Famous Stick Up Poems by Famous Poets

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

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S was Papas new Stick

by Edward Lear
S  was Papa's new Stick,Papa's new thumping Stick, To thump extremely wicked boys,Because it was so thick. ...Read more of this...

The Return of Albert

by Marriott Edgar
 You've 'eard 'ow young Albert Ramsbottom,
In the Zoo up at Blackpool one year,
With a stick and 'orse's 'ead 'andle,
Gave a lion a poke in the ear.

The name of the lion was Wallace,
The poke in the ear made 'im wild;
And before you could say 'Bob's your Uncle,'
'E'd up and 'e'd swallered the child.

'E were sorry the moment 'e'd done it,
With...Read more of this...

Jubilate Agno (excerpt)

by Christopher Smart
 For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry. 
For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk,...Read more of this...

Shandur Polo

by Omer Tarin
Had I seen the ghosts of this place
They would dance their victory dance;
Glorious vale
Cup, chalice,
Basin;
The glacial streams
Empty into that lake
Quiet, ever so silent,
Rippling lyre, reflection;
Snows and rocks frame it —
I have no words
Only emotions
Which boil and rise
With the thunder of horses,
The sound of stick
And ball thudding
Across the turf;
The ghosts of this place,
Had I but seen them,
Pale as the snow
Cold as...Read more of this...

To My Wife

by Barry Tebb
 I

You buy my freedom with your love.

With every book you catalogue or stamp

My imagination hacks a strand from the hawser

That for three years has held it

In the grubbing estuary of mud and time.

Your early waking with tired eyes

And late return at evening, all

Contribute to the store of images

I love you for: the irony being

Your job is worse than mine

Your...Read more of this...

Youth And Beauty

by William Carlos (WCW) Williams
 I bought a dishmop— 
having no daughter— 
for they had twisted 
fine ribbons of shining copper 
about white twine 
and made a tousled head
of it, fastened it 
upon a turned ash stick
slender at the neck 
straight, tall— 
when tied upright 
on the brass wallbracket
to be a light for me 
and naked 
as a girl should seem 
to her father....Read more of this...

Alberts Return

by Marriott Edgar
 You've `eard `ow young Albert Ramsbottom 
At the zoo up at Blackpool one year 
With a stick with an `orse's `ead `andle
Gave a lion a poke in the ear? 

The name of the lion was Wallace, 
The poke in the ear made `im wild 
And before you could say "Bob's yer uncle" 
E'd upped and `e'd swallowed the child....Read more of this...

The Saginaw Song

by Theodore Roethke
 In Saginaw, in Saginaw,
 The wind blows up your feet,
When the ladies' guild puts on a feed,
 There's beans on every plate,
And if you eat more than you should,
 Destruction is complete.

Out Hemlock Way there is a stream
 That some have called Swan Creek;
The turtles have bloodsucker sores,
 And mossy filthy feet;
The bottoms of migrating ducks
 Come off it...Read more of this...

The Sightless Man

by Robert William Service
 Out of the night a crash,
A roar, a rampart of light;
A flame that leaped like a lash,
Searing forever my sight;
Out of the night a flash,
Then, oh, forever the Night!

Here in the dark I sit,
I who so loved the sun;
Supple and strong and fit,
In the dark till my days be done;
Aye, that's the hell of it,
Stalwart and twenty-one.

Marie is stanch...Read more of this...

Cartoon Physics Part 1

by Nick Flynn
 Children under, say, ten, shouldn't know
that the universe is ever-expanding,
inexorably pushing into the vacuum, galaxies

swallowed by galaxies, whole

solar systems collapsing, all of it
acted out in silence. At ten we are still learning

the rules of cartoon animation,

that if a man draws a door on a rock
only he can pass through it.
Anyone else who tries

will crash into the rock. Ten-year-olds
should stick...Read more of this...

A Stick Of Incense

by William Butler Yeats
 Whence did all that fury come?
From empty tomb or Virgin womb?
Saint Joseph thought the world would melt
But liked the way his finger smelt....Read more of this...

The Star of Australasia

by Henry Lawson
 We boast no more of our bloodless flag, that rose from a nation's slime; 
Better a shred of a deep-dyed rag from the storms of the olden time. 
From grander clouds in our `peaceful skies' than ever were there before 
I tell you the Star of the South shall rise -- in the lurid clouds of war. 
It ever...Read more of this...

