Famous Smoking Poems by Famous Poets

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

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To The Sound Of Violins

by Barry Tebb
 Give me life at its most garish

Friday night in the Square, pink sequins dazzle

And dance on clubbers bare to the midriff

Young men in crisp shirts and pressed pants

‘Dress code smart’ gyrate to ‘Sex Bomb, Sex Bomb’

And sing along its lyrics to the throng of which I’m one

My shorts, shoulder bag and white beard

Making me stand out in the teeming...Read more of this...

Hiawathas Departure

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 By the shore of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
At the doorway of his wigwam,
In the pleasant Summer morning,
Hiawatha stood and waited.
All the air was full of freshness,
All the earth was bright and joyous,
And before him, through the sunshine,
Westward toward the neighboring forest
Passed in golden swarms the Ahmo,
Passed the bees, the honey-makers,
Burning, singing In the sunshine.
Bright above him shone the...Read more of this...

The Smoking Frog

by Robert William Service
 Three men I saw beside a bar,
Regarding o'er their bottle,
A frog who smoked a rank cigar
They'd jammed within its throttle.

A Pasha frog it must have been
So big it as and bloated;
And from its lips the nicotine
In graceful festoon floated.

And while the trio jeered and joked,
As if it quite enjoyed it,
Impassively it smoked and smoked,
(It could now well avoid it).

A...Read more of this...

The Miracles

by Rudyard Kipling
 I sent a message to my dear --
 A thousand leagues and more to Her --
The dumb sea-levels thrilled to hear,
 And Lost Atlantis bore to Her.

Behind my message hard I came,
 And nigh had found a grave for me;
But that I launched of steel and flame
 Did war against the wave for me.

Uprose the deep, by gale on...Read more of this...

In the Smoking Car

by Richard Wilbur
 The eyelids meet. He'll catch a little nap. 
The grizzled, crew-cut head drops to his chest. 
It shakes above the briefcase on his lap. 
Close voices breathe, "Poor sweet, he did his best." 

"Poor sweet, poor sweet," the bird-hushed glades repeat, 
Through which in quiet pomp his litter goes, 
Carried by native girls with naked feet. 
A sighing stream...Read more of this...

The House Of Dust: Part 01: 07: Midnight; bells toll and along the cloud-high towers

by Conrad Aiken
 Midnight; bells toll, and along the cloud-high towers
The golden lights go out . . .
The yellow windows darken, the shades are drawn,
In thousands of rooms we sleep, we await the dawn,
We lie face down, we dream,
We cry aloud with terror, half rise, or seem
To stare at the ceiling or walls . . .
Midnight . . . the last of...Read more of this...

Phantasmagoria CANTO VI ( Dyscomfyture )

by Lewis Carroll
 As one who strives a hill to climb,
Who never climbed before:
Who finds it, in a little time,
Grow every moment less sublime,
And votes the thing a bore: 

Yet, having once begun to try,
Dares not desert his quest,
But, climbing, ever keeps his eye
On one small hut against the sky
Wherein he hopes to rest: 

Who climbs till nerve and force are spent,
With...Read more of this...

Letters To Friends

by Barry Tebb
 I


Eddie Linden

Dear Eddie we’ve not met

Except upon the written page 

And at your age the wonder 

Is that you write at all

When so many have gone under 

Or been split asunder by narcissistic humours

Blunder following blunder

Barker and Graham, godfathering my verse

Bearing me cloud-handed to Haworth moor

From my chained metropolitan moorings,

O hyaline March morning with Leeds

At its thrusting best, the...Read more of this...

Hymn 125

by Isaac Watts
 Christ's compassion to the weak and tempted.

Heb. 4:15,16; 5:7; Matt. 12:20. 

With joy we meditate the grace
Of our High Priest above;
His heart is made of tenderness,
His bowels melt with love.

Touched with a sympathy within,
He knows our feeble frame;
He knows what sore temptations mean,
For he has felt the same.

But spotless, innocent, and pure,
The great Redeemer stood,
While Satan's fiery darts he...Read more of this...

Cooney Potter

by Edgar Lee Masters
 I inherited forty acres from my Father
And, by working my wife, my two sons and two daughters
From dawn to dusk, I acquired
A thousand acres. But not content,
Wishing to own two thousand acres,
I bustled through the years with axe and plow,
Toiling, denying myself, my wife, my sons, my daughters.
Squire Higbee wrongs me to say
That I died from smoking Red Eagle...Read more of this...

The Man Of Bombay

by Mother Goose
There was a fat man of Bombay,
Who was smoking one sunshiny day;
    When a bird called a snipe
    Flew away with his pipe,
Which vexed the fat man of Bombay....Read more of this...

A Hundred Collars

by Robert Frost
 Lancaster bore him--such a little town, 
Such a great man. It doesn't see him often 
Of late years, though he keeps the old homestead 
And sends the children down there with their mother 
To run wild in the summer--a little wild. 
Sometimes he joins them for a day or two 
And sees old friends he somehow can't get near....Read more of this...

