Famous Stitching Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Adams Curse

...d I, and talked of poetry. 
I said, 'A line will take us hours maybe; 
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, 
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught. 
Better go down upon your marrow-bones 
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones 
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather; 
For to articulate sweet sounds together 
Is to work harder than all these, and yet 
Be thought an idler by the noisy set 
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen 
The martyrs call the...Read more of this...
by Yeats, William Butler


At Ithaca

...
that web of pictures there, 
enchantments that I thought 
he had, that I had lost; 
weaving his happiness 
within the stitching frame, 
weaving his fire and frame, 
I thought my work was done, 
I prayed that only one 
of those that I had spurned 
might stoop and conquer this 
long waiting with a kiss.

But each time that I see 
my work so beautifully 
inwoven and would keep 
the picture and the whole, 
Athene steels my soul. 
Slanting across my brain, 
I see as shafts of ra...Read more of this...
by Doolittle, Hilda

Aurora Leigh (excerpts)

...on once a year
To prove their soundness of humility.
The poor-club exercised her Christian gifts
Of knitting stockings, stitching petticoats,
Because we are of one flesh after all
And need one flannel (with a proper sense
Of difference in the quality) -- and still
The book-club, guarded from your modern trick
Of shaking dangerous questions from the crease,
Preserved her intellectual. She had lived
A sort of cage-bird life, born in a cage,
Accounting that to leap from perch to...Read more of this...
by Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

Frankenstein

...the Baron,
who made him with knobs sticking out from each side of his neck
where the head was attached to the body
and stitching all over
where parts of cadavers were sewed together.

He is pursued by the ignorant villagers,
who think he is evil and dangerous because he is ugly
and makes ugly noises.
They wave firebrands at him and cudgels and rakes,
but he escapes and comes to the thatched cottage
of an old blind man playing on the violin Mendelssohn's "Spring Song."

Heari...Read more of this...
by Field, Edward

Lovers Gifts XVI: She Dwelt Here by the Pool

...s of rice.
Her pet name is known here among those date-palm groves and
in the courtyards where girls sit and talk while stitching their
winter quilts. The water in this pool keeps in its depth the memory
of her swimming limbs, and her wet feet had left their marks, day
after day, on the footpath leading to the village.
The women who come to-day with their vessels to the water have
all seen her smile over simple jests, and the old peasant, taking
his bullocks to their bath, us...Read more of this...
by Tagore, Rabindranath


The Book of Hours of Sister Clotilde

...had to say,
For Sister Marthe saw the world in little,
She weighed every grain and recorded each tittle.
She did plain stitching
And worked in the kitchen.
"Sister Radegonde knows the apples won't last,
I told her so this Friday past.
I must speak to her before Compline."
Her words were like dust motes in slanting sunshine.
The other nun sighed,
With her pleasure quite dried.
Suddenly Sister Berthe cried out:
"The snowdrops are blooming!" They turned about.
The little white ...Read more of this...
by Lowell, Amy

The Bride of Frankenstein

...s as possible,
and puts together the prettiest monster-woman you ever saw
with a body like a pin-up girl
and hardly any stitching at all
where he sewed on the head of a raped and murdered beauty queen.

He sets his liquids burping, and coils blinking and buzzing,
and waits for an electric storm to send through the equipment
the spark vital for life.
The storm breaks over the castle
and the equipment really goes crazy
like a kitchen full of modern appliances
as the lightning j...Read more of this...
by Field, Edward

The Little Land

...s plain: 
High bare walls, great bare floor; 
Great big knobs on drawer and door; 
Great big people perched on chairs, 
Stitching tucks and mending tears, 
Each a hill that I could climb, 
And talking nonsense all the time-- 
O dear me, 
That I could be 
A sailor on a the rain-pool sea, 
A climber in the clover tree, 
And just come back a sleepy-head, 
Late at night to go to bed....Read more of this...
by Stevenson, Robert Louis

The Quilting

...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 Laurence Dunbar, Paul

The Schooner Flight

...storm,"
but for that dream, the book had no answer.
A next night I dreamed of three old women
featureless as silkworms, stitching my fate,
and I scream at them to come out of my house,
and I try beating them away with a broom,
but as they go out, so they crawl back again,
until I start screaming and crying, my flesh
raining with sweat, and she ravage the book
for the dream meaning, and there was nothing;
my nerves melt like a jellyfish - that was when I broke -
they found me ...Read more of this...
by Walcott, Derek

Three Ghosts

...eople.
The names are forgotten. It is a joke in ghosts.

Cutters or bushelmen or armhole basters, they sat
cross-legged stitching, snatched at scissors, stole each
other thimbles.

Cross-legged, working for wages, joking each other
as misfits cut from the cloth of a Master Tailor,
they sat and spoke their thoughts of the glory of
The People, they met after work and drank beer to
The People.

Faded off into the twilights the names are forgotten.
It is a joke in ghosts. Let it ...Read more of this...
by Sandburg, Carl

Three Women

...om, a shriek at his heel.
The blue color pales. He is human after all.
A red lotus opens in its bowl of blood;
They are stitching me up with silk, as if I were a material.

What did my fingers do before they held him?
What did my heart do, with its love?
I have never seen a thing so clear.
His lids are like the lilac-flower
And soft as a moth, his breath.
I shall not let go.
There is no guile or warp in him. May he keep so.

SECOND VOICE:
There is the moon in the high window....Read more of this...
by Plath, Sylvia

To My Wife

...orld redeems

What it had lent.

By night the world unpicked

The dream we wove by day,

Each dawn we woke to find

The stitching come away.

IV

Two creatures from a bestiary

Besieged our dream:

A neighbour’s one-eyed cat

That prowled outside to bring

Its witch-like owner

With her tapping stick.

Was the Bach we played too loud for her deaf ears,

Or was it our love that howled her silence home?

V

We have re-built that house

With blood.

We have sculptured that dream...Read more of this...
by Tebb, Barry

Wisdom

...Miracle had its playtime where
In damask clothed and on a seat
Chryselephantine, cedar-boarded,
His majestic Mother sat
Stitching at a purple hoarded
That He might be nobly breeched
In starry towers of Babylon
Noah's freshet never reached.
King Abundance got Him on
Innocence; and Wisdom He.
That cognomen sounded best
Considering what wild infancy
Drove horror from His Mother's breast....Read more of this...
by Yeats, William Butler

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