Lip-Stick Liz

by Robert William Service
 Oh Lip-Stick Liz was in the biz, That's the oldest known in history;
She had a lot of fancy rags, Of her form she made no myst'ry.
She had a man, a fancy man, His name was Alexander,
And he used to beat her up because he couldn't understand her. 

Now Lip-Stick Liz she loved her man And she couldn't love no...Read more of this...

Good-Children Street

by Eugene Field
 There's a dear little home in Good-Children street -
My heart turneth fondly to-day
Where tinkle of tongues and patter of feet
Make sweetest of music at play;
Where the sunshine of love illumines each face
And warms every heart in that old-fashioned place.

For dear little children go romping about
With dollies and tin tops and drums,
And, my! how they frolic and scamper and shout
Till...Read more of this...

The Crooked Stick

by Elinor Wylie
 First Traveller: What's that lying in the dust? 
Second Traveller: A crooked stick. 
First Traveller: What's it worth, if you can trust to arithmetic? 
Second Traveller: Isn't this a riddle? 
First Traveller: No, a trick. 
Second Traveller:It's worthless, leave it where it lies. 
First Traveller: Wait; count ten; 
Rub a little dust upon your eyes; 
Now, look again. 
Second...Read more of this...

Saltbush Bill

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 Now is the law of the Overland that all in the West obey -- 
A man must cover with travelling sheep a six-mile stage a day; 
But this is the law which the drovers make, right easily understood, 
They travel their stage where the grass is bad, but they camp where the grass is good; 
They camp, and they...Read more of this...

Rapunzel

by Anne Sexton
 A woman 
who loves a woman 
is forever young. 
The mentor 
and the student 
feed off each other. 
Many a girl 
had an old aunt 
who locked her in the study 
to keep the boys away. 
They would play rummy 
or lie on the couch 
and touch and touch. 
Old breast against young breast... 
Let your dress fall down...Read more of this...

To Mrs Reynolds Cat

by John Keats
 Cat! who hast pass’d thy grand climacteric,
How many mice and rats hast in thy days
Destroy’d? How many tit bits stolen? Gaze
With those bright languid segments green, and prick
Those velvet ears - but pr’ythee do not stick
Thy latent talons in me - and upraise
Thy gentle mew - and tell me all thy frays,
Of fish and mice, and rats and tender...Read more of this...

Whether or Not

by D. H. Lawrence
I

Dunna thee tell me its his'n, mother,
      Dunna thee, dunna thee.
--Oh ay! he'll be comin' to tell thee his-sèn
      Wench, wunna he?

Tha doesna mean to say to me, mother,
      He's gone wi that--
--My gel, owt'll do for a man i' the dark,
   ...Read more of this...

Music Swims Back To Me

by Anne Sexton
 Wait Mister. Which way is home?
They turned the light out
and the dark is moving in the corner.
There are no sign posts in this room,
four ladies, over eighty,
in diapers every one of them.
La la la, Oh music swims back to me
and I can feel the tune they played
the night they left me
in this private institution on a hill.

Imagine it. A...Read more of this...

Rhapsody on a Windy Night

by T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
 TWELVE o’clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

Half-past one,
The street-lamp sputtered,
The street-lamp muttered,
The street-lamp said, “Regard that woman
Who hesitates...Read more of this...

Maktoob

by Alan Seeger
 A shell surprised our post one day 
And killed a comrade at my side. 
My heart was sick to see the way 
He suffered as he died. 

I dug about the place he fell, 
And found, no bigger than my thumb, 
A fragment of the splintered shell 
In warm aluminum. 

I melted it, and made a mould, 
And poured...Read more of this...

Water

by Robert Lowell
 It was a Maine lobster town—
each morning boatloads of hands
pushed off for granite
quarries on the islands,

and left dozens of bleak 
white frame houses stuck
like oyster shells
on a hill of rock,

and below us, the sea lapped
the raw little match-stick 
mazes of a weir,
where the fish for bait were trapped.

Remember? We sat on a slab of rock.
>From this distance in time
it...Read more of this...

Snake

by D. H. Lawrence
 A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before
me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the...Read more of this...

At The Other End Of The Telescope

by George Bradley
 the people are very small and shrink,
dwarves on the way to netsuke hell
bound for a flea circus in full
retreat toward sub-atomic particles--
 difficult to keep in focus, the figures
at that end are nearly indistinguishable,
generals at the heads of minute armies
differing little from fishwives,
emperors the same as eskimos
huddled under improvisations of snow--
 eskimos, though, now have the advantage,
for it seems...Read more of this...

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