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Famous Stitches Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Plath, Sylvia
...si, too, are bowing to some big thing :
It rattles their stars on the green hill where Percy
Nurses the hardship of his stitches, and walks and walks.

There is a dignity to this; there is a formality --
The flowers vivid as bandages, and the man mending.
They bow and stand : they suffer such attacks!

And the octogenarian loves the little flocks.
He is quite blue; the terrible wind tries his breathing.
The narcissi look up like children, quickly and whitely.<...Read more of this...



by Mayakovsky, Vladimir
...
 just live for show - 
No,
 you highbrow,
 ruffling your matted hair,
you would thrust upon her
 a sewing machine,
in stitches
 scribbling 
 the silk of verse.
Proletarians
 arrive at communism
 from below - 
by the low way of mines,
 sickles,
 and pitchforks - 
But I,
 from poetry’s skies,
 plunge into communism,
because
 without it
 I feel no love.
Whether
 I’m self-exiled
 or sent to mamma - 
the steel of words corrodes,
 the brass of the brass tarnishes.
Why...Read more of this...

by Dickinson, Emily
...
In crayon or in wool,
With "This was last her fingers did,"
Industrious until

The thimble weighed too heavy,
The stitches stopped themselves,
And then 't was put among the dust
Upon the closet shelves.

A book I have, a friend gave,
Whose pencil, here and there,
Had notched the place that pleased him,--
At rest his fingers are.

Now, when I read, I read not,
For interrupting tears
Obliterate the etchings
Too costly for repairs....Read more of this...

by Dickinson, Emily
...Don't put up my Thread and Needle --
I'll begin to Sew
When the Birds begin to whistle --
Better Stitches -- so --

These were bent -- my sight got crooked --
When my mind -- is plain
I'll do seams -- a Queen's endeavor
Would not blush to own --

Hems -- too fine for Lady's tracing
To the sightless Knot --
Tucks -- of dainty interspersion --
Like a dotted Dot --

Leave my Needle in the furrow --
Where I put it down --
I can make the zigzag stitches
Stra...Read more of this...

by Wilner, Eleanor
...ust as he came
to us, in a uniform of soft brown
with an eagle embroidered on the sleeve,
its body made of careful gray stitches,
its eye a knot of gold. The motto
underneath had almost worn away. For days,
watching from our caves, we saw
the huge white shape of silk shifting
in the weeds, like a pale moon
when the wind filled it, stranded, 
searching in the aimless way
of unmoored things
for whatever human ballast gave 
direction to their endless drift....Read more of this...



by Plath, Sylvia
...y best friend thinks I'm in the country.
Skin doesn't have roots, it peels away easy as paper.
When I grin, the stitches tauten. I grow backward. I'm twenty,
Broody and in long skirts on my first husband's sofa, my fingers
Buried in the lambswool of the dead poodle;
I hadn't a cat yet.

Now she's done for, the dewlapped lady
I watched settle, line by line, in my mirror—
Old sock-face, sagged on a darning egg.
They've trapped her in some laboratory jar....Read more of this...

by Pinsky, Robert
...The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians

Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam to the band

Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,
The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
The treadle, the bobbin. The code....Read more of this...

by Kay, Jackie
...nineteen
My whole life is changing

Tonight I see her
Shuttered eyes in my dreams

I cannot pretend she's never been
My stitches pull and threaten to snap

My own body a witness
Leaking blood to sheets milk to shirts

My stretch marks
Record that birth

Though I feel like somebody is dying

I stand up in my bed
And wail like a banshee

II
On the second night
I shall suffocate her with a feather pillow

Bury her under a weeping willow
Or take her far out to sea

And watch her ...Read more of this...

by Plath, Sylvia
...t of a person?
Do you wear
A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,
A brace or a hook,
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,

Stitches to show something's missing? No, no? Then
How can we give you a thing?
Stop crying.
Open your hand.
Empty? Empty. Here is a hand

To fill it and willing
To bring teacups and roll away headaches
And do whatever you tell it.
Will you marry it?
It is guaranteed

To thumb shut your eyes at the end
And dissolve of sorrow.
We make new ...Read more of this...

by St Vincent Millay, Edna
...g have I.

"There's nothing in the house
To make a boy breeches,
Nor shears to cut a cloth with,
Nor thread to take stitches.

"There's nothing in the house
But a loaf-end of rye,
And a harp with a woman's head
Nobody will buy,"
And she began to cry.

