Famous Spending Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Spending poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous spending poems. These examples illustrate what a famous spending poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Davies, William Henry
...hings glad and beautiful.
My pockets nothing hold,
But he that owns the gold,
The Sun, is my great friend--
His spending has no end.
Hail to the morning sky,
Which bright clouds measure high;
Hail to you birds whose throats
Would number leaves by notes;
Hail to you shady bowers,
And you green field of flowers.
Hail to you women fair,
That make a show so rare
In cloth as white as milk--
Be't calico or silk:
Good morning, Life--and all
Things glad ...Read more of this...
by
Aiken, Conrad
...All lovely things will have an ending,
All lovely things will fade and die,
And youth, that's now so bravely spending,
Will beg a penny by and by.
Fine ladies soon are all forgotten,
And goldenrod is dust when dead,
The sweetest flesh and flowers are rotten
And cobwebs tent the brightest head.
Come back, true love! Sweet youth, return!—
But time goes on, and will, unheeding,
Though hands will reach, and eyes will yearn,
And the wild days set true he...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...vers, lakes, bays, embouchure in him,
Mississippi with yearly freshets and changing chutes—Columbia, Niagara, Hudson,
spending
themselves lovingly in him,
If the Atlantic coast stretch, or the Pacific coast stretch, he stretching with them north
or
south,
Spanning between them, east and west, and touching whatever is between them,
Growths growing from him to offset the growth of pine, cedar, hemlock, live-oak, locust,
chestnut, hickory, cottonwood, orange, magnolia,
...Read more of this...
by
Berry, Wendell
...elds of the bottomlands,
slow and preoccupied as stars. In this world
men are making plans, wearing themselves out,
spending their lives, in order to kill each other....Read more of this...
by
Nash, Ogden
...don't mind if you only tip them a dime,
Because it's very funny
But somehow if you're rich enough you can get away with spending
water like money
While if you're not rich you can spend in one evening your salary for
the year
And everybody will just stand around and jeer.
If you are rich you don't have to think twice about buying a judge or a
horse,
Or a lower instead of an upper, or a new suit, or a divorce,
And you never have to say When,
And you can sleep every morning ...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...the country.
This is part of my history in the Challis National Forest.
We came over through Lowman after spending a little time
with my woman's Mormon relatives at McCall where we
learned about Spirit Prison and couldn't find Duck Lake.
I carried the baby up the mountain. The sign said 1 1/2
miles. There was a green sports car parked on the road.
We walked up the trail until we met a man with a green
sports car hat on and a girl in a ligh...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
.... " Things
like this make us laugh.
The woman who owns this cabin will come back in the aut-
umn. She's spending the summer in Europe. When she comes
back, she will spend only one day a week out here: Saturday.
She will never spend the night because she's afraid to. There
is something here that makes her afraid.
Pard and his girlfriend sleep in the cabin and the baby
sleeps in the basement, and we sleep outside under the
apple tree, ...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...h them week in and week out.
What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me;
Me going in for my chances, spending for vast returns;
Adorning myself to bestow myself on the first that will take me;
Not asking the sky to come down to my good will;
Scattering it freely forever.
15
The pure contralto sings in the organ loft;
The carpenter dresses his plank—the tongue of his foreplane whistles its
wild ascending lisp;
The married and unmarried ch...Read more of this...
by
Matthew, John
...crawl
The morning paper is still unread.
You who sleep standing
Don’t drool on his shirt
It will cost him a lot of spending
If you pour on him all your dirt.
Plastic bags, umbrellas, Tiffin
The rack is full and the seats overflow
What is that smell Peter Griffin?
Is it the Sewri sewers overflowing?
Beware of pickers of pockets
Who surround and slash with knife
Careful of your arm’s sockets
Lest they dislocate and misery make life.
Welcome to Bombay’s bustling ...Read more of this...
by
Edgar, Marriott
...ived in the deep end,
And thought nothing of swimming a length.
So they wrote him, C/o Workhouse Master,
Joe were spending the summer with him,
And promised him two Christmas puddings
If over the Channel he'd swim.
Joe jumped into t' breach like an 'ero,
He said, "All their fears I'll relieve,
And it isn't their puddings I'm after,
As I told them last Christmas Eve.
"Though many have tackled the Channel
From Grisnez to Dover that is,
For the honour and glory...Read more of this...
by
Jeffers, Robinson
...The heroic stars spending themselves,
Coining their very flesh into bullets for the lost battle,
They must burn out at length like used candles;
And Mother Night will weep in her triumph, taking home her heroes.
