Famous Sort It Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Sort It poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous sort it poems. These examples illustrate what a famous sort it poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Edwin Arlington Robinson
“Do I hear them? Yes, I hear the children singing—and what of it?
Have you come with eyes afire to find me now and ask me that?
If I were not their father and if you were not their mother,
We might believe they made a noise…. What are you—driving at!”
“Well, be glad that you can hear them,...Read more of this...
by
William Butler Yeats
I. Ribh at the Tomb of Baile and Aillinn
Because you have found me in the pitch-dark night
With open book you ask me what I do.
Mark and digest my tale, carry it afar
To those that never saw this tonsured head
Nor heard this voice that ninety years have cracked.
Of Baile and Aillinn you need not speak,
All know their tale, all know...Read more of this...
by
Alan Alexander (A A) Milne
There are lions and roaring tigers,
and enormous camels and things,
There are biffalo-buffalo-bisons,
and a great big bear with wings.
There's a sort of a tiny potamus,
and a tiny nosserus too -
But I gave buns to the elephant
when I went down to the Zoo!
There are badgers and bidgers and bodgers,
and a Super-in-tendent's House,
There are masses of goats, and a Polar,
and different kinds of...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
'Twas just this time, last year, I died.
I know I heard the Corn,
When I was carried by the Farms --
It had the Tassels on --
I thought how yellow it would look --
When Richard went to mill --
And then, I wanted to get out,
But something held my will.
I thought just how Red -- Apples wedged
The Stubble's joints between --
And the...Read more of this...
by
Sylvia Plath
Touch it: it won't shrink like an eyeball,
This egg-shaped bailiwick, clear as a tear.
Here's yesterday, last year ---
Palm-spear and lily distinct as flora in the vast
Windless threadwork of a tapestry.
Flick the glass with your fingernail:
It will ping like a Chinese chime in the slightest air stir
Though nobody in there looks up or bothers to answer.
The inhabitants are light as...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
Lord, let me live, that more and more
Your wonder world I may adore;
With every dawn to grow and grow
Alive to graciousness aglow;
And every eve in beauty see
Reason for rhapsody.
Lord, let me bide, that I may prove
The buoyant brightness of my love
For sapphire sea and lyric sky
And buttercup and butterfly;
And glory in the golden thought
...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
Rg Gregory
professor piebald
(the oldest man in the home) was meek
at the same time ribald
he clothed his matter (so to speak)
in latin and (was it) greek
it caused no great offence
to nobody did it make sense
to make a rude joke
in languages nobody spoke
once he'd changed the word agenda
at a home's committee meeting to pudenda
this sort of thing was tolerated by the other
inmates...Read more of this...
by
William Cowper
A poet's cat, sedate and grave
As poet well could wish to have,
Was much addicted to inquire
For nooks to which she might retire,
And where, secure as mouse in chink,
She might repose, or sit and think.
I know not where she caught the trick--
Nature perhaps herself had cast her
In such a mould [lang f]philosophique[lang e],
Or else she learn'd it of her master.
Sometimes...Read more of this...
by
Sophie Hannah
Where they have been, if they have been away,
or what they've done at home, if they have not -
you make them write about the holiday.
One writes My Dad did. What? Your Dad did what?
That's not a sentence. Never mind the bell.
We stay behind until the work is done.
You count their words (you who can count and spell);
all the assignments...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
I'm goin' 'ome to Blighty -- ain't I glad to 'ave the chance!
I'm loaded up wiv fightin', and I've 'ad my fill o' France;
I'm feelin' so excited-like, I want to sing and dance,
For I'm goin' 'ome to Blighty in the mawnin'.
I'm goin' 'ome to Blighty: can you wonder as I'm gay?
I've got a wound I wouldn't sell for...Read more of this...
by
Philip Larkin
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.
Up to then there'd only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.
Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
Army Reform-.After Boer war "The Army of a Dream"-Traffics and Discoveries.
