Famous Silly Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Silly poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous silly poems. These examples illustrate what a famous silly poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Robert Burns
O POORTITH cauld, and restless love,
Ye wrack my peace between ye;
Yet poortith a’ I could forgive,
An ’twere na for my Jeanie.
Chorus.—O why should Fate sic pleasure have,
Life’s dearest bands untwining?
Or why sae sweet a flower as love
Depend on Fortune’s shining?
The warld’s wealth, when I think on,
It’s pride and a’ the lave o’t;
O fie on...Read more of this...
by
Robert Burns
Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi' bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murd'ring pattle!
I'm truly sorry man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill...Read more of this...
by
Amy Lowell
I
The Trumpet-Vine Arbour
The throats of the little red trumpet-flowers are
wide open,
And the clangour of brass beats against the hot sunlight.
They bray and blare at the burning sky.
Red! Red! Coarse notes of red,
Trumpeted at the blue sky.
In long streaks of sound, molten metal,
The vine declares itself.
Clang! -- from its red and yellow trumpets.
Clang! -- from its long, nasal trumpets,
Splitting...Read more of this...
by
Joyce Kilmer
When you had played with life a space
And made it drink and lust and sing,
You flung it back into God's face
And thought you did a noble thing.
"Lo, I have lived and loved," you said,
"And sung to fools too dull to hear me.
Now for a cool and grassy bed
With violets in blossom near me."
Well, rest is good for weary feet,
Although...Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
This silly sorrow-laden heart of mine
Is ever pining for that Love of mine;
When the Cupbearer poured the wine of love,
With my heart's blood he filled this cup of mine!...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
Inside many of us
is a small old man
who wants to get out.
No bigger than a two-year-old
whom you'd call lamb chop
yet this one is old and malformed.
His head is okay
but the rest of him wasn't Sanforized?
He is a monster of despair.
He is all decay.
He speaks up as tiny as an earphone
with Truman's asexual voice:
I am your dwarf.
I am the enemy...Read more of this...
by
John Wilmot
Well Sir, 'tis granted, I said Dryden's Rhimes,
Were stoln, unequal, nay dull many times:
What foolish Patron, is there found of his,
So blindly partial, to deny me this?
But that his Plays, Embroider'd up and downe,
With Witt, and Learning, justly pleas'd the Towne,
In the same paper, I as freely owne:
Yet haveing this allow'd, the...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
I'm gatherin' flowers by the wayside to lay on the grave of Bill;
I've sneaked away from the billet, 'cause Jim wouldn't understand;
'E'd call me a silly fat'ead, and larf till it made 'im ill,
To see me 'ere in the cornfield, wiv a big bookay in me 'and.
For Jim and me we are rough uns, but Bill was...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
The strength of twice three thousand horse
That seeks the single goal;
The line that holds the rending course,
The hate that swings the whole;
The stripped hulls, slinking through the gloom,
At gaze and gone again --
The Brides of Death that wait the groom --
The Choosers of the Slain!
Offshore where sea and skyline blend
In rain, the daylight dies;
The...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
I
This is the sorrowful story
Told when the twilight fails
And the monkeys walk together
Holding their neighbours' tails: --
"Our fathers lived in the forest,
Foolish people were they,
They went down to the cornland
To teach the farmers to play.
"Our fathers frisked in the millet,
Our fathers skipped in the wheat,
Our fathers hung from the branches,
Our fathers danced in...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
They dumped it on the lonely road,
Then like a streak they sped;
And as along the way I strode
I thought that it was dead:
And then I saw that yelping pup
Rise, race to catch them up.
You know how silly wee dogs are.
It thought they were in fun.
Trying to overtake their car
I saw it run and run:
But...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
"And there was no more sea."
Thus said The Lord in the Vault above the Cherubim
Calling to the Angels and the Souls in their degree:
"Lo! Earth has passed away
On the smoke of Judgment Day.
That Our word may be established shall We gather up the sea?"
Loud sang the souls of the jolly, jolly mariners:
"Plague upon the...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
Mary and I were twenty-two
When we were wed;
A well-matched pair, right smart to view
The town's folk said.
For twenty years I have been true
To nuptial bed.
But oh alas! The march of time,
Life's wear and tear!
