Famous Slip By Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The Wedding Ring

by Robert William Service
 I pawned my sick wife's wedding ring,
To drink and make myself a beast.
I got the most that it would bring,
Of golden coins the very least.
With stealth into her room I crept
And stole it from her as she slept.

I do not think that she will know,
As in its place I left a band
Of brass that has a brighter glow
And gleamed...Read more of this...

This Night Slip In His Honor (after Komachi)

by Jennifer Reeser
 This night slip, in his honor
flipped inside out – of lace-
edged netting – is the color
of Shaka Zulu’s face;

of panther flower at midnight
where crow and boa doze;
of vertigo and stage fright
in frail Ophelia’s clothes.

I wear it as a symbol.
Its ripped, Chantilly trim
I fixed without a thimble,
was pricked and bled for him.

A torn band may be mended,
but what if he...Read more of this...

The New Love

by Dorothy Parker
 If it shine or if it rain,
Little will I care or know.
Days, like drops upon a pane,
Slip, and join, and go.

At my door's another lad;
Here's his flower in my hair.
If he see me pale and sad,
Will he see me fair?

I sit looking at the floor.
Little will I think or say
If he seek another door;
Even if he stay....Read more of this...

Simplicity

by Robert William Service
 What I seek far yet seldom find
Is large simplicity of mind
 In fellow men;
For I have sprouted from the sod,
Like Bobbie Burns, my earthly god,
 --From plough to pen.

So I refuse my brain to vex
With problems prosy and complex,
 Beyond my scope;
To me simplicity is peace,
So I persue it without cease,
 And growing hope.

"The world is too much with...Read more of this...

Advice to a Prophet

by Richard Wilbur
 When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God's name to have self-pity,

Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.

Nor shall you...Read more of this...

The Ballad Of How Macpherson Held The Floor

by Robert William Service
 Said President MacConnachie to Treasurer MacCall:
"We ought to have a piper for our next Saint Andrew's Ball.
Yon squakin' saxophone gives me the syncopated gripes.
I'm sick of jazz, I want to hear the skirling of the pipes."
"Alas! it's true," said Tam MacCall. "The young folk of to-day
Are fox-trot mad and dinna ken a reel from Strathspey.
Now, what we want's a...Read more of this...

Sonnet XLIX

by Francesco Petrarch
SONNET XLIX. Se voi poteste per turbati segni. HE ENTREATS LAURA NOT TO HATE THE HEART FROM WHICH SHE CAN NEVER BE ABSENT.  If, but by angry and disdainful sign,By the averted head and downcast sight,By readiness beyond thy sex for flight,Deaf to all pure and worthy prayers of mine,Thou canst,...Read more of this...

Act of Union

by Seamus Heaney
 I

To-night, a first movement, a pulse,
As if the rain in bogland gathered head
To slip and flood: a bog-burst,
A gash breaking open the ferny bed.
Your back is a firm line of eastern coast
And arms and legs are thrown
Beyond your gradual hills. I caress
The heaving province where our past has grown.
I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder
That you would neither...Read more of this...

Sea Song

by Adela Florence Cory Nicolson
   Sad is the Evening: all the level sand
     Lies left and lonely, while the restless sea,
   Tired of the green caresses of the land,
     Withdraws into its own infinity.

   But still more sad this white and chilly Dawn
     Filling the vacant...Read more of this...

If

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
 Dear love, if you and I could sail away, 
With snowy pennons to the wind unfurled, 
Across the waters of some unknown bay, 
And find some island far from all the world;

If we could dwell there, ever more alone, 
While unrecorded years slip by apace, 
Forgetting and forgotten and unknown 
By aught save native song-birds of the place;

If Winter...Read more of this...

With the same love that you were

by Emile Verhaeren
With the same love that you were for me long ago a garden of splendour whose wavering coppices shaded the long grass and the docile roses, you are for me in these black days a calm and steadfast sanctuary.
All is centred there: your fervour and your brightness and your movements assembling the flowers of your goodness; but all is drawn...Read more of this...

Garden Francies

by Robert Browning
 I. THE FLOWER'S NAME

Here's the garden she walked across,
Arm in my arm, such a short while since:
Hark, now I push its wicket, the moss
Hinders the hinges and makes them wince!
She must have reached this shrub ere she turned,
As back with that murmur the wicket swung;
For she laid the poor snail, my chance foot spurned,
To feed and forget it the...Read more of this...

When de Co'n Pone's Hot

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Dey is times in life when Nature
Seems to slip a cog an' go,
Jes' a-rattlin' down creation,
Lak an ocean's overflow;
When de worl' jes' stahts a-spinnin'
Lak a picaninny's top,
An' yo' cup o' joy is brimmin'
'Twell it seems about to slop,
An' you feel jes' lak a racah,
Dat is trainin' fu' to trot—
When yo' mammy says de blessin'
An' de co'n pone's hot.

