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Famous Squeezed Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Voznesensky, Andrei
...tlessly like owls 
 at night, along with plants and trees. 

 They're cool and crooked, resembling bills, 
 they're squeezed in doors, 
 get hurt by boxers, 
 however, our neighbour's noses 
 screw into keyholes, just like drills! 

 (Great Gogol felt by intuition 
 the role they play in man's ambition.) 
 My friend Bukashkin who was boozy 
 dreamed of a nose 
 that grew like crazy: 
 above him, coming like a bore, 
 upsetting pans and chandeliers, 
 a nose 
 was pier...Read more of this...



by Scannell, Vernon
...fied 
And he bit his knuckles and cried and cried; 
But he had to do something with the dead thing there. 
His eyes squeezed beads of salty prayer 
But the wound of fear gaped wide and raw; 
He dared not touch the thing with his hands 
So he fetched a spade and shovelled it 
And dumped the load of heavy fur 
In the spidery cupboard under the stair 
Where it's been for years, and though it died 
It's grown in that cupboard and its hot low purr 
Grows slowly louder year by ...Read more of this...

by Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...d on my memory since that afternoon.
But all there was left now for me to do 
Was to lie there and see him while he squeezed 
His unclean outlines into the dim room, 
And half erect inside, like a still beast 
With a face partly man’s, came slowly on
Along the floor to the bed where I lay, 
And waited. There had been so much of waiting, 
Through all those evil years before my respite— 
Which now I knew and recognized at last 
As only his more venomous preparation
For ...Read more of this...

by Carver, Raymond
...ehow,
between the two of us, we managed
to raise it. This can't be my arm
is what I kept thinking as
we thumped it, squeezed it, and
prodded it back to life. Shook it
until that stinging went away.

We said a few words to each other.
I don't remember what. Whatever
reassuring things people
who love each other say to each other
given the hour and such odd
circumstance. I do remember
you remarked how it was light
enough in the room that you could see
cir...Read more of this...

by Rossetti, Christina
...ter, hurry-skurry,
Chattering like magpies,
Fluttering like pigeons,
Gliding like fishes, --
Hugged her and kissed her;
Squeezed and caressed her;
Stretched up their dishes,
Panniers and plates:
"Look at our apples
Russet and dun,
Bob at our cherries
Bite at our peaches,
Citrons and dates,
Grapes for the asking,
Pears red with basking
Out in the sun,
Plums on their twigs;
Pluck them and suck them,
Pomegranates, figs."

"Good folk," said Lizzie,
Mindful of Jeanie,
"Give me...Read more of this...



by Olds, Sharon
...is tongue.
Tamarack, Western hemlock,
manzanita, water birch
with its scored bark,
I put my arms around a trunk and squeezed it,
then I lay down on my father's grave.
The sun shone down on me, the powerful
ants walked on me. When I woke,
my cheek was crumbly, yellowish 
with a mustard plaster of earth. Only
at the last minute did I think of his body
actually under me, the can of 
bone, ash, soft as a goosedown
pillow that bursts in bed with the lovers.
Whe...Read more of this...

by Browning, Robert
...w, above, around, 
All hardened into black without a bound. 

Fill up a swart stone chalice to the brim 
With fresh-squeezed yet fast-thickening poppy-juice: 
See how the sluggish jelly, late a-swim, 
Turns marble to the touch of who would loose 
The solid smooth, grown jet from rim to rim, 
By turning round the bowl! So night can fuse 
Earth with her all-comprising sky. No less, 
Light, the least spark, shows air and emptiness. 

And thus it proved when--diving i...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Amy
...Everard lurched and seized
His wife and held her smothered to his coat. "Everard, loose 
me, we shall drown --" and squeezed
Against him, she beat with her hands. He gasped "Never, 
by God!" The slidden boat gave way
And the black foamy water split -- and met. Bubbled 
up through the spray
A wailing rose and in the branches rasped,
And creaked, and stilled. Over the treetops, clasped
In the blue evening, a clear moon was set.

LXII
They lie entangled in th...Read more of this...

by Berman, David
...time they called it "our sun"
and playing football when the only play
was "go out long" are what stand out now.

If squeezed for more information
I can remember old clock radios
with flipping metal numbers
and an entree called Surf and Turf.

