Famous Sneak Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Sneak poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous sneak poems. These examples illustrate what a famous sneak poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Henry Lawson
While you use your best endeavour to immortalise in verse
The gambling and the drink which are your country's greatest curse,
While you glorify the bully and take the spieler's part --
You're a clever southern writer, scarce inferior to Bret Harte.
If you sing of waving grasses when the plains are dry as bricks,
And discover shining rivers...Read more of this...
by
Mihai Eminescu
With the curtains drawn together,
At my table of rough wood,
And the firelight flickering softly,
Do I fall to thoughtful mood.
Flocks and flocks of sweet illusions,
Memories the mind recalls,
And they softly creep like crickets
Through time's grey and crumbled walls;
Or they drop with gentle patter
On the pavement of the soul,
As does wax...Read more of this...
by
Marge Piercy
And thus the people every year
in the valley of humid July
did sacrifice themselves
to the long green phallic god
and eat and eat and eat.
They're coming, they're on us,
the long striped gourds, the silky
babies, the hairy adolescents,
the lumpy vast adults
like the trunks of green elephants.
Recite fifty zucchini recipes!
Zucchini tempura; creamed...Read more of this...
by
Vachel Lindsay
I. THEIR BASIC SAVAGERY
Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,
Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable,
Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table,
A deep rolling bass.
Pounded on the table,
Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom,
Hard as they were able,
Boom, boom, BOOM,
With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom,
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM.
THEN I had religion, THEN...Read more of this...
by
William Topaz McGonagall
Kind Christians, pray list to me,
And I'll relate a sad story,
Concerning a little blind girl, only nine years of age,
Who lived with her father in a lonely cottage.
Poor girl, she had never seen the blessed light of day,
Nor the beautiful fields of corn and hay,
Nor the sparrows, that lifted their heads at early morn
To bright Sol that does...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
She lay like a saint on her copper couch;
Like an angel asleep she lay,
In the stare of the ghoulish folks that slouch
Past the Dead and sneak away.
Then came old Jules of the sightless gaze,
Who begged in the streets for bread.
Each day he had come for a year of days,
And groped his way to the Dead.
"What's...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
'A man should write to please himself,'
He proudly said.
Well, see his poems on the shelf,
Dusty, unread.
When he came to my shop each day,
So peaked and cold,
I'd sneak one of his books away
And say 'twas sold.
And then by chance he looked below,
And saw a stack
Of his own work,--speechless with woe
He came not back.
I hate...Read more of this...
by
Erica Jong
Sometimes the poem
doesn't want to come;
it hides from the poet
like a playful cat
who has run
under the house
& lurks among slugs,
roots, spiders' eyes,
ledge so long out of the sun
that it is dank
with the breath of the Troll King.
Sometimes the poem
darts away
like a coy lover
who is afraid of being possessed,
of feeling too much,
of losing his essential
loneliness-which he calls
freedom.
Sometimes the...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
I own a gorgeous Cadillac,
A chauffeur garbed in blue;
And as I sit behind his back
His beefy neck I view.
Yet let me whisper, though you may
Think me a ***** old cuss,
From Claude I often sneak away
To board a bus.
A democrat, I love the crowd,
The bustle and the din;
The market wives who gab aloud
As they...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
If I could practise what I preach,
Of fellows there would few be finer;
If I were true to what I teach
My life would be a lot diviner.
If I would act the way I speak,
Of halo I might be a winner:
The spirit wills, the flesh is weak,--
I'm just a simple sinner.
Six days I stray,--on number seven
I try to be a...Read more of this...
by
Katharine Tynan
Here in the garden-bed,
Hoeing the celery,
Wonders the Lord has made
Pass ever before me.
I see the young birds build,
And swallows come and go,
And summer grow and gild,
And winter die in snow.
Many a thing I note,
And store it in my mind,
For all my ragged coat
That scarce will stop the wind.
