Famous Soda Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Mayakovsky In New York: A Found Poem

by Annie Dillard
 New York: You take a train that rips through versts.
It feels as if the trains were running over your ears.

For many hours the train flies along the banks
of the Hudson about two feet from the water. At the stops,
passengers run out, buy up bunches of celery,
and run back in, chewing the stalks as they go.

Bridges leap over the train...Read more of this...

Biography In The First Person

by Stephen Dunn
 This is not the way I am.
Really, I am much taller in person,
the hairline I conceal reaches back
to my grandfather, and the shyness my wife
will not believe in has always been why
I was bold on first dates. My father a crack salesman.
I've saved his pines, the small acclamations
I used to show my friends. And the billyclub
I keep by my...Read more of this...

Executive

by John Betjeman
 I am a young executive. No cuffs than mine are cleaner;
I have a Slimline brief-case and I use the firm's Cortina.
In every roadside hostelry from here to Burgess Hill
The ma?tres d'h?tel all know me well, and let me sign the bill.

You ask me what it is I do. Well, actually, you know,
I'm partly a liaison man, and partly P.R.O.
Essentially,...Read more of this...

Band Concert

by Carl Sandburg
 BAND concert public square Nebraska city. Flowing and circling dresses, summer-white dresses. Faces, flesh tints flung like sprays of cherry blossoms. And gigglers, God knows, gigglers, rivaling the pony whinnies of the Livery Stable Blues.

Cowboy rags and ****** rags. And boys driving sorrel horses hurl a cornfield laughter at the girls in dresses, summer-white dresses. Amid the cornet staccato...Read more of this...

A Servant to Servants

by Robert Frost
 I didn't make you know how glad I was 
To have you come and camp here on our land. 
I promised myself to get down some day 
And see the way you lived, but I don't know! 
With a houseful of hungry men to feed 
I guess you'd find.... It seems to me 
I can't express my feelings any...Read more of this...

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

by Anne Sexton
 No matter what life you lead
the virgin is a lovely number:
cheeks as fragile as cigarette paper,
arms and legs made of Limoges,
lips like Vin Du Rhône,
rolling her china-blue doll eyes
open and shut.
Open to say, 
Good Day Mama,
and shut for the thrust
of the unicorn.
She is unsoiled.
She is as white as a bonefish.

Once there was a lovely virgin
called Snow White.
Say she was...Read more of this...

The End Of March

by Elizabeth Bishop
 For John Malcolm Brinnin and Bill Read: Duxbury


It was cold and windy, scarcely the day 
to take a walk on that long beach 
Everything was withdrawn as far as possible, 
indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken, 
seabirds in ones or twos. 
The rackety, icy, offshore wind 
numbed our faces on one side; 
disrupted the formation 
of a...Read more of this...

Bear In There

by Shel Silverstein
 There's a Polar Bear
In our Frigidaire--
He likes it 'cause it's cold in there.
With his seat in the meat
And his face in the fish
And his big hairy paws
In the buttery dish,
He's nibbling the noodles,
He's munching the rice,
He's slurping the soda,
He's licking the ice.
And he lets out a roar
If you open the door.
And it gives me a scare
To know he's in...Read more of this...

The Lost Drink

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 I had spent the night in the watch-house -- 
My head was the size of three -- 
So I went and asked the chemist 
To fix up a drink for me; 
And he brewed it from various bottles 
With soda and plenty of ice, 
With something that smelt like lemon, 
And something that seemed like spice. 
It fell on...Read more of this...

The Song of Right and Wrong

by G K Chesterton
 Feast on wine or fast on water 
And your honour shall stand sure, 
God Almighty's son and daughter 
He the valiant, she the pure; 
If an angel out of heaven 
Brings you other things to drink, 
Thank him for his kind attentions, 
Go and pour them down the sink. 

Tea is like the East he grows in, 
A great...Read more of this...

You Can Have It

by Philip Levine
 My brother comes home from work 
and climbs the stairs to our room. 
I can hear the bed groan and his shoes drop 
one by one. You can have it, he says. 

The moonlight streams in the window 
and his unshaven face is whitened 
like the face of the moon. He will sleep 
long after noon and waken to...Read more of this...

Baby Vamps

by Carl Sandburg
 BABY vamps, is it harder work than it used to be?
Are the new soda parlors worse than the old time saloons?
 Baby vamps, do you have jobs in the day time or is this all you do? do you come out only at night?
In the winter at the skating rinks, in the summer at the roller coaster parks,
Wherever figure...Read more of this...

A Memory At Sixty

by Barry Tebb
 They have vanished, the pop men with their varnished crates

Of Tizer and dandy, American ice-cream soda and one percent shandy.

The clunk of frothy quarts dumped on donkey-stoned doorsteps

Is heard no more, nor the neighs of restless mares between the shafts.

The shining brass of harness hangs in bar-rooms or droops

From imitation beams.



Gelded stallions no longer chomp and champ

In stalls beneath...Read more of this...

Winter Complaint

by Ogden Nash
 Now when I have a cold
I am careful with my cold, 
I consult a physician 
And I do as I am told. 
I muffle up my torso 
In woolly woolly garb, 
And I quaff great flagons 
Of sodium bicarb. 
I munch on aspirin, 
I lunch on water, 
And I wouldn’t dream of osculating
Anybody’s daughter, 
And to anybody’s son 
I...Read more of this...

Gregory Corso

by Gregory Corso
 Budger of history Brake of time You Bomb
 Toy of universe Grandest of all snatched sky I cannot hate you
 Do I hate the mischievous thunderbolt the jawbone of an ass
 The bumpy club of One Million B.C. the mace the flail the axe
 Catapult Da Vinci tomahawk Cochise flintlock Kidd dagger Rathbone
 Ah and the sad desparate gun...Read more of this...

Far Rockaway

by Delmore Schwartz
 "the cure of souls." Henry James


The radiant soda of the seashore fashions
Fun, foam and freedom. The sea laves
The Shaven sand. And the light sways forward
On self-destroying waves. 

The rigor of the weekday is cast aside with shoes,
With business suits and traffic's motion;
The lolling man lies with the passionate sun,
Or is drunken in the ocean. 

A socialist health take should...Read more of this...

The Fire Sermon

by T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
  The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
  Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
  Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
  Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
  The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
  Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
  Or...Read more of this...

Americanisation

by G K Chesterton
 Britannia needs no Boulevards,
No spaces wide and gay:
Her march was through the crooked streets
Along the narrow way.
Nor looks she where, New York's seduction,
The Broadway leadeth to destruction.

Britannia needs no Cafes:
If Coffee needs must be,
Its place should be the Coffee-house
Where Johnson growled for Tea;
But who can hear that human mountain
Growl for an ice-cream soda-fountain?

She needs no Russian Theatrey
Mere Father strangles...Read more of this...

The Fury Of Sundays

by Anne Sexton
 Moist, moist, 
the heat leaking through the hinges, 
sun baking the roof like a pie 
and I and thou and she 
eating, working, sweating, 
droned up on the heat. 
The sun as read as the cop car siren. 
The sun as red as the algebra marks. 
The sun as red as two electric eyeballs. 
She wanting to take a...Read more of this...

I would to heaven that I were so much clay

by George (Lord) Byron
 I would to heaven that I were so much clay,
As I am blood, bone, marrow, passion, feeling -
Because at least the past were passed away -
And for the future - (but I write this reeling,
Having got drunk exceedingly today,
So that I seem to stand upon the ceiling)
I say - the future is a serious matter - 
And so -...Read more of this...

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