As a way of getting in touch with my origins
every night I set the alarm clock
for the time I was born so that waking up
becomes a historical reenactment and the first thing I do
 is take a reading of the day and try to flow with...Read more of this...

by Toomer, Jean
...oul, leaving, soon gone,
Leaving, to catch thy plaintive soul soon gone.
O ***** slaves, dark purple ripened plums,
Squeezed, and bursting in the pine-wood air,
Passing, before they stripped the old tree bare
One plum was saved for me, one seed becomes
an everlasting song, a singing tree,
Caroling softly souls of slavery,
What they were, and what they are to me,
Caroling softly souls of slavery....Read more of this...

by Brooks, Gwendolyn
... With his dark little wife,
And his dark little children three.

A neighbor would look, with a yawning eye
That squeezed into a slit.
But the Rudolph Reeds and children three
Were too joyous to notice it.

For were they not firm in a home of their own
With windows everywhere
And a beautiful banistered stair
And a front yard for flowers and a back for grass?

The first night, a rock, big as two fists.
The second, a rock big as three.
But nary a curse cu...Read more of this...

by Frost, Robert
...t sight of him treading-water-like, 
Keeping his head above. 'Damn ye,' I says, 
'That gets ye!' He squeaked like a squeezed rat. 
That was the last I saw or heard of him. 
I cleaned the rack and drove out to cool off. 
As I sat mopping hayseed from my neck, 
And sort of waiting to be asked about it, 
One of the boys sings out, 'Where's the old man?' 
'I left him in the barn under the hay. 
If ye want him, ye can go and dig him out.' 
They realized fro...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Amy
...a sudden, the clear moon
Showed her a passer-by, inopportune
Indeed, but here he was, whistling and striding.
Lotta squeezed in between the currants, hiding.
"The best laid plans of mice and men," alas!
The stranger came indeed, but did not pass.
Instead, he leant upon the garden-gate,
Folding his arms and whistling. Lotta's state,
Crouched in the prickly currants, on wet grass,
Was far from pleasant. Still the stranger stayed,
And Lotta in her currants wa...Read more of this...

by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...ain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: "That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all."

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been wort...Read more of this...

by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...r the crowd, 
And all things great; but we, unworthier, told 
Of college: he had climbed across the spikes, 
And he had squeezed himself betwixt the bars, 
And he had breathed the Proctor's dogs; and one 
Discussed his tutor, rough to common men, 
But honeying at the whisper of a lord; 
And one the Master, as a rogue in grain 
Veneered with sanctimonious theory. 
But while they talked, above their heads I saw 
The feudal warrior lady-clad; which brought 
My book to mind: ...Read more of this...

by Plath, Sylvia
...ain.
The air is thick. It is thick with this working.
I am used. I am drummed into use.
My eyes are squeezed by this blackness.
I see nothing.

SECOND VOICE:
I am accused. I dream of massacres.
I am a garden of black and red agonies. I drink them,
Hating myself, hating and fearing. And now the world conceives
Its end and runs toward it, arms held out in love.
It is a love of death that sickens everything.
A dead sun stains t...Read more of this...

by Bukowski, Charles
....

maybe it was his protest against
this or
his protest
against
everything.

a one man
Freedom March
that never squeezed in
between
the concert reviews and the
baseball
scores.

God, or somebody,
bless
him....Read more of this...

by Harrison, Tony
...ed on the coal-grate for our wicket,
and every one bought now by 'coloured chaps',

dad's most liberal label as he felt
squeezed by the unfamiliar, and fear
of foreign food and faces, when he smelt
curry in the shop where he'd bought beer.

And growing frailer, 'wobbly on his pins',
the shops he felt familiar with withdrew
which meant much longer tiring treks for tins
that had a label on them that he knew.

And as the shops that stocked his favourites receded 
whereas...Read more of this...

by Cohen, Leonard
...and you're lying in the rain, 
and they ask you how you're doing 
of course you'll say you can't complain -- 
If you're squeezed for information, 
that's when you've got to play it dumb: 
You just say you're out there waiting 
for the miracle, for the miracle to come....Read more of this...

by Giovanni, Nikki
...called its cousins  and brothers and a web  of snow engulfed me then  i reached to love them all  and i squeezed them and they became  a spring rain and i stood perfectly  still and was a flower    ...Read more of this...

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Book: Reflection on the Important Things