Famous Stripes Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Stripes poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous stripes poems. These examples illustrate what a famous stripes poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Whitman, Walt
...on!
Way for the Federal foot and dragoons—and the apparitions copiously tumbling.
I love to look on the stars and stripes—I hope the fifes will play Yankee Doodle.
How bright shine the cutlasses of the foremost troops!
Every man holds his revolver, marching stiff through Boston town.
A fog follows—antiques of the same come limping,
Some appear wooden-legged, and some appear bandaged and bloodless.
Why this is indeed a show! It has called the dead out ...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...those groups of
sea-islands;
I chant my sail-ships and steam-ships threading the archipelagoes;
I chant my stars and stripes fluttering in the wind;
I chant commerce opening, the sleep of ages having done its work—races, reborn, refresh’d;
Lives, works, resumed—The object I know not—but the old, the Asiatic, renew’d, as it must
be,
Commencing from this day, surrounded by the world.
6
And you, Libertad of the world!
You shall sit in the middle, well-pois’d, thousa...Read more of this...
by
Seeger, Alan
...d killed;
He has gone untrounced for the blood he spilled;
He has jeering used for his bootblack's rag
The stars and stripes of the gringo's flag;
And you, in the depths of your easy-chair --
What did you do, what did you care?
Did you find the season too cold and damp
To change the counter for the camp?
Were you frightened by fevers in Mexico?
I can't imagine, but this I know --
You are impassioned vastly more
By the news of the daily baseball score
Than to hear ...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...these gnats, that fill the hour, to pass for poets;)
Bards with songs as from burning coals, or the lightning’s fork’d stripes!
Ample Ohio’s bards—bards for California! inland bards—bards of the war;)
(As a wheel turns on its axle, so I find my chants turning finally on the war;)
Bards of pride! Bards tallying the ocean’s roar, and the swooping eagle’s
scream!
You, by my charm, I invoke!...Read more of this...
by
Sidney, Sir Philip
...ghly moue
To keepe the place of their first louing state.
The boy refusde for fear of Marses hate,
Who threatned stripes if he his wrath did proue;
But she, in chafe, him from her lap did shoue,
Brake bowe, brake shafts, while Cupid weeping sate;
Till that his grandame Nature, pitying it,
Of Stellaes brows made him two better bowes,
And in her eyes of arrows infinit.
O how for ioy he leaps! O how he crowes!
And straight therewith, like wags new got to play,
...Read more of this...
by
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...ead,
Down his sides and back and shoulders
Plates of bone with spines projecting
Painted was he with his war-paints,
Stripes of yellow, red, and azure,
Spots of brown and spots of sable;
And he lay there on the bottom,
Fanning with his fins of purple,
As above him Hiawatha
In his birch canoe came sailing,
With his fishing-line of cedar.
"Take my bait," cried Hiawatha,
Dawn into the depths beneath him,
"Take my bait, O Sturgeon, Nahma!
Come up from below the wa...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...br>
The grammar-school caretaker always had the boards re-blacked
And the floors waxed, but I never shone.
The stripes of the red and black blazer
Were prison-grey. You could never see things that way:
Your home had broken windows to the street.
You had the mortification of lice in your hair
While I had the choice of Brylcreem or orange pomade.
Four children, an alcoholic father and
An Irish immigrant mother. Failure’s metaphor.
I did n...Read more of this...
by
Riley, James Whitcomb
...;
For a hundred years the grand old clime
Columbia has been free;
For a hundred years our country's love,
The Stars and Stripes, has waved above.
Away far out on the gulf of years--
Misty and faint and white
Through the fogs of wrong--a sail appears,
And the Mayflower heaves in sight,
And drifts again, with its little flock
Of a hundred souls, on Plymouth Rock.
Do you see them there--as long, long since--
Through the lens of History;
Do you see them there as their c...Read more of this...
by
Trumbull, John
...s top, the flag unfurl'd
Waved triumph o'er the gazing world,
Inscribed with inconsistent types
Of Liberty and thirteen stripes.
Beneath, the crowd without delay
The dedication-rites essay,
And gladly pay, in antient fashion,
The ceremonies of libation;
While briskly to each patriot lip
Walks eager round the inspiring flip:
Delicious draught! whose powers inherit
The quintessence of public spirit;
Which whoso tastes, perceives his mind
To nobler politics refined;
Or rouse...Read more of this...
by
Trumbull, John
...me our principles to change:
For vain that boasted faith, that gathers
No perquisite, but tar and feathers;
No pay, but stripes from whiggish malice,
And no promotion, but the gallows.
I've long enough stood firm and steady,
Half-hang'd for loyalty already,
And could I save my neck and pelf,
I'd turn a flaming whig myself.