I light...Read more of this...
by
David St John
It was in the old days,
When she used to hang out at a place
Called Club Zombie,
A black cabaret that the police liked
To raid now and then. As she
Stepped through the door, the light
Would hit her platinum hair,
And believe me, heads would turn. Maestro
Loved it; he'd have her by
The arm as he led us through the packed crowd
To a private...Read more of this...
by
Siegfried Sassoon
I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.
In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who...Read more of this...
by
Guillaume Apollinaire
ZONE
In the end you are tired of this ancient world
Shepherd oh Eiffel Tower the herd of bridges is bleating this morning
You've had enough of living in Greek and Roman antiquity
Here even the cars look antique
Only religion has stayed new religion
Has stayed simple like the hangars at Port-Aviation
You alone in Europe are not ancient...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
It's cruel cold on the water-front, silent and dark and drear;
Only the black tide weltering, only the hissing snow;
And I, alone, like a storm-tossed wreck, on this night of the glad New Year,
Shuffling along in the icy wind, ghastly and gaunt and slow.
They're playing a tune in McGuffy's saloon, and it's cheery and bright in there
(God!...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
I
Let others sing of gold and gear, the joy of being rich;
But oh, the days when I was poor, a vagrant in a ditch!
When every dawn was like a gem, so radiant and rare,
And I had but a single coat, and not a single care;
When I would feast right royally on bacon, bread and beer,
And dig into a stack...Read more of this...
by
Henry Lawson
The world is narrow and ways are short, and our lives are dull and slow,
For little is new where the crowds resort, and less where the wanderers go;
Greater, or smaller, the same old things we see by the dull road-side --
And tired of all is the spirit that sings
of the days when the world was...Read more of this...
by
Ellis Parker Butler
Captain O’Hare was a mariner brave;
He refused to abandon his ship;
A hero, he sleeps in a watery grave—
And his widow is now Mrs. Bipp,
Haw! Haw!
His widow is now Mrs. Bipp!
Henri Dupont was a fearless young ace;
Five thousand feet up he was hit;
Each year on his grave pretty flowers we place—
And his widow is now Mrs. Schmitt,
Haw! Haw!
His...Read more of this...
by
Allen Ginsberg
Lento
You'll bare your bones you'll grow you'll pray you'll only know
When the light appears, boy, when the light appears
You'll sing & you'll love you'll praise blue heavens above
When the light appears, boy, when the light appears
You'll whimper & you'll cry you'll get yourself sick and sigh
You'll sleep & you'll dream you'll only know what you mean
When the light appears,...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
You talk o' prayer an' such -
Well, I jest don't know how;
I guess I got as much
Religion as a cow.
I fight an' drink an' swear;
Red hell I often raise,
But never said a prayer
In all my days.
I'm honest, right enough;
Don't take no stock in crimes;
I'm jest a dockside tough,
An' yet . . . an' yet sometimes,
If I should happen...Read more of this...
by
Du Fu
Dusk stay at stone moat village Be official night capture people Old man over wall escape Old woman out door look Official shout with what anger Woman cry with what grief Hear woman forward send words Three sons Ye city defend One son send letter to Two sons newly battle dead Survive one for now sneak life...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Lee Masters
To be able to see every side of every question;
To be on every side, to be everything, to be nothing long;
To pervert truth, to ride it for a purpose,
To use great feelings and passions of the human family
For base designs, for cunning ends,
To wear a mask like the Greek actors --
Your eight-page paper -- behind which you huddle,
Bawling through...Read more of this...
by
Eugene Field
Speakin' of dorgs, my bench-legged fyce
Hed most o' the virtues, an' nary a vice.
Some folks called him Sooner, a name that arose
From his predisposition to chronic repose;
But, rouse his ambition, he couldn't be beat -
Yer bet yer he got thar on all his four feet!
Mos' dorgs hez some forte - like huntin' an' such,
But the sports o' the field...Read more of this...
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