Now I am in my lusty prime
With pep to spare,
While she looks ten more years than I'm,
With greying hair.
'Twas on...Read more of this...
by
Spike Milligan
Said Hamlet to Ophelia,
I'll draw a sketch of thee,
What kind of pencil shall I use?
2B or not 2B?...Read more of this...
by
Edwin Arlington Robinson
“Be calm? And was I frantic?
You’ll have me laughing soon.
I’m calm as this Atlantic,
And quiet as the moon;
I may have spoken faster
Than once, in other days;
For I’ve no more a master,
And now—‘Be calm,’ he says.
“Fear not, fear no commotion,—
I’ll be as rocks and sand;
The moon and stars and ocean
Will envy...Read more of this...
by
Sophie Hannah
Although you have given me a stomach upset,
Weak knees, a lurching heart, a fuzzy brain,
A high-pitched laugh, a monumental phone bill,
A feeling of unworthiness, sharp pain
When you are somewhere else, a guilty conscience,
A longing, and a dread of what’s in store,
A pulse rate for the Guinness Book of Records -
Life now is better than it was before.
Although you have...Read more of this...
by
Denise Duhamel
I had sex with a famous poet last night
and when I rolled over and found myself beside him I shuddered
because I was married to someone else,
because I wasn't supposed to have been drinking,
because I was in fancy hotel room
I didn't recognize. I would have told you
right off this was a dream, but recently
a friend...Read more of this...
by
Robert Louis Stevenson
The gardener does not love to talk,
He makes me keep the gravel walk;
And when he puts his tools away,
He locks the door and takes the key.
Away behind the currant row
Where no one else but cook may go,
Far in the plots, I see him dig
Old and serious, brown and big.
He digs the flowers, green, red and blue,
Nor wishes to be...Read more of this...
by
Sylvia Plath
The horizons ring me like faggots,
Tilted and disparate, and always unstable.
Touched by a match, they might warm me,
And their fine lines singe
The air to orange
Before the distances they pin evaporate,
Weighting the pale sky with a soldier color.
But they only dissolve and dissolve
Like a series of promises, as I step forward.
There is no life higher than the grasstops
Or the hearts...Read more of this...
by
Siegfried Sassoon
I’ve had a good bump round; my little horse
Refused the brook first time,
Then jumped it prime;
And ran out at the double,
But of course
There’s always trouble at a double:
And then—I don’t know how
It was—he turned it up
At that big, hairy fence before the plough;
And some young silly pup
(I don’t know which),
Near...Read more of this...
by
Edward Lear
THERE WAS AN OLD MAN OF NEW YORK, WHO MURDERED HIMSELF WITH A FORK;
BUT NOBODY CRIED THOUGH HE VERY SOON DIED, --
FOR THAT SILLY OLD MAN OF NEW YORK....Read more of this...
by
Laura Riding Jackson
The little quids, the million quids,
The everywhere, everything, always quids,
The atoms of the Monoton—
Each turned three essences where it stood
And ground a gisty dust from its neighbors' edges
Until a powdery thoughtfall stormed in and out,
The cerebration of a slippery quid enterprise.
Each quid stirred.
The united quids
Waved through a sinuous decision.
The quids, that had never done anything before
But be, be, be,...Read more of this...
by
Robert Graves
The cruel Moon hangs out of reach
Up above the shadowy beech.
Her face is stupid, but her eye
Is small and sharp and very sly.
Nurse says the Moon can drive you mad?
No, that’s a silly story, lad!
Though she be angry, though she would
Destroy all England if she could,
Yet think, what damage can she...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
The 'eathen in 'is blindness bows down to wood an' stone;
'E don't obey no orders unless they is 'is own;
'E keeps 'is side-arms awful: 'e leaves 'em all about,
An' then comes up the Regiment an' pokes the 'eathen out.
All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess,
All along o' doin' things rather-more-or-less,
All along of abby-nay, kul, an'...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
Smells are surer than sounds or sights
To make your heart-strings crack--
They start those awful voices o' nights
That whisper, " Old man, come back! "
That must be why the big things pass
And the little things remain,
Like the smell of the wattle by Lichtenberg,
Riding in, in the rain.
There was some silly fire on the flank
And...Read more of this...
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