But since, obnoxious here to fate,
This saving wisdom comes too late,
Our noblest hopes already crost,
Our sal'ries gone, our titles lost,
Doom'd t...Read more of this...
by
Milton, John
...; terms of peace yet none
Vouchsafed or sought; for what peace will be given
To us enslaved, but custody severe,
And stripes and arbitrary punishment
Inflicted? and what peace can we return,
But, to our power, hostility and hate,
Untamed reluctance, and revenge, though slow,
Yet ever plotting how the Conqueror least
May reap his conquest, and may least rejoice
In doing what we most in suffering feel?
Nor will occasion want, nor shall we need
With dangerous expediti...Read more of this...
by
Milton, John
...met, give me to spell,
Sorrows and labours, opposition, hate,
Attends thee; scorns, reproaches, injuries,
Violence and stripes, and, lastly, cruel death.
A kingdom they portend thee, but what kingdom,
Real or allegoric, I discern not;
Nor when: eternal sure—as without end,
Without beginning; for no date prefixed
Directs me in the starry rubric set."
So saying, he took (for still he knew his power
Not yet expired), and to the Wilderness
Brought back, the Son of God,...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...;
I see the filaments of the news of the wars, deaths, losses, gains, passions, of my race.
I see the long river-stripes of the earth;
I see where the Mississippi flows—I see where the Columbia flows;
I see the Great River and the Falls of Niagara;
I see the Amazon and the Paraguay;
I see the four great rivers of China, the Amour, the Yellow River, the Yiang-tse, and the
Pearl;
I see where the Seine flows, and where the Danube, the Loire, the Rhone, and the
Guada...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...ands aboard schooners and sloops, the raftsman,
the
pioneer,
Lumbermen in their winter camp, day-break in the woods, stripes of snow on the limbs of
trees,
the
occasional snapping,
The glad clear sound of one’s own voice, the merry song, the natural life of the woods,
the
strong
day’s work,
The blazing fire at night, the sweet taste of supper, the talk, the bed of hemlock boughs,
and
the
bear-skin;
—The house-builder at work in cities or anywhere,
The preparato...Read more of this...
by
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...
The slender, graceful spars
Poise aloft in the air,
And at the mast-head,
White, blue, and red,
A flag unrolls the stripes and stars.
Ah! when the wanderer, lonely, friendless,
In foreign harbors shall behold
That flag unrolled,
'T will be as a friendly hand
Stretched out from his native land,
Filling his heart with memories sweet and endless!
All is finished! and at length
Has come the bridal day
Of beauty and of strength.
To-day the vessel shall be la...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...ning fate. Behind, the vault
Stretches from dim to dark, a groping way
Bordered by casks and puncheons, whose brass stripes
And bands gleam dully still, beyond the gay tumult.
4
"For good old Master Hilverdink, a toast!"
Clamoured a youth with tassels on his boots.
"Bring out your oldest brandy for a boast,
From that small barrel in the very roots
Of your deep cellar, man. Why here is Max!
Ho! Welcome, Max, you're scarcely here in time.
We want to drink t...Read more of this...
by
Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...I have a Gumbie Cat in mind, her name is Jennyanydots;
Her coat is of the tabby kind, with tiger stripes and leopard spots.
All day she sits upon the stair or on the steps or on the mat;
She sits and sits and sits and sits--and that's what makes a Gumbie Cat!
But when the day's hustle and bustle is done,
Then the Gumbie Cat's work is but hardly begun.
And when all the family's in bed and asleep,
She tucks up her skirts to the basement to creep....Read more of this...
by
Borges, Jorge Luis
...of smells
And in the wind picking the smell of dawn
And tantalizing scent of grazing deer;
Among the bamboo's slanting stripes I glimpse
The tiger's stripes and sense the bony frame
Under the splendid, quivering cover of skin.
Curving oceans and the planet's wastes keep us
Apart in vain; from here in a house far off
In South America I dream of you,
Track you, O tiger of the Ganges' banks.
It strikes me now as evening fills my soul
That the tiger addressed in my poem...Read more of this...
by
Sandburg, Carl
...rty postoffice
And a dirty city hall
And a dirty railroad station
And the United States flag cries, cries the Stars and Stripes to the four winds on Lincoln’s birthday and the Fourth of July.
Kalamazoo kisses a hand to something far off.
Kalamazoo calls to a long horizon, to a shivering silver angel, to a creeping mystic what-is-it.
“We’re here because we’re here,” is the song of Kalamazoo.
“We don’t know where we’re going but we’re on our way,” are the wo...Read more of this...
by
Lawrence, D. H.
...in an arch like a bridge,
Scale-lapping, like a lobster's sections
Or a bee's.
Then crossways down his sides
Tiger-stripes and wasp-bands.
Five, and five again, and five again,
And round the edges twenty-five little ones,
The sections of the baby tortoise shell.
Four, and a keystone;
Four, and a keystone;
Four, and a keystone;
Then twenty-four, and a tiny little keystone.
It needed Pythagoras to see life playing with counters on the living back
Of the baby...Read more of this...
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