There is the stuff for an epic poem--
This magnificent raid at the heart of darkness, this lost battle--
We don't know enough, we'll never know.
Oh happy Hom...Read more of this...
by
Bradstreet, Anne
...I did arrive;
2.10 My mother still did waste, as I did thrive,
2.11 Who yet with love and all alacity,
2.12 Spending was willing to be spent for me.
2.13 With wayward cries, I did disturb her rest,
2.14 Who sought still to appease me with her breast;
2.15 With weary arms, she danc'd, and By, By, sung,
2.16 When wretched I (ungrate) had done the wrong.
2.17 When Infancy was past, my Childishness
2.18 Did act all folly that it could e...Read more of this...
by
Raleigh, Sir Walter
...only hate:
And if they once reply,
Then give them all the lie.
Tell them that brave it most,
They beg for more by spending,
Who, in their greatest cost,
Seek nothing but commending.
And if they make reply,
Then give them all the lie.
Tell zeal it wants devotion;
Tell love it is but lust;
Tell time it is but motion;
Tell flesh it is but dust:
And wish them not reply,
For thou must give the lie.
Tell age it daily wasteth;
Tell honour how it alters;
Tell beau...Read more of this...
by
Gibran, Kahlil
...abundantly, until the sequence of the wine began to play its part. At dawn the throng dispersed boisterously, after spending a long night of intoxication and gluttony which hurried their worn bodies into their deep beds with unnatural sleep.
Part Two
At eventide, a man attired in the dress of heavy work stood before the door of his small house and knocked at the door. As it opened, he entered and greeted the occupants in a cheerful manner, and then sat betwe...Read more of this...
by
Crashaw, Richard
...HAIL, sister springs,
Parents of silver-footed rills!
Ever bubbling things,
Thawing crystal, snowy hills!
Still spending, never spent; I mean
Thy fair eyes, sweet Magdalene.
Heavens thy fair eyes be;
Heavens of ever-falling stars;
'Tis seed-time still with thee,
And stars thou sow'st whose harvest dares
Promise the earth to countershine
Whatever makes Heaven's forehead fine.
Every morn from hence
A brisk cherub something sips
Whose soft influence
Adds...Read more of this...
by
Hesse, Hermann
...ring along, with a gun in your fist,
Smiling, whispering, to your exhausted horse.
Maybe--I keep imagining--you are spending the night
As a guest in a strange castle with a park
And writing a letter by candlelight, and tapping
On the piano keys by the window,
Groping for a sound...
--And maybe
You are already silent, already dead, and the day
Will shine no longer into your beloved
Serious eyes, and your beloved brown hand hangs wilted,
And your white forehead...Read more of this...
by
Gregory, Rg
...
high art is a fraud - a provider of pap
for suckers happy to give up their own
longings to beauty in a cellophane wrap
spending their rights for a rich illusion
people demean themselves before a throne
but sooner or later have to let the sap
earthed in them rise to a new extrusion
art's not in the show (a lovely touch of clap)
but in the tough fusion of blood and bone
dreams may be soured in the drab confusion
but everywhere's the making of a map
charting today's unimagina...Read more of this...
by
Frost, Robert
..., and unsafe in darkness;
When they were halted by a tumbled wall
With barbed-wire binding. They stood facing this,
Spending what onward impulse they still had
In One last look the way they must not go,
On up the failing path, where, if a stone
Or earthslide moved at night, it moved itself;
No footstep moved it. 'This is all,' they sighed,
Good-night to woods.' But not so; there was more.
A doe from round a spruce stood looking at them
Across the wall, as near...Read more of this...
by
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
...od and sea and firmament;
Through light, through life, it forward flows.
I see the inundation sweet,
I hear the spending of the steam
Through years, through men, through Nature fleet,
Through love and thought, through power and dream.
Musketaquit, a goblin strong,
Of shard and flint makes jewels gay;
They lose their grief who hear his song,
And where he winds is the day of day.
So forth and brighter fares my stream,--
Who drink it shall not thirst ag...Read more of this...
by
Piercy, Marge
...like plankton.
If you turn over the old refuse
of sexual slang, the worn buttons
of language, you find men
talk of spending and women
of dying.
You come in a torrent and ease
into limpness. Pleasure takes me
farther and farther from the shore
in a series of breakers, each
towering higher before it
crashes and spills flat.
I am open then as a palm held out,
open as a sunflower, without
crust, without shelter, without
skin, hideless and unhidden.
How can...Read more of this...
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