
We feel the cold mist on our faces.
And with every heave we disappear
and become lost to each other
in these sudden clouds of our own making,
these fountain-bursts of snow.

This is so much better than a sermon in church,
I say out loud, but Buddha keeps on shoveling.
This is the true religion...Read more of this...
by Collins, Billy

Smoke and Steel

...lled and blue.

So fire runs in, runs out, runs somewhere else again,
And the bar of steel is a gun, a wheel, a nail, a shovel,
A rudder under the sea, a steering-gear in the sky;
And always dark in the heart and through it,
 Smoke and the blood of a man.
Pittsburg, Youngstown, Gary—they make their steel with men.

In the blood of men and the ink of chimneys
The smoke nights write their oaths:
Smoke into steel and blood into steel;
Homestead, Braddock, Birmingham, they make t...Read more of this...
by Sandburg, Carl

Snow

...ll she said was,
He hadn’t come and had he really started.”

“She knew he had, poor thing, two hours ago.”

“He had the shovel. He’ll have made a fight.”

“Why did I ever let him leave this house!”

“Don’t begin that. You did the best you could
To keep him—though perhaps you didn’t quite
Conceal a wish to see him show the *****
To disobey you. Much his wife’ll thank you.”

“Fred, after all I said! You shan’t make out
That it was any way but what it was.
Did she let on by any ...Read more of this...
by Frost, Robert

The Water-Nymph

...d all worries; there he passed
His summer days in constant prayer,
Deep studies and eternal fast.
Already with a humble shovel
The elder dug himself a grave -
As, calling saints to bless his hovel,
Death - nothing other - did he crave.

So once, upon a falling night, he
Was bowing by his wilted shack
With meekest prayer to the Almighty.
The grove was turning slowly black;
Above the lake a mist was lifting;
Through milky clouds across the sky
The ruddy moon was softly drifting...Read more of this...
by Pushkin, Alexander

They Who Prepare my Evening Meal Below

...They who prepare my evening meal below
Carelessly hit the kettle as they go
With tongs or shovel,
And ringing round and round,
Out of this hovel
It makes an eastern temple by the sound.
At first I thought a cow bell right at hand
Mid birches sounded o'er the open land,
Where I plucked flowers
Many years ago,
Spending midsummer hours
With such secure delight they hardly seemed to flow....Read more of this...
by Thoreau, Henry David

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