Bavarian Gentians

by D. H. Lawrence
 Not every man has gentians in his house
in Soft September, at slow, Sad Michaelmas.

Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the daytime torchlike with the smoking blueness of Pluto's
 gloom,
ribbed and torchlike, with their blaze of darkness spread blue
down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day
torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto's dark-blue daze,
black lamps from the...Read more of this...

A Panegyric To Sir Lewis Pemberton

by Robert Herrick
 Till I shall come again, let this suffice,
I send my salt, my sacrifice
To thee, thy lady, younglings, and as far
As to thy Genius and thy Lar;
To the worn threshold, porch, hall, parlour, kitchen,
The fat-fed smoking temple, which in
The wholesome savour of thy mighty chines,
Invites to supper him who dines:
Where laden spits, warp'd with large ribs of beef,
Not represent, but...Read more of this...

Jack Dunn of Nevertire

by Henry Lawson
 It chanced upon the very day we'd got the shearing done, 
A buggy brought a stranger to the West-o'-Sunday Run; 
He had a round and jolly face, and he was sleek and stout, 
He drove right up between the huts and called the super out. 
We chaps were smoking after tea, and heard the swell enquire 
For one as...Read more of this...

The Town Between the Hills

by Katherine Mansfield
 The further the little girl leaped and ran,
The further she longed to be;
The white, white fields of jonquil flowers
Danced up as high as her knee
And flashed and sparkled before her eyes
Until she could hardly see.
So into the wood went she.

It was quiet in the wood,
It was solemn and grave;
A sound like a wave
Sighed in the tree-tops
And then sighed no...Read more of this...

In The New Sun

by Philip Levine
 Filaments of light 
slant like windswept rain. 
The orange seller hawks 
into the sky, a man with a hat 
stops below my window 
and shakes his tassels. 
 Awake 
in Tetuan, the room filling 
with the first colors, and water running 
in a tub. 

* 

A row of sparkling carp 
iced in the new sun, odor 
of first love,...Read more of this...

Dreams

by Lisa Zaran
 It is later than late, 
the simmered down darkness 
of the jukebox hour. 

The hour of drunkenness 
and cigarettes. 
The fools hour. 

In my dreams, 
I still smoke, cigarette after cigarette. 
It's okay, I'm dreaming. 
In dreams, smoking can't kill me. 

It's warm outside. 
I have every window open. 
There's no such thing as danger, 
only the dangerous face...Read more of this...

Luck

by Charles Bukowski
 once
we were young
at this
machine. . .
drinking
smoking
typing
it was a most 
splendid
miraculous
time
still
is
only now
instead of
moving toward
time
it 
moves toward 
us
makes each word 
drill 
into the
paper
clear
fast
hard
feeding a
closing
space....Read more of this...

Rain In Summer

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 How beautiful is the rain!
After the dust and heat,
In the broad and fiery street,
In the narrow lane,
How beautiful is the rain!

How it clatters along the roofs,
Like the tramp of hoofs
How it gushes and struggles out
From the throat of the overflowing spout!

Across the window-pane
It pours and pours;
And swift and wide,
With a muddy tide,
Like a river down the gutter roars
The rain,...Read more of this...

Candles

by Constantine P Cavafy
 The days of our future stand in front of us
like a row of little lit candles --
golden, warm, and lively little candles.

The days past remain behind us,
a mournful line of extinguished candles;
the ones nearest are still smoking,
cold candles, melted, and bent.

I do not want to look at them; their form saddens me,
and it saddens me to recall their first...Read more of this...

We Aint Got No Money Honey But We Got Rain

by Charles Bukowski
 call it the greenhouse effect or whatever
but it just doesn't rain like it used to.
I particularly remember the rains of the 
depression era.
there wasn't any money but there was
plenty of rain.
it wouldn't rain for just a night or
a day,
it would RAIN for 7 days and 7
nights
and in Los Angeles the storm drains
weren't built to carry off taht much
water
and the...Read more of this...

The Rape of the Lock: Canto 3

by Alexander Pope
 Close by those meads, for ever crown'd with flow'rs, 
Where Thames with pride surveys his rising tow'rs,
There stands a structure of majestic frame,
Which from the neighb'ring Hampton takes its name.
Here Britain's statesmen oft the fall foredoom
Of foreign tyrants and of nymphs at home;
Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes counsel take--and sometimes tea.
Hither the heroes and the...Read more of this...

Katie Drummond

by Robert William Service
 My Louis loved me oh so well
 And spiered me for his wife;
He would have haled me from the hell
 That was my bawdy life:
The mother of his bairns to be,
 Daftlike he saw in me.

But I, a hizzie of the town
 Just telt him we must part;
Loving too well to drag him down
 I tore him from my...Read more of this...

The Cinnamon Peeler

by Michael Ondaatje
 If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
And leave the yellow bark dust
On your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
You could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbour to you hair
or the...Read more of this...

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