Know this, my brethren, Heaven is clear
And all the clouds are gone--
The Proper Sort shall flourish now,
Good times are coming on"--
The evil that was threatened late
To all of our degree
Hath passed in discord and debate,
And,Hey then up go we!
A common people strove in vain
To...Read more of this...
by
Andrew Barton Paterson
I’M travellin’ down the Castlereagh, and I’m a station hand,
I’m handy with the ropin’ pole, I’m handy with the brand,
And I can ride a rowdy colt, or swing the axe all day,
But there’s no demand for a station-hand along the Castlereagh. +
So it’s shift, boys, shift, for there isn’t the slightest doubt
That we’ve got...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
Joyce Kilmer
(For Robert Cortez Holliday)
If I should live in a forest
And sleep underneath a tree,
No grove of impudent saplings
Would make a home for me.
I'd go where the old oaks gather,
Serene and good and strong,
And they would not sigh and tremble
And vex me with a song.
The pleasantest sort of poet
Is the poet who's old and wise,
With an old white beard and...Read more of this...
by
Marianne Moore
If external action is effete
and rhyme is outmoded,
I shall revert to you,
Habakkuk, as when in a Bible class
the teacher was speaking of unrhymed verse.
He said - and I think I repeat his exact words -
"Hebrew poetry is prose
with a sort of heightened consciousness." Ecstasy affords
the occasion and expediency determines the form....Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
In reverent sort to mosque I wend my way,
But, by great Allah, it is not to pray;
No! but to steal a prayer-mat! When 'tis worn,
I go again, another to purvey....Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
It would never be Common -- more -- I said --
Difference -- had begun --
Many a bitterness -- had been --
But that old sort -- was done --
Or -- if it sometime -- showed -- as 'twill --
Upon the Downiest -- Morn --
Such bliss -- had I -- for all the years --
'Twould give an Easier -- pain --
I'd...Read more of this...
by
William Topaz McGonagall
'Twas in the year of 1886, and on the 29th of November,
Which the surviving crew of the "Samuel Crawford" will long remember,
She was bound to Baltimore with a cargo of pine lumber;
But, alas! the crew suffered greatly from cold and hunger.
'Twas on December 3rd when about ten miles south-west
Of Currituck light, and scudding at her best;
That a heavy...Read more of this...
by
Paul Laurence Dunbar
I don't believe in 'ristercrats
An' never did, you see;
The plain ol' homelike sorter folks
Is good enough fur me.
O' course, I don't desire a man
To be too tarnal rough,
But then, I think all folks should know
When they air nice enough.
Now there is folks in this here world,
From peasant up to king,
Who want to be so awful nice
They overdo the thing.
That's jest...Read more of this...
by
William Carlos (WCW) Williams
Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.
—through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks....Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
1891
There were thirty million English who talked of England's might,
There were twenty broken troopers who lacked a bed for the night.
They had neither food nor money, they had neither service nor trade;
They were only shiftless soldiers, the last of the Light Brigade.
They felt that life was fleeting; they kuew not that art was long,
That though they were dying of...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Hardy
By Corporal Tullidge. See "The Trumpet-Major"
In Memory of S. C. (Pensioner). Died 184-
WE trenched, we trumpeted and drummed,
And from our mortars tons of iron hummed
Ath'art the ditch, the month we bombed
The Town o' Valencie?n.
'Twas in the June o' Ninety-dree
(The Duke o' Yark our then Commander be?n)
The German Legion, Guards, and we
Laid siege to Valencie?n.
This was the first time in...Read more of this...
by
D. H. Lawrence
Her tawny eyes are onyx of thoughtlessness,
Hardened they are like gems in ancient modesty;
Yea, and her mouth’s prudent and crude caress
Means even less than her many words to me.
Though her kiss betrays me also this, this only
Consolation, that in her lips her blood at climax clips
Two wild, dumb paws in anguish on the lonely
Fruit...Read more of this...
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