When you set...Read more of this...

e Coin Behind Your Ear

by Connie Wanek
 Before you knew you owned it
it was gone, stolen, and you were a fool.
How you never felt it is the wonder,
heavy and thick,
lodged deep in your hair like a burr.
You still see the smile of the magician
as he turned the coin in his long fingers,
which had so disturbed your ear
with their caress. You watched him
lift it into the light,...Read more of this...

Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal

by Alfred Lord Tennyson
 Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font;
The firefly wakens, waken thou with me. 

Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me. 

Now lies the Earth all Danae to the stars, 
And all thy heart lies...Read more of this...

Taking His Chance

by Henry Lawson
 They stood by the door of the Inn on the Rise; 
May Carney looked up in the bushranger's eyes: 
`Oh! why did you come? -- it was mad of you, Jack; 
You know that the troopers are out on your track.' 
A laugh and a shake of his obstinate head -- 
`I wanted a dance, and I'll chance it,'...Read more of this...

I Shall Come Back

by Dorothy Parker
 I shall come back without fanfaronade
Of wailing wind and graveyard panoply;
But, trembling, slip from cool Eternity-
A mild and most bewildered little shade.
I shall not make sepulchral midnight raid,
But softly come where I had longed to be
In April twilight's unsung melody,
And I, not you, shall be the one afraid.

Strange, that from lovely dreamings of the dead
I shall come back to...Read more of this...

The Boston Athenaeum

by Amy Lowell
 Thou dear and well-loved haunt of happy hours,
How often in some distant gallery,
Gained by a little painful spiral stair,
Far from the halls and corridors where throng
The crowd of casual readers, have I passed
Long, peaceful hours seated on the floor
Of some retired nook, all lined with books,
Where reverie and quiet reign supreme!
Above, below, on every side, high shelved
From careless grasp...Read more of this...

An Epitaph On The Marchioness Of Winchester

by John Milton
 This rich Marble doth enterr
The honour'd Wife of Winchester,
A Vicounts daughter, an Earls heir,
Besides what her vertues fair
Added to her noble birth,
More then she could own from Earth.
Summers three times eight save one
She had told, alas too soon,
After so short time of breath,
To house with darknes, and with death. 
Yet had the number of her days
Bin as compleat as...Read more of this...

Purple Martins

by Carl Sandburg
 IF we were such and so, the same as these,
maybe we too would be slingers and sliders,
tumbling half over in the water mirrors,
tumbling half over at the horse heads of the sun,
tumbling our purple numbers.

Twirl on, you and your satin blue.
Be water birds, be air birds.
Be these purple tumblers you are.

 Dip and get away
From loops into slip-knots,
Write your...Read more of this...

For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid

by William Stafford
 There is a country to cross you will
find in the corner of your eye, in
the quick slip of your foot--air far
down, a snap that might have caught.
And maybe for you, for me, a high, passing
voice that finds its way by being
afraid. That country is there, for us,
carried as it is crossed. What you fear
will not go away: it will...Read more of this...

Now Returned Home

by Robinson Jeffers
 Beyond the narrows of the Inner Hebrides
We sailed the cold angry sea toward Barra, where Heaval mountain
Lifts like a mast. There were few people on the steamer, it was late in the
 year; I noticed most an old shepherd,
Two wise-eyed dogs wove anxious circles around his feet, and a thin-armed
 girl 
Who cherished what seemed a doll, wrapping it...Read more of this...

The Poplar

by Richard Aldington
 Why do you always stand there shivering 
Between the white stream and the road? 

The people pass through the dust 
On bicycles, in carts, in motor-cars; 
The waggoners go by at down; 
The lovers walk on the grass path at night. 

Stir from your roots, walk, poplar! 
You are more beautiful than they are. 

I know that the white...Read more of this...

My Soviet Passport

by Vladimir Mayakovsky
 I'd tear
 like a wolf
 at bureaucracy.
For mandates
 my respect's but the slightest.
To the devil himself
 I'd chuck without mercy
every red-taped paper.
 But this ...
Down the long front
 of coupés and cabins
File the officials
 politely.
They gather up passports
 and I give in
My own vermilion booklet.
For one kind of passport -
smiling lips part
For others -
 an attitude scornful.
They take
 with...Read more of this...

Respondez!

by Walt Whitman
 RESPONDEZ! Respondez! 
(The war is completed—the price is paid—the title is settled beyond recall;) 
Let every one answer! let those who sleep be waked! let none evade! 
Must we still go on with our affectations and sneaking? 
Let me bring this to a close—I pronounce openly for a new distribution of roles;
Let that which stood in front go behind!...Read more of this...

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