That was in the early fall.
When came the late fall,
"Son," she said, "the sight of you
Makes your mother's blood crawl,—

"Little skinny shoulder-blades
Sticking through your clothes!
And where you'll get a jack...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Amy
...tifully designed."
He opened it and there the curls were, twined.
Charlotta's heart dropped beats like knitting-stitches.
She burned a moment, flaming; then she froze.
Her face was jerked by little, nervous twitches,
She heard her husband asking: "What are those?"
Put out her hand quickly to interpose,
But stopped, the gesture half-complete, astounded
At the calm way the question was propounded.
"A pretty fancy, Dear, I do declare.
Indeed I will not le...Read more of this...

by Murray, Les
...as if in irons, but
as at a whoop of young men running loose
in brick passages, there occurred the thought
like instant stitches all through crumpled silk:

as if he'd had to leap to catch the bullet.

A stench like hands out of the ground.
The willows had like beads in their hair, and
Peenemünde, grunted the dentist's drill, Peenemünde! 
Fowls went on typing on every corn key, green
kept crowding the pinks of the peach trees into the sky
but used speech balloons were...Read more of this...

by Pinsky, Robert
...ave made him up,
Imagined him as I imagined

The ball, a scintilla
High in the black backdrop
Of the sky. Tight red stitches.
Rawlings. The bleached

Horsehide white: the color
Of nothing. Color of the past
And of the future, of the movie screen
At rest and of blank paper.

"I could have." The mind. The black
Backdrop, the white
Fly picked out by the towering
Lights. A few years later

On a blanket in the grass
By the same river
A girl and I ca...Read more of this...

by Laurence Dunbar, Paul
...ses throb, how my fingers itch,
While I note her dainty waist and her slender hand,
As she matches this and that, she stitches strand by strand.
And I long to tell her Life's a quilt and I'm a patch;
Love will do the stitching if she'll only be my match.
...Read more of this...

by Parker, Dorothy
...Needle, needle, dip and dart,
Thrusting up and down,
Where's the man could ease a heart
Like a satin gown?

See the stitches curve and crawl
Round the cunning seams-
Patterns thin and sweet and small
As a lady's dreams.

Wantons go in bright brocade;
Brides in organdie;
Gingham's for the plighted maid;
Satin's for the free!

Wool's to line a miser's chest;
Crepe's to calm the old;
Velvet hides an empty breast
Satin's for the bold!

Lawn is for a bishop's yoke;
Linen's...Read more of this...

by Holmes, Oliver Wendell
...ever, 
But those young pantaloons have gone
Forever and forever! 
And not till fate has cut the last 
Of all my earthly stitches, 
This aching heart shall cease to mourn 
My loved, my long-lost breeches!...Read more of this...

by Whittier, John Greenleaf
...ir feet delay. 

Where the ancient cobbler, Keezar, 
On the open hillside justice wrought, 
Singing, as he drew his stitches, 
Songs his German masters taught. 

Singing, with his gray hair floating 
Round a rosy ample face,--- 
Now a thousand Saxon craftsmen 
Stitch and hammer in his place. 

All the pastoral lanes so grassy 
Now are Traffic's dusty streets; 
From the village, grown a city, 
Fast the rural grace retreats. 

But, still green and tall and state...Read more of this...

by Bosselaar, Laure-Anne
...ne. 
 Think of it: the worlds in this world. 


 Yesterday, while a Chinese woman took 
hours to sew seven silk stitches into a tapestry 
started generations ago, guards took only
seconds to mop up a cannibal’s brain from the floor 
of a Wisconsin jail, while the man who bashed 
the killer’s head found no place to hide, 
and sat sobbing for his mother in a shower stall —
the worlds in this world. 

 Or say, one year — say 1916: 
while my grandfather, a prisoner of...Read more of this...

by Davidson, John
...my pipe all alight,
A-scheming how to count ten bob a pound.

And it's often very cold and very wet,
And my missus stitches towels for a hunks;
And the Pillar'd Halls is half of it to let--
Three rooms about the size of travelling trunks.
And we cough, my wife and I, to dislocate a sigh,
When the noisy little kids are in their bunks.

But you never hear her do a growl or whine,
For she's made of flint and roses, very odd;
And I've got to cut my meaning rather fin...Read more of this...

by Goedicke, Patricia
...ficult it is to look
hard and head
on has not been said

often enough, if prayer
is an act of attention
even to dropped stitches, blood
dangling beneath the lines, the
poem? I said,
what prepares us for what
will never save us?...Read more of this...

Dont forget to view our wonderful member Stitches poems.


Book: Reflection on the Important Things