The Whiskey Taster’s Flavor Guide

Famous Stock Still Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The Double Image

by Anne Sexton
 1.

I am thirty this November.
You are still small, in your fourth year.
We stand watching the yellow leaves go *****,
flapping in the winter rain.
falling flat and washed. And I remember
mostly the three autumns you did not live here.
They said I'd never get you back again.
I tell you what you'll never really know:
all the medical hypothesis
that explained my brain will never...Read more of this...

Night-Scented Stock

by Katherine Mansfield
 White, white in the milky night
The moon danced over a tree.
"Wouldn't it be lovely to swim in the lake!"
Someone whispered to me.

"Oh, do-do-do!" cooed someone else,
And clasped her hands to her chin.
"I should so love to see the white bodies--
All the white bodies jump in!"

The big dark house hid secretly
Behind the magnolia and the spreading pear-tree;
But there was a...Read more of this...

The First Surveyor

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 'The man who brought the railway through -- our friend the engineer.' 
They cheer his pluck and enterprise and engineering skill! 
'Twas my old husband found the pass behind that big red hill. 
Before the engineer was born we'd settled with our stock 
Behind that great big mountain chain, a line of range and rock -- 
A line that...Read more of this...

The Pearl

by George Herbert
 The Kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, 
seeking goodly pearls; who, when he had found one, 
sold all that he had and bought it.—Matthew 13.45


I know the ways of Learning; both the head
And pipes that feed the press, and make it run;
What reason hath from nature borrowed,
Or of itself, like a good huswife, spun
In laws and...Read more of this...

Fiddle-Dee-Dee

by Eugene Field
 There once was a bird that lived up in a tree,
And all he could whistle was "Fiddle-dee-dee" -
A very provoking, unmusical song
For one to be whistling the summer day long!
Yet always contented and busy was he
With that vocal recurrence of "Fiddle-dee-dee."

Hard by lived a brave little soldier of four,
That weird iteration repented him sore;
"I prithee, Dear-Mother-Mine! fetch me my...Read more of this...

The Sick Stockrider

by Adam Lindsay Gordon
 Hold hard, Ned! Lift me down once more, and lay me in the shade. 
Old man, you've had your work cut out to guide 
Both horses, and to hold me in the saddle when I swayed, 
All through the hot, slow, sleepy, silent ride. 
The dawn at "Moorabinda" was a mist rack dull and dense, 
The sun-rise was a...Read more of this...

The Old Bark School

by Henry Lawson
 It was built of bark and poles, and the floor was full of holes 
Where each leak in rainy weather made a pool; 
And the walls were mostly cracks lined with calico and sacks – 
There was little need for windows in the school. 

Then we rode to school and back by the rugged gully-track, 
On the old grey...Read more of this...

The Swagmans Rest

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 We buried old Bob where the bloodwoods wave 
At the foot of the Eaglehawk; 
We fashioned a cross on the old man's grave 
For fear that his ghost might walk; 
We carved his name on a bloodwood tree 
With the date of his sad decease 
And in place of "Died from effects of spree" 
We wrote "May he rest...Read more of this...

Sonnet XLIII

by Edmund Spenser
 SHall I then silent be or shall I speake?
And if I speake, her wrath renew I shall:
and if I silent be, my hart will breake,
or choked be with ouerflowing gall.
What tyranny is this both my hart to thrall,
and eke my toung with proud restraint to tie?
that nether I may speake nor thinke at all,
but like a stupid stock in...Read more of this...

Sic Vita

by Henry David Thoreau
 I am a parcel of vain strivings tied 
By a chance bond together, 
Dangling this way and that, their links 
Were made so loose and wide, 
Methinks, 
For milder weather. 
A bunch of violets without their roots, 
And sorrel intermixed, 
Encircled by a wisp of straw 
Once coiled about their shoots, 
The law 
By which I'm fixed. 

A nosegay...Read more of this...

Clancy Of The Overflow

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 I had written him a letter which I had, for want of better
 Knowledge, sent to where I met him down the Lachlan, years ago,
He was shearing when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him,
 Just on spec, addressed as follows, "Clancy, of The Overflow". 

And an answer came directed in a writing unexpected,
 (And I...Read more of this...

Indignation Jones

by Edgar Lee Masters
 You would not believe, would you
That I came from good Welsh stock?
That I was purer blooded than the white trash here?
And of more direct lineage than the New Englanders
And Virginians of Spoon River?
You would not believe that I had been to school
And read some books.
You saw me only as a run-down man,
With matted hair and beard
And ragged clothes.
Sometimes a...Read more of this...

Buying Stock

by Denise Duhamel
 "...The use of condoms offers substantial protection, but does not 
guarantee total protection and that while 
there is no evidence that deep kissing has resulted in 
transfer of the virus, no one can say that such transmission 
would be absolutely impossible."

--The Surgeon General, 1987


I know you won't mind if I ask you to put this on.
It's for your protection...Read more of this...

A Message to America

by Alan Seeger
 You have the grit and the guts, I know; 
You are ready to answer blow for blow 
You are virile, combative, stubborn, hard, 
But your honor ends with your own back-yard; 
Each man intent on his private goal, 
You have no feeling for the whole; 
What singly none would tolerate 
You let unpunished hit the state, 
Unmindful that each...Read more of this...

A Man Young And Old: VI. His Memories

by William Butler Yeats
 We should be hidden from their eyes,
Being but holy shows
And bodies broken like a thorn
Whereon the bleak north blows,
To think of buried Hector
And that none living knows.

The women take so little stock
In what I do or say
They'd sooner leave their cosseting
To hear a jackass bray;
My arms are like the twisted thorn
And yet there beauty lay;

The first of all the...Read more of this...

The Paper Windmill

by Amy Lowell
 The little boy pressed his face against the window-pane 
and looked out
at the bright sunshiny morning. The cobble-stones of 
the square
glistened like mica. In the trees, a breeze danced and 
pranced,
and shook drops of sunlight like falling golden coins into the brown 
water
of the canal. Down stream slowly drifted a long string 
of galliots
piled with crimson cheeses. The little...Read more of this...

Tortures

by Wislawa Szymborska
 Nothing has changed.
The body is susceptible to pain,
it must eat and breathe air and sleep,
it has thin skin and blood right underneath,
an adequate stock of teeth and nails,
its bones are breakable, its joints are stretchable.
In tortures all this is taken into account. 

Nothing has changed.
The body shudders as it shuddered
before the founding of Rome and after,
in the twentieth century...Read more of this...

The Peasants Confession

by Thomas Hardy
 Good Father!… ’Twas an eve in middle June,
And war was waged anew 
By great Napoleon, who for years had strewn 
Men’s bones all Europe through. 

Three nights ere this, with columned corps he’d crossed
The Sambre at Charleroi, 
To move on Brussels, where the English host 
Dallied in Parc and Bois. 

The yestertide we’d heard the gloomy gun 
Growl through...Read more of this...

Nearly A Valediction

by Marilyn Hacker
 You happened to me. I was happened to
like an abandoned building by a bull-
dozer, like the van that missed my skull
happened a two-inch gash across my chin.
You were as deep down as I've ever been.
You were inside me like my pulse. A new-
born flailing toward maternal heartbeat through
the shock of cold and glare: when you were gone,
swaddled in strange...Read more of this...

On Love

by Bliss Carman
 TO the assembled folk 
At great St. Kavin’s spoke 
Young Brother Amiel on Christmas Eve; 
I give you joy, my friends, 
That as the round year ends, 
We meet once more for gladness by God’s leave. 

On other festal days 
For penitence or praise 
Or prayer we meet, or fullness of thanksgiving; 
To-night we calendar 
The rising of that...Read more of this...

If you fancy that your people came of better stock than mine

by Henry Lawson
 If you fancy that your people came of better stock than mine, 
If you hint of higher breeding by a word or by a sign, 
If you're proud because of fortune or the clever things you do -- 
Then I'll play no second fiddle: I'm a prouder man than you! 

If you think that your profession has the more...Read more of this...

the man the gun and the dog

by Rg Gregory
 yesterday the man was pleased
the sun sat in the tree and all
upon the land held to the harmony
his coming then expected

 his gun in his arm
 his dog at his heels

a blackbird sang on a high branch
a white horse ambled by the hedge
a brindled cow munched grass - the man
shared his heartbeat with them

 his gun in his arm
...Read more of this...

The Dark Girls Rhyme

by Dorothy Parker
 Who was there had seen us
Wouldn't bid him run?
Heavy lay between us
All our sires had done.

There he was, a-springing
Of a pious race,
Setting hags a-swinging
In a market-place;

Sowing turnips over
Where the poppies lay;
Looking past the clover,
Adding up the hay;

Shouting through the Spring song,
Clumping down the sod;
Toadying, in sing-song,
To a crabbed god.

There I was, that came of
Folk of mud and name-
I that...Read more of this...

Ancient Roman Villa

by Dejan Stojanovic
Here lies once splendid ancient Roman Villa in ruins. Remnants of a gorgeous mosaic—Venus and a flying dove on the floor—of big gardens, fountains and pools talk about her rich and lively history. 

The Roman wealthy patrician did not think of us looking at the mosaic of his Villa. He built it for posterity, yet desired to live longer than...Read more of this...

Aftermath

by Sylvia Plath
 Compelled by calamity's magnet
They loiter and stare as if the house
Burnt-out were theirs, or as if they thought
Some scandal might any minute ooze
From a smoke-choked closet into light;
No deaths, no prodigious injuries
Glut these hunters after an old meat,
Blood-spoor of the austere tragedies.

Mother Medea in a green smock
Moves humbly as any housewife through
Her ruined apartments, taking stock
Of charred shoes, the